CONSTRUCTION: Walt & Welt

As undergraduates at the University of Washington’s School of Architecture, Welton Becket and Walter Wurdeman determinedly rushed the same coed. Neither of them married her, but out of their rivalry grew a business partnership that has taken Architects Becket, 45, and Wurdeman, 44, right to the top of Los Angeles’ building boom.

Last week Wurdeman & Becket were hard at work on one of the West Coast’s fattest architectural prizes: supervising the $31,000,000 building program for the University of California’s Los Angeles campus. They had also won a contract to build a chain of four hotels for air travelers across the Pacific, starting with a $1,000,000 hotel at Manila. In all, Walt & Welt last week had contracts for $121,050,000 a backlog few U.S. architects can match. Like all their contracts, they had won last week’s new business, as they have been winning it for years, by smooth salesmanship, a rising reputation for deftly mixing traditional and unorthodox designs, and a knack for “dollar-stretching.”

Spit & Matchstick. As “depression architects,” the partners had learned all about making a dollar go far. On one of their first jobs—redesigning Los Angeles’ Clifton’s Cafeteria in 1933—they took out their fees in meals. When their plans won first place in a competition for the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, Wurdeman, a good man with a racket, spent his share of the fee to join the Westside Tennis Club—and incidentally to get some business from its Hollywood members. Soon Wurdeman & Becket were building actors’ homes by the dozen. From then on, as Wurdeman says: “The graft has gone up steadily.”

The war put Walt & Welt’s home designing on a mass production basis. They put up housing for 50,000 workers in California’s mushrooming war industries, and soon they had 83 assistants working for them. “It was spit and matchstick stuff,” Wurdeman says, “but it made us build a big organization and got us so we weren’t appalled at big jobs.”

Models & Trends. The big jobs came. Invited to discuss alterations for Bullock’s, Inc., they spoke so convincingly of a store “that would work like a machine” that they won the job of building Bullock’s new Pasadena branch. Their brash argument: as they had never planned a store, they couldn’t palm off an old plan. They built a scale model because “most people can’t read blueprints or understand dimensions from sketches.” After they got the contract they studied merchandising at Bullock’s for a year before drawing final plans. They planned the interior first, then “wrapped the outside around it.”

Abolishing fixed partitions, central stockrooms (each department has its own), and installing direct package delivery to customers’ autos, they built a country-club-like store that started a new trend in stores. Expected to gross $7,500,000 a year, the store, which opened last fall, is now operating at an annual rate of $16 million. Bullock’s was so pleased that it hired Walt & Welt to design two more branches at Palm Springs and Westwood.

A Bullock’s director who is also an official of Socony-Vacuum’s General Petroleum Corp. then got the team to plan General’s new $8,000,000 office building. They designed the building in “modules” — or 7-ft. sections — for easy shifting of partitions and rooms in rearranging offices. Says Wurdeman: “When times are bad, that’s when this building will pay off.”

They also lopped $800,000 from the estimated construction costs by persuading the City Council to permit the use of lightweight vermiculite instead of concrete to sheathe the steel girders against fire. This saved so much weight that they were able to use lighter girders, eliminated 1,200 tons of steel. Another big office-building job, Prudential Insurance Co. of America’s $8,500,000 building, will be the lightest building (per square foot) in Los Angeles.

Wurdeman & Becket think other architects could get around antiquated building codes to cut costs. Wurdeman thinks that “they just haven’t presented their cases right.” The partners, who netted $125,000 apiece last year, are still penny-conscious. Says Wurdeman: “I just wouldn’t know how to act if a guy would say ‘I don’t give a damn how much it costs.’ “