Walter Stares White

After attending San Bernardino High School (1933-36), White worked for architects Harwell Hamilton Harris (1937) and Rudolf Schindler (1937-38). Following these two stints, he went on to work for Allen Kelly Ruoff (1938-39) and Win E. Wilson (1939-42). For the latter he helped design prefab war housing with a skin-stressed plywood panel system of which 8,000 were constructed in the United States.

White went on to work for Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo (1942-46) before moving to Palm Springs where he worked for the architecture firm run by principals John Porter Clark and Albert Frey (1947-1948). By 1948, the young architect moved to La Quinta, shortly afer which his first commercial building - in Palm Desert. “The façade of the building—sparkling aluminum, sheets of plate glass, and a mitered glass corner—speaks of White’s modern ambitions as he launched his career as a designer and builder.”

Reportedly moving to Colorado Springs by 1960, White designed homes in the exclusive Kissing Camels Estate. Returning to California, the architect designed a number of projects in the 1970s and 1980s as well as patenting a Solar Heat Exchanger Window Wall and a hyperboloic paraboloid roof system.

In 2015, an exhibition on White was curated by Professor Volker Welter, from the UC Santa Barbara History of Art and Architecture Department alongside the text Walter S. White: Inventions in Mid-Century Architecture.

Partial List of Projects

McCreery House Remodel (1988)
455 East 5th Street, Escondido
*This remodel for James McCreery was of John Lloyd Wright's Wood House (1912)

Residence for Newton & Hella Stafford (1957-58)
411 Idaho Avenue, Escondido
*Now labeled as 409-11 Idaho Ave

Residence for Newton & Hella Stafford (1985-88)
2405 Nabal Street, Escondido