Julia Morgan

by

Karen McNeill

• LAST MODIFIED: 20 August 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190922467-0103

Introduction

Julia Morgan (b. 1872–d. 1957) is the most decorated and best known woman architect in United States history. The San Francisco native was raised in Oakland and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1894. In 1898 she became the first woman to pass the entrance examinations for the architecture program at the École des Beaux-Arts, and in 1902 became the first woman to earn a certificât d’études from that prestigious institution. Upon returning to California, Morgan worked for John Galen Howard, campus architect of the University of California, where she contributed to the Hearst Mining Building, Greek Theater, and initial studies for Sather Gate. Morgan’s big break came in 1903 when Susan Mills, president of the eponymous women’s college in Oakland, hired her to design a Mission-style campanile. When that reinforced concrete structure survived the earthquake and fires of 1906 without a crack, Morgan’s professional reputation and status catapulted her to the highest ranks of the region’s architects. Morgan earned her California state architectural license in 1904, the first woman to do so, and immediately opened an office in San Francisco’s financial district. Her career spanned nearly fifty years and produced as many as 750 buildings and structures in an eclectic variety of styles. Residential architecture—from modest brown shingle bungalows to historicist mansions—dominated the first decade of Morgan’s career. Her clientele always included institutional architecture and women’s organizations too, but 1912 marked the beginning of a twenty-year relationship with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), for whom Morgan ultimately designed at least thirty buildings in at least seventeen locations (the number keeps growing as new documentation becomes accessible). She was also the supervising architect of the national YWCA Hostess House initiative during World War I. The Hearst family, meanwhile, was Morgan’s single most important family client, beginning with the remodeling of Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, Phoebe Hearst’s country estate forty miles east of San Francisco, and culminating with the Bavarian inspired Wyntoon compound in Shasta County and, of course, Hearst Castle in the Santa Lucia Mountains above California’s central coast. This pioneering career earned Morgan accolades in life and death. The University of California, Berkeley, awarded her its highest honor, a Doctor of Laws degree, in 1929, and in 1940 the women’s board of the Golden Gate International Exposition named Morgan one of the most influential women in the state. In 2014, Julia Morgan became the first woman to be awarded the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, its highest honor—fifty-seven years after Morgan’s death and 107 years after the award was established. Although Morgan has been the subject of more books and articles than probably any other woman architect in the United States or elsewhere, hagiography dominates the canon. The literature is rarely analytical or intellectual, and it tends to avoid complex topics like race, class, or sexuality. This has allowed myths to persist (for example, that Morgan destroyed her archives) and factual errors to go unchecked (that Morgan was the first woman to earn a diplôme from the École), including in many of the articles and books listed below.

General

Julia Morgan’s life and career intersects with a number of major themes, such as place, time, gender, and profession. Apart from six years in Paris and one in Brooklyn, she lived her entire life in California. The late, long-time California state librarian Kevin Starr’s California History is a short, comprehensive introduction to the history of the Golden State. As Julia Morgan was a woman who grew up in during the Gilded Age, came of age during the post-Victorian era, and practiced architecture through the long Progressive Era, a slightly more focused lens might be California Women and Politics, an anthology of essays that examine women’s issues and institutions that Morgan and, more often, her clients championed. As Michael McGerr relates in A Fierce Discontent, this era of reform was hardly unique to California. The author focuses on the white, urban, educated middle class who sought to thwart the rise of radicalism by reforming business and politics, expanding rights to some women, cleaning up the cities, sanitizing entertainment, and providing free education to children. Depending on such variables as race, class, and region, women experienced this period in American history differently. Women’s America brings the diversity of women’s experience to the forefront. Of course, Julia Morgan was an architect, and so this section includes Kostof 1995, a survey of Western architecture from the Stone Age through the late twentieth century, while Upton 2020 provides the general backdrop of American architecture and the architectural profession. And although she would like to have been recognized simply as an architect, Morgan could never escape her pioneering status as a woman architect. Nearly forty-five years after it was first published, Torre’s Women in American Architecture remains a standard introduction to this theme within architectural history. It is an edited anthology of brief essays on women architects, domestic architecture, women as architectural critics, and gendered aspects of design. Around the same time, Gwendolyn Wright published “On the Fringe of the Profession,” which defines four modes through which women have practiced architecture in the United States: exceptional women (like Morgan), anonymous designers, adjuncts, and reformers. This framework endures through much contemporary scholarship. Sumita Singh’s anthology, Women in Architecture, offers an updated anthology of documents, reports, and scholarship that provide a comprehensive overview of women in architecture from a global perspective. Stratigakos 2016, meanwhile, is a concise and pointed critique of the architectural profession and the persistent underrepresentation of women within it.

• Cherny, Robert W., Ann Marie Wilson, and Mary Ann Irwin, eds. California Women and Politics: From the Gold Rush to the Great Depression. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

  Within this long view of California women and political activism, readers will find a few essays that pertain more directly to Morgan’s clients, including one on Phoebe Hearst; one on conservation and the fight to protect California’s redwood trees; an essay on Berkeley’s Twentieth Century Club, to which several clients belonged; and several essays on clubwomen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• Kerber, Linda K., Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Karissa Haugeberged, eds. Women’s America: Refocusing the Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

  This edited volume of essays and documents spans the United States from pre-European contact to the present. Parts 3 and 4, from the Gilded Age through World War II, pertain most to Julia Morgan’s world.

• Kostof, Spiro. A History of Architecture: Setting and Rituals. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

  Kostof provides a sweeping history of architecture from prehistoric cave drawings through late-20th-century postmodernism. Much like Morgan’s academic training and practice, the bulk of the book focuses on the ancient Mediterranean world and Europe from the Holy Roman Empire through World War II. It provides just enough context for each chapter’s time, place, and theme to convey architecture and planning as complex responses and solutions to the social, cultural, political, and economic times in which humans have lived.

• McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920. New York: Free Press, 2003.

  McGerr locates the origins of progressivism in the desires of an increasingly educated middle-class elite who disparaged the corruption and inequality of industrial capitalism but feared the rise of the working class and radical socialism. The competition between labor, capital, and government intervention roared back after World War I and, in the end, a return to unfettered capitalism and conservative government ruled the 1920s.

• Singha, Sumita. Women in Architecture. London: Routledge, 2018.

  This four-volume anthology is generally available at research libraries. It focuses consistently on four themes: history and identity of the “woman architect,” notable architects, broader impact and influence, and the education and employment of women in the field.

• Starr, Kevin. California: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2005.

  Kevin Starr’s work is always a readable introduction to many themes in the history of California. This book is a general synthesis of California history, but interested readers will find Starr’s books on the Progressive era, Southern California in the 1920s, the Great Depression, and World War II equally valuable introductions to the California of Julia Morgan’s life and times.

• Stratigakos, Despina. Where Are the Women Architects? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

  DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvct00dx

  Why, after nearly 150 years of precedent for women practicing architecture, a half century of scholarship, and rising numbers in undergraduate programs have women struggled to gain a foothold in the architectural profession (narrowly defined as the designers of buildings)? Patriarchy is among the most significant and stubbornly persistent obstacles, while intergenerational tensions among women raise issues too. Stratigakos calls for innovative, multipronged approaches to educating the public about women architects, citing the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF) as a model to follow.

• Torre, Susana, ed. Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977.

  This seminal work on the history of women and architecture in the United States made clear from the outset that women’s influence must be understood beyond the traditional idea of “architect.” That said, it also provides profiles of several practitioners, mostly from Morgan’s generation. Sara Boutelle, author of the first and still most widely-read biography of Julia Morgan, published her first essay on the architect in this volume.

• Upton, Dell. American Architecture: A Thematic History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

  This survey incorporates Upton’s interests in everything from Indigenous to monumental architecture, from skyscrapers and institutional buildings to popular and everyday spaces. He explores the tension between architecture as art or technology as well as the role of money and nature in architectural practice and design.

• Wright, Gwendolyn. 1977. “On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Architecture.” In The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession. Edited by Spiro Kostof, 280–308. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Embedded in this overview of the four main ways American women have participated in architecture during the past two hundred years is a discussion about Julia Morgan and the limits of her significance in terms of architectural design and feminist credentials. For Wright, Morgan was well-trained, deliberate, prolific, and successful, but that success was dependent precisely on her own and her clients’ profound conservatism.