Early Career

Walter Stares White, Jr. was born January 24, 1917, in San Bernardino, California. His interest in architecture began early in his life. In 1936 he received the First Premium Award at the California State Fair for architectural lettering. After one semester at San Bernardino Valley Junior College, White spent the next decade working in the Los Angeles area for a number of architects, builders, and engineers. For six months in 1937 he worked with Harwell Hamilton Harris; for eight months, 1937 to 1938, with Rudolf Schindler; and for six months thereafter with architect Allen Ruoff. During the war, from 1942 to 1946, Douglas Aircraft employed him as a machine tool designer. White returned to architecture in 1947 with an eighteen-month stint with Palm Springs architects, Clark & Frey (John Porter Clark and Albert Frey).

Among White’s earliest designs are revival style buildings for Los Angeles, La Quinta, and Palm Desert, and various attempts in a modern architectural language. Most significant is a 1940 design by White for an ’ideal‘ single-family home, which clearly references Frank Lloyd Wright, and Schindler’s own house in Los Angeles, and marks the beginning of White’s own distinctive style.

In 1948 White relocated to La Quinta, a desert city in the Coachella Valley. A year later White designed his first office building on Highway 111 in the Palm Desert area. 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.