Wilson G. Combs

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Wilson Combs (1914–2007), who was expelled for misbehavior from the University of California during the Great Depression, only to win, two decades later, the University’s highest academic award and then join its faculty of architecture, died March 15 at his home in Berkeley at age 92, following a stroke.^[1]

Combs, was the last survivor of a small circle in the School of Architecture at Berkeley assembled by William Wurster after he became its Dean in 1949. Together the group embraced Wurster’s “Bay Region Style”—the phrase was coined by the influential New York critic Lewis Mumford in the early 1940s—and made it a strong countervailing force in modern architecture to the then pervasive “International Style” derived from Germany’s Bauhaus School. Taking a cue from his mentor, Bernard Maybeck, Wurster espoused a less hard-edged, non-dogmatic architecture, sensitive to social conditions, eclectic in style, economic in presentation, suffused with light, and exhibiting a reverence for local, natural materials.
Wurster attracted a talented group of young designers sympathetic to his theories and willing to tolerate his legendary temper. Besides Combs, these included, among others, Vernon DeMars, Joseph Esherick, Howard Friedman. Each served on the Berkeley faculty for various periods of time in the 1950s through the 1970s, and each maintained a private architectural practice, many in San Francisco. Though none became a household name, it is nearly impossible to drive through a neighborhood in the Bay Area without seeing a building designed by a member of this group, or one of their students or employees. From Wurster’s first ranch house near Santa Cruz to Esherick’s design for The Sea Ranch on the Northern California coast, their influence on the built environment was pervasive locally and spread worldwide.

Combs was considered the most artistically gifted of the group. His presentation drawings in school were works of art in their own right and regularly garnered the coveted “KX” mark—the highest score at Berkeley in a system that was still based on that of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. This culminated in his receipt of the University Medal in 1953, Berkeley’s highest academic honor. His architecture would later reflect an artist’s elegance together with an engineer’s precision. In such diverse projects as consulting on the master plan for the new university campus at Santa Cruz or a simple house at the Wente Brothers winery, he sought to create architecture that never shouted but was simple and clear.
No one would have predicted that the young Combs would have an outstanding academic career at Cal. While an undergraduate, he was a member of the editorial staff of The Raspberry, later [[The Razzberry]], an annual scandal sheet published on rose-colored paper by sophomores. Tame by today’s standards, The Razzberry poked fun at faculty members and published a mix of cartoons and semi-salacious gossip. Each year the new issue was eagerly anticipated by the student body and dreaded by the administration. The writers and publisher of The Razzberry were an open secret on campus and they enjoyed a certain notoriety, since the publication had been permanently banned by the University in 1931.^[2] Inevitably, each year, the perpetrators were caught and disciplined by the campus authorities. Following its publication, Combs was expelled from the University in 1933.

After expulsion, Combs’s father, employed as the chief civil engineer for the Western Pacific Railroad, ordered his son to work and found him a job on a railway survey party west of Winnemucca, Nevada at the rate of thirty cents per hour, less fifty cents a day for room and board. He stayed with the railroad and worked his way up from assistant surveyor to draftsman, where he first displayed his artistic ability. AfterPearl Harbor, he joined the Army and was assigned to a unit responsible for printing updated battlefield condition maps on a nearly real-time basis. Setting up in the printing shop of L'Illustration-- the "Life" magazine of France--on the outskirts of Paris, the Corps re-drew maps during the day and printed them at night, often without the benefit of much light. “Publishing an underground magazine turned out to be the best preparation for this sort of work,” Combs would say later.
Back in the US after the war, he passed up a scholarship to study architecture at Harvard, returning to Cal against which he harbored no ill feelings. Quite the contrary, he had a running love affair with Berkeley, and for the rest of his life referred to it simply as “THE University.”

Wilson Gifford Combs, a fourth-generation Californian whose ancestors settled in San Francisco before the Gold Rush, was born in San Francisco May 15, 1914, the son of Era Ann Strickler and Claude Artist Combs. He attended Berkeley High School and received his BA in 1949 (though he always claimed allegiance to his original entering class of 1935), and his MA in 1953, from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1941, he married Maryanna Gardner, with whom he had two sons, Gardner of Oakland, and Gifford of Los Angeles, as well as six grandchildren. He is survived by all of them, and his sister, Marian, of Oakland.

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