Julia Morgan, Architect and Trail-Blazer
"My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone." --Julia Morgan
All I have to say is, How did I NOT ever know about this woman????
She was the 1st woman to be a licensed architect (California), one of the first women to be admitted to the architecture program at the Ecole Beaux Arts in Paris, the architect of over 700 buildings, many still regarded as architectural treasures, AND…SHE DESIGNED THE HEARST CASTLE, for Pete’s sake! Did YOU know that? Here’s one of those many moments I’ve been having where I am astounded at all the things and people I don’t know, but should have, I think, at some time.
Born in 1872 in San Francisco, she became interested in architecture and engineering at Berkeley, after which she traveled to Paris to study architecture. Common practice at the time was a policy not to admit women to the architectural program, but as a part of the women’s suffrage movement, protests by women artists forced the school to allow women beginning in 1897. Julia was admitted as the first woman in the architecture program graduating her degree twice as fast as the average student.
She worked from 1919 to 1947 on Hearst Castle, and almost as long on Asilomar. She was involved in every detail from pool design to placement of furniture. She designed Asilomar and hundreds of homes. Julia often donated her labor or charged lower commissions for women’s civic projects: housing for single women, orphanages, YWCA’s, women’s schools, among them. After the 1906 earthquake, she was involved in the restoration of many buildings. She embraced the Arts and Crafts movement and pioneered the aesthetic use of reinforced concrete.
“She came of age at the dawn of the Progressive era, when women were really beginning to feel the frustration of not being able to use the skills they had learned in college,” says historian and Morgan expert Karen McNeill. “She had chutzpah and moxie. This incredibly competitive woman was not going to be deterred from pursuing her dream because she was born with two X chromosomes.”
