About

Julia Morgan was one of the most important female architects of the early twentieth century and a great figure in the history of California architecture. She was a pioneer for women in the fields of architecture and engineering, overcoming many obstacles that faced women in a time before they could even vote. She was the first woman to graduate from the University of California's Civil Engineering program and the first woman to be trained at the prestigious Ecole de Beaux Arts, a classically-themed architecture school in Paris. During her 49-year career as an architect, she is believed to have designed more than 700 buildings, most of which were built. According to architect Bernard Maybeck, one of Morgan's mentors, there was never a job too large or too small for her. She took on projects as grand as William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon castle and as simple as a college home for the son of Hearst's lawyer. Throughout her long career, she also designed multiple buildings for institutions serving women and girls. It is hard to identify one style that Morgan adhered to. According to her biographer, Sarah Holmes Boutelle, "Her affection for the California landscape infused her work, influencing her choice of styles, materials, and colors. She chose styles to correlate directly to the site at hand: the light-filled, woodsy comfort of the Arts and Crafts style seemed well suited to the Bay area, the simplicity of the California missions offered inspiration for dwellings and courtyards in more arid landscapes, buildings in the Bavarian style provided an apt choice for the snowy mountains of Tahoe and Shasta."

Other Projects
Julia Morgan's 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; the Mills College Bell Tower, St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley; the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland; the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove near Monterey, 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 died at the age of 85 on February 2, 1957, She is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.