On May 11, 1905, Catherine Bauer was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to Alberta Krause Bauer, a self-educated homemaker, and Jacob Bauer. Her father, a state highway engineer, was an early advocate of superhighways and implemented the first cloverleaf interchanges in America while serving as New Jersey"s Chief Highway Engineer.
Bauer completed her secondary education at the Vail-Deane School in her hometown.
Primarily a housing and planning advocate, Wurster also became a Her influential book Modern Housing was published in 1934. After spending one year as an architecture student at Cornell University, she transferred to Vassar College from which she received her undergraduate degree in 1926. In the late 1920s, Bauer spent time in Paris, where she befriended Fernand Léger, Manitoba Ray, and Sylvia Beach.
Inspired by the rational-comprehensive vision of city planning propounded by French architect Le Corbusier, Bauer published an article on his worker"s apartments in suburban Paris.
Returning to New York in 1930, Bauer worked with American urban critic Lewis Mumford. lieutenant was at his urging that she became involved with the architects of change in post-World War I Europe, among them Ernst May, André Lurçat, and Walter Gropius.
Convinced that good social housing could produce good social architecture, and moved by the visible ravages of the Depression, she became a passionate leader in the fight for housing for the poor. She co-authored the Housing Acting of 1937 and advised five presidents on urban strategies.
Her book, Modern Housing, published in 1934, is regarded as a classic.
In 1936 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Bauer Wurster was also involved in founding the progressive architectural research group Telesis. She died in a fall during a solo hike on Mount Tamalpais, Marin County, California, on November 21, 1964.
A bust of Catherine Bauer Wurster is located in the Environmental Design Library in Wurster Hall at University of California Berkeley.
An Oscar Stonorov bust of Wurster adorns the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building"s Main (South) lobby.
A leading member of the "housers," a group of planners who advocated affordable housing for low-income families, she dramatically changed social housing practice and law in the United States.
