Julia Morgan was an American architect in California. She designed more than 700 buildings in California during a long and prolific career.
Background
Julia Morgan was born on January 20, 1872, in San Francisco, California, and died there in 1957. Morgan's father, Charles Bill Morgan, was born into a prominent East Coast family that included successful military men, politicians, and influential businessmen. He studied to be a mining engineer, then in 1867, he sailed for San Francisco, California, to speculate in mines and oil. He returned the next year to marry Eliza Woodland Parmelee, the favored daughter of Albert O. Parmelee, a cotton trader and self-made millionaire. The wedding was in Brooklyn, New York, where she had grown up.
Education
Morgan graduated from Oakland High School in 1890 and enrolled in the University of California, in nearby Berkeley. At university, she was a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority.
Career
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.
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.
Achievements
Views
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.
Membership
After her graduation, Morgan became a member of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, now the American Association of University Women.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Upon her return from Paris, Morgan took employment with San Francisco architect John Galen Howard, who was supervising the University of California Master Plan. Morgan worked on several buildings on the Berkeley campus, providing the decorative elements for the Hearst Mining Building and an early proposal for Sather Gate. She was the primary designer for the Hearst Greek Theatre. Howard told a colleague that Morgan was "an excellent draftsman whom I have to pay almost nothing, as it is a woman. "
Connections
Although highly respected as an architect, not much is known about her personal life. She was never married and had no known romances. She kept a low profile and lived modestly, in spite of her wealthy clientele.