Catherine Bauer Wurster: A Thoroughly Modern Woman

The latest episode of New Angle: Voice features the first lady of American housing policy.

Catherine Bauer’s life divided into two names and two geographies: her urban east coast youth and her Bay Area soft landing. She hobnobbed with the bohemian elite of the interwar years, charming the pants off of the big architecture names of the Weimar Republic, Paris cafe society, and the International Style: Gropius, Mies, Corb, Oud, May — with her lover, Lewis Mumford — culminating in the publication of her 1934 classic: Modern Housing.

Her glamour and charismatic presence endeared her to trade unionists, labor leaders, and politicians, including five presidents — who she tried to turn to her vision of housing as a worthy responsibility of the government — sexier and leftier during the Depression. Her arguments were a harder sell in the red scare fifties and ran into a “dreary deadlock” in the suburban sixties. In the Bay Area she developed an academic career that also included architect husband William Wurster, a daughter, and a house on the bay — all surrounded by the nature she quickly grew to love. Her legacy lives on to this day, as even the latest of housing legislation echoes the progressive ideals she was advocating for in her prime.