Architectural Oscars

The top prizes given to U.S. architects for buildings of the year are the annual awards of the 11,000-member American Institute of Architects. To pick this year's winners, a jury of five topflight architects, including Eero Saarinen (TIME, March 19) and Pietro Belluschi, dean of M.I.T.'s School of Architecture, thumbed through more than 200 sets of plans and photographs before they made their choice. The runaway winners, announced in Washington this week: the San Francisco firm of Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons, which not only got a First Honor Award for its $258,000 "Thinkers' Shangri-La"-- the Ford Foundation's hilltop Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, near Stanford University--but also picked up two merit awards for houses in Stockton and Sausalito, Calif.

Other top winners:

P: Hellmuth, Yamasaki & Lienweber of St. Louis and Detroit, for their concrete and glass terminal building at the St. Louis Municipal Airport.

P: John Lyon Reid & Partners of San Francisco, for the Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, Calif., designed with removable partitions and interchangeable wall panels for maximum planning flexibility and future growth.

P: Philip C. Johnson of New York, a Mies van der Rohe purist, for a glass-paneled luxury house (owned by TV-man Richard Hodgson) in New Canaan, Conn.

P: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, one of the nation's largest architectural firms, for the Manufacturers Trust Co.'s new open-faced aluminum and glass Fifth Avenue bank building.

Retreat for Scholars. In a year of outstanding buildings, the three awards to Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons are a tribute to a small U.S. firm (total staff: 25), whose open, uncluttered designs, broad windows and lavish use of natural wood have made it the leader in one of the best regional movements in the U.S. This week's prizewinners sum up the partners' goal: to disregard any preconceived formulas, fit each design both to the terrain and to the building's occupants and purpose.

For the Ford Foundation's Advanced Study Center, the firm, led by Senior Partner William Wilson Wurster, 60, dean of the University of California's School of Architecture, put together a miniature campus in six months from commission to moving day. Designed as a retreat for scholars, it is built around restful individual studies for the 38 residents, done in unpainted redwood, with secluded patios and large windows looking out over the lonely hills.

Hat for a House. Partner Theodore Bernardi, 52, who won a merit award for the pleasantly informal redwood house he designed for himself, chose a hillside site for maximum privacy and view. Main feature: an expansive wood deck, surrounded by oak and eucalyptus trees and overlooking San Francisco Bay. The Wurster-designed house in Stockton, which won the second merit award, is a simple rectangle with large overhanging roof, "a hot-climate house with a hat on it. It was meant to be a house for older people to retire in with dignity. It has big rooms but few of them, and it is easy to live in. There is nothing cute about it."

The prizewinning partners insist that their "California" style is simply a natural adaptation to the California way of life. Says Wurster: "One doesn't want regionalism for its own sake, but only if it fits the problem." The firm's record to date has brought commissions for everything from master plans for 21 Air Force bases in the U.S. to a $14 million community project of the Ford assembly plant at Milpitas, Calif. What pleases the partners most is that clients no longer come in asking for something "modern." Says Wurster: "You can be sure that American colonists never asked for a 'colonial' house."

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