Julia Morgan

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(b San Francisco, CA, 26 Jan 1872; d San Francisco, 2 Feb 1957). American architect. She was probably the first woman to study in the architecture section of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, having previously graduated in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. Morgan was also one of the first women to sustain a long-standing and well-known practice in the USA. Working primarily in the suburbs of San Francisco and other northern California communities, she designed hundreds of residences and numerous schools, college buildings, churches and facilities for the Young Women's Christian Association (Y.W.C.A.) between 1904 and 1940. Women philanthropists and women's organizations comprised a major portion of her clientele.

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Julia Morgan (1872-1957), California's first licensed female architect, designed both institutional buildings and private homes in the San Francisco area. She preferred to use indigenous materials and carefully designed for often topographically difficult sites.

Julia Morgan was born on January 20, 1872, in San Francisco, California, and died there in 1957. Her career as an architect was shaped by two principal facts: her residence in California, with its distinctive architectural traditions and practical possibilities, and her gender - at the beginning of the 20th century she was a woman attempting to break into a field judged by most of her contemporaries to be the exclusive province of men. In fact, she became California's first licensed female architect.

After graduating with a degree in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1894, Morgan planned to continue her education at the world's most prestigious architectural school, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In applying there, she was following a pattern established by such well-respected American architects as Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and her own California mentor, Bernard Maybeck; and while her initial attempts to enroll were rebuffed because she was female, ultimately she was permitted to attend classes there.

Upon her return from Europe in 1902, Morgan began her architectural career in the San Francisco area working for the designer John Galen Howard on buildings for her alma mater; she also collaborated with Maybeck, with whom she was continuing to develop a strong professional relationship. Maybeck's personal style, a product of Beaux-Arts discipline and individual fancy, was one which appealed to her enormously and which had a lasting effect on her own style.

Among Julia Morgan's most important early projects as an independent architect were designs (begun in 1904) for several buildings on the campus of Mills College, a four-year institution for women in Oakland, California. Following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Morgan was able to obtain a large number of commissions in the Bay Area, many of them for private homes. Like Maybeck, Morgan took an eclectic approach to design and refused to limit herself to the popular, conservative, turn-of-the-century revival styles sweeping the country and dominating the domestic market. The house that best exemplifies this attitude is also her most famous work "La Casa Grande," William Randolph Hearst's home at San Simeon, California (begun in 1919), one of several commissions executed for the Hearst family. It is actually a complex of domestic buildings, eclectic in style, made comprehensible through Beaux-Arts organization. The commission was a difficult one as Hearst constantly changed his mind about details relating to the design; yet Morgan's patience and resolve carried her through the project.

Morgan's career was financially successful in part because she seemed to be able to deliver the kind of design that would appeal to the Hearsts and others of their economic class. Yet Morgan's works were by no means limited to lavish domestic structures. She designed several centers for the Young Women's Christian Association, as well as private clubs, churches, and commercial establishments.

Further, she created many moderate-sized homes for middle-class families. She specialized in indigenous materials, particularly in her designs for these smaller, less-expensive houses; in this way, her works can be seen to be in keeping with other, more famous California progressive architects, such as her contemporaries Charles and Henry Greene and her mentor Maybeck. The Williams and Mitchell House (1915-1918) is one of several redwood-shingled cottages that are perched astride the Berkeley Hills in the vicinity of San Francisco. Here, several of her solutions to the problem of the small house placed on a difficult site are in evidence: by eliminating unnecessary rooms and opening up areas of the walls with very large windows, she made the limited space feel open and airy. She also changed scale in an attempt to accommodate the building to the uneven topography. In short, whether designing for a millionaire or a schoolteacher, Morgan gave her client a carefully considered solution.

One of the hallmarks of Julia Morgan's career is that she realized so many of her projects: more than seven hundred buildings were constructed over a career that spanned nearly fifty years. One of the few unbuilt designs was a museum in the medieval style for Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and the fact that it remained unbuilt saddened the architect in her last years. Morgan ended her career on a dramatic and mysterious note when she ordered virtually all her professional records destroyed a few years before her death in 1957.

Further Reading

An interesting treatment of the life and work of Julia Morgan is Sara Boutelle's Julia Morgan, Architect (1988). A modest-sized publication with an excellent text is Julia Morgan - Architect by Richard Longstreth (1977). There have been several articles published on Morgan since the centennial of her birth. These include two by Boutelle: "The Woman Who Built San Simeon," in the California Monthly (1976), and "Women's Networks: Julia Morgan and her Clients," in Heresies of 1981. Nancy Loe's San Simeon Revisited (1987) is a collection of the correspondence between the architect and William Randolph Hearst. The University of California at Berkeley has assembled a valuable trove of information on Morgan as part of their regional oral history series. The two volumes are entitled "The Julia Morgan Architectural History Project."

Additional Sources

Boutelle, Sara Holmes, Julia Morgan, architect, New York: Abbeville Press, 1988.

James, Cary, Julia Morgan, New York: Chelsea House, 1990.

American architect and engineer, she was the first woman to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and became California's first licensed woman architect. Her works include several buildings for Mills College, Oakland, CA, including the reinforced-concrete campanile (1903–4), library (1905–6), and gymnasium (1907–8). She was responsible for many private houses (some in Mission Revival style) in the San Francisco area and her responses to client-needs were realized drawing on eclectic motifs, often building with local materials, and always displaying the assurance in design acquired in Paris. Her Young Women's Christian Association buildings at Asilomar-Pacific Grove, CA (1913–28), are now a State Monument and National Conference Center. Insisting on fine detailing and sensitivity to human beings and sites, she was capable on occasion of creating eclectic fantasies of extraordinary power, among which must be mentioned San Simeon, CA (1919–38), a vigorously composed collection of cultural references at Enchanted Hill, for William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951). Her fine Arts-and-Crafts-inspired St John's Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, CA (1908–10), is now the Julia Morgan Center for Performing Arts.

Bibliography

• Beach (1976)
• Boutelle (1995)
• C. James (1990)
• Longstreth (1977)
• Susana Torre (ed.) (1977)
• Wadsworth (1990)
• Winslow (1980)
• R. Winter (ed.) (1997)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Julia Morgan
Personal information
Name	Julia Morgan
Nationality	American
Birth date	January 20, 1872(1872-01-20)
Birth place	San Francisco, United States
Date of death	February 2, 1957 (aged 85)
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Work
Buildings	Los Angeles Examiner Building The YWCA in Chinatown, San Francisco Riverside Art Museum Asilomar Conference Grounds
Projects	Hearst Castle

Julia Morgan (January 20, 1872 – February 2, 1957) was an American architect. The architect of over 700 buildings in California,^[1] she is best known for her work on Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California. Throughout her long career, she designed multiple buildings for institutions serving women and girls.

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Career 3 Books 4 Further reading 5 References 6 External links

Early life and education

Born in San Francisco, California, she was raised in Oakland and graduated from Oakland High School in 1890. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1894 with a degree in civil engineering. At the urging of her friend and mentor Bernard Maybeck, whom she met in her final year in undergraduate school, she headed to Paris to apply to the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Denied at first because the school was not accepting women, and a second time because she failed the entrance exam (she claimed in a letter that she had been failed deliberately because she was a woman^[2]), after two years she finally passed the entrance exams in the architecture program, placing 13th out of 376 applicants^[3], and was duly admitted. She was the first woman to graduate with a degree in architecture from the school in Paris.

Career

Upon her return from Paris she took employment with the San Francisco architect John Galen Howard who was at that time supervising the University of California Master Plan. Morgan worked on several buildings on the Berkeley campus, most notably providing the decorative elements for the Hearst Mining Building, and designs for the Hearst Greek Theatre.

In 1904, she opened her own office in San Francisco. One of her earliest works from this period was North Star House in Grass Valley, California, commissioned in 1906 by mining engineer Arthur De Wint Foote and his wife, the author and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote. Naturally, many commissions followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, ensuring her financial success.

The Hearst Castle facade.

The most famous of Morgan's patrons was the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who had been introduced to Morgan by his mother Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the chief patroness of the University of California at Berkeley. It is believed that this introduction led to Morgan's first downstate commission by Hearst, circa 1914, for the design of the Los Angeles Examiner Building, a project that included contributions by Los Angeles architects William J. Dodd and J. Martyn Haenke. In 1919 Hearst selected Morgan as the architect for La Cuesta Encantada, better known as Hearst Castle, which was built atop the family campsite overlooking San Simeon harbor. The project proved to be her largest and most complex, as Hearst's vision for his estate grew ever grander during planning and construction. From this point forward, Morgan became Hearst's principal architect, producing the designs for dozens of buildings, such as Wyntoon (a second castle plus "Bavarian village" of four villas located on 50,000 acres (202 km²) of forest on the McCloud River near Mount Shasta), The Hacienda (a hotel built in a hybrid Mission and Moorish style about thirty miles from the Castle), and Babicora, Hearst's Mexican rancho.

The Julia Morgan School for Girls^[4] in Oakland is named after her. The school is the only middle school for girls in the East Bay. It occupies Alderwood Hall at Mills College, a 1924 building designed by Morgan.^[5]

Her best-known works not commissioned by Hearst include the YWCAs in San Francisco's Chinatown, Oakland, and Riverside, the latter of which is now the Riverside Art Museum, as well as a World War I YWCA Hostess House in Palo Alto which has been the site of MacArthur Park restaurant^[6] since 1981, the Mills College Bell Tower, the former St. John's Presbyterian Church (now the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts)^[7] in Berkeley, the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove near Monterey, California, the sanctuary of Ocean Avenue Presbyterian Church at 32 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, where Mission Bay Community Church also meets, the Berkeley City Club, adjacent to University of California, and several houses on San Francisco's Russian Hill. Some of her residential projects, most of them located in the San Francisco Bay Area, may be categorized as ultimate bungalows, a term often associated with the work of Greene and Greene and some of Morgan's other contemporaries and teachers.

Morgan is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced on May 28, 2008 that Morgan will be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. The induction ceremony will take place December 15 and her great-niece will accept the honor in her place.

Books

• Boutelle, Sara Holmes (1988). Julia Morgan, Architect. New York: Abbeville Press.
• Morgan, J. (1976). Architectural drawings by Julia Morgan: beau-arts assignments and other buildings. Oakland, Calif: Oakland Museum, Art Dept.
• Steilberg, W. T., & Morgan, J. (1983). Some examples of the work of Julia Morgan. San Francisco: Architect and Engineer of California.
• Morgan, J., Hearst, W. R., & Loe, N. E. (1987). San Simeon revisited: the correspondence between architect Julia Morgan and William Randolph Hearst. San Luis Obispo, Calif: Library Associates, California Polytechnic State University.
• Morgan, J. (1987). Berkeley houses by Julia Morgan. [Berkeley, Calif.]: The Association.

Further reading

• Longstreth, R. W. (1977). Julia Morgan, architect. Berkeley Architectural Heritage publication series, no. 1. [Berkeley, Calif.]: Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.
• University of California, Berkeley. (1986). Julia Morgan, architectural drawings: inventory of holdings, College of Environmental Design. Berkeley: The College.
• Pasadena Cultural Heritage Commission. (1988). Report on reuse of the Julia Morgan YWCA building: YWCA & YMCA Pasadena, California. New York: Halsband.
• Quacchia, R. L. (2005). Julia Morgan, architect, and the creation of the Asilomar Conference Grounds: including a comparison with Hearst Castle. [Virginia Beach, Va.]: Q Pub.
• McNeill, Karen (May 2007). "Julia Morgan: Gender, Architecture, and Professional Style." Pacific Historical Review, pp. 229-267.

References

1. ^ Davies, Stacy (2007-10-11). "Best Architectural Wonder—The Riverside Art Museum" (PDF). Inland Empire Weekly (Alternative Weekly Network): p. 21. http://www.ieweekly.com/Oct4-Oct10_2007issue26.pdf. Retrieved 2007-10-13. 
2. ^ Reichers, M. (2006). Beyond San Simeon. Humanities, September/October 2006, Volume 27/Number 5
3. ^ Julia Morgan: Early Architect. California State Capitol website, Retrieved 2009-05-26 from Internet Archive
4. ^ http://www.juliamorganschool.org/ Julia Morgan School for Girls
5. ^ Ito, Susan (Winter 2004). "Julia Morgan at Mills" (PDF). Mills Quarterly (Mills College): p. 14. http://www.mills.edu/alumnae/publications/backissues/W2004_03.pdf. Retrieved 2008-02-27. 
6. ^ MacArthur Park - Fine Dining, Events and Catering in Palo Alto, CA: Home Page
7. ^ St. John's history page at BerkeleyHeritage.com

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Julia Morgan

• The Julia Morgan Collection at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
• Julia Morgan — An Online Exhibition
• Julia Morgan at Hearst Castle
• Index of Buildings by Julia Morgan
• Julia Morgan Architectural Drawings, 1907-1929, The Bancroft Library
• North Star House Foundation
• Wyntoon at Great Buildings Online
• Women in Architecture
• Carrillo Rec Center in Santa Barbara
• William J. Dodd: American Architect & Designer ~ Los Angeles
• Julia Morgan Center for the Arts ~ Berkeley, CA
• UC Berkeley Environmental Design Archives

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