Overlooked No More: Julia Morgan, Pioneering Female Architect

Here is an article by Alexandra Lange that is part of a series initiated by The New York Times to recognize extraordinary women who had not been honored in a Times obituary.  To read the complete article and others in the series, please click here.

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Julia Morgan (1872-1957), who was the first woman to earn an architect’s license in California, was a prolific designer of hundreds of buildings, namely the Hearst Castle at San Simeon.

Through fire and shock, the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 destroyed more than 80 percent of the city’s buildings. The grand Fairmont Hotel, only days from opening, was gutted by flames, leaving only a shell.

The hotel’s owners, determined to rebuild, turned to a young architect, Julia Morgan. Only three years earlier she had built a bell tower on the campus of Mills College, and it had withstood the earthquake unscathed — proof that Morgan was as experienced in reinforced concrete as she was in European design.

But word that a woman had been hired to renovate the luxurious hotel was met with astonishment. Was the building really in the charge of a woman? Jane Armstrong, a reporter for The San Francisco Call, asked the project’s foreman in 1907 on a visit to the hotel’s ballroom after Morgan had restored it to its original splendor.

Yes, the foreman answered, it was in the charge of “a real architect, and her name happens to be Julia Morgan, but it might as well be John Morgan.’ ”

“To him it was work well done,” Armstrong wrote. After she toured the building with Morgan, she added, she was so inspired that she “wanted to emblazon above it the part that a woman has played.”

The grand Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, which Morgan restored after it was damaged in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

As the first woman to receive an architect’s license in California, in 1904, Morgan early on was used to skepticism about her abilities. But she came to allay those doubts by building a sterling reputation with projects now known around the world, including the Asilomar conference grounds on the Monterey Peninsula and, most notably, the Hearst Castle at San Simeon.

By the time she retired in 1951, at 79, she had designed hundreds of buildings and sites.

Morgan was born in San Francisco on Jan. 20, 1872. Her father, Charles Bill Morgan, had settled in California in 1867, having reached it from Brooklyn by sailing around the tip of South America accompanied by his new bride, Eliza Woodland Parmelee. A mining engineer, he had seen the West as the place to make his fortune. Morgan and her four siblings were raised in a large Victorian house across San Francisco Bay in Oakland.

Morgan enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied civil engineering. When she was a senior, she met the architect Bernard Maybeck, who would go on to design one of the defining works of the Bay Area School of architecture, the First Church of Christ, Scientist (1910) in Berkeley, as well as the neo-Classical Palace of Fine Arts (1915) in San Francisco.

Maybeck was a charismatic teacher and mentor who encouraged many of his students, including Morgan, to study, as he had, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then the world’s most prestigious architecture school.

She applied, and at 26 became the first woman to pass the school’s entrance exams. The San Francisco Examiner hailed her achievement with the headline, “California Girl Wins High Honor.”

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To read the complete article and others in the series, please click here.

Alexandra Lange is the architecture critic for Curbed. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in numerous design publications including Architect, Harvard Design Magazine, Metropolis, and T Magazine, as well as in New York Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. She has been a featured writer at Design Observer and an Opinion columnist at Dezeen. She has taught design criticism at the School of Visual Arts and New York University. To learn more about Alexandra and her brilliant work, please click here.

 

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