Early Architectural Career
After graduating from Harvard University, Warnecke worked as a building inspector for the public housing authority in Richmond, California. In 1943, he began work as a draftsman for his father's architectural firm (which specialized in the Beaux-Arts architectural style). He was influenced by the work of architects Bernard Maybeck and William Wurster, leading proponents and practitioners of the "Bay Area school" of architecture.
He established a solo practice in 1950, and incorporated as a firm in 1956. At first, he set a goal of applying Modernist architectural principles to major types of building. But his work soon reflected a desire to harmonize building designs with the environment in which they were set as well as their cultural and historical setting, an architectural theory known as contextualism. Warnecke won national recognition in 1951 for the Mira Vista Elementary School in East Richmond Heights, California (a small residential community which overlooks the northern part of San Francisco Bay). Other schools in the San Francisco Bay are followed, earning him much praise. Warnecke became an internationally recognized architect after submitting a design for a new U.S. embassy in Thailand in 1956 (it was never built). He reorganized his firm in 1958 under the name John Carl Warnecke & Associates, the name it would be best known by. He was named an Associate of the National Academy of Design the same year. He won additional notice for buildings at Stanford University (built in the 1960s) and the University of California, Berkeley (built in the 1960s and early 1970s).
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