Julia Morgan

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Julia Morgan (January 20, 1872–February 2, 1957) was an American architect. She is best known for her work on Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California. Born in San Francisco, California, she was raised in Oakland and graduated from Oakland High School in 1890. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1894 with a degree in civil engineering. At the urging of her friend and mentor Bernard Maybeck, whom she met in her final year in undergraduate school, she headed to Paris to apply to the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Denied at first because she was a woman, she would wait two years before being permitted to study in the architecture program. She would be the first woman to graduate with a degree in architecture from the school.

Upon her return from Paris she took employment with the San Francisco architect John Galen Howard who was at that time supersiving the University of California Master Plan. Morgan worked on several buildings on the UC Berkeley campus, most notably providing the decorative elements for the Hearst Mining Building, and designs for the Hearst Greek Theatre.

In 1904 she opened her own office in San Francisco. One of her earliest works from this period was North Star House in Grass Valley, California, commissioned in 1905 by mining engineer Arthur DeWint Foote and his wife, the author and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote. Naturally, many commissions followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, ensuring her financial success.

The most famous of Morgan's patrons was the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who had been introduced to Morgan by his mother Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the chief patroness of the University of California at Berkeley. It is believed that this introduction led to Morgan's first downstate commission by Hearst, ca 1914, for the design of the Los Angeles Examiner Building, a project that included contributions by Los Angeles architects William J. Dodd and J. Martyn Haenke. In 1919 Hearst selected Morgan as the architect for the Hearst Castle, which was built atop the family campsite overlooking San Simeon harbor. From this point forward, Morgan became Hearst's principal architect, producing the designs for dozens of buildings, such as Wyntoon (a "Bavarian village" located on 50,000 forested acres on the McCloud River near Mount Shasta), Jolon (a "hunting lodge" built in a Mission Style about thirty miles from the Castle), and Babicore, Hearst's Mexican rancho.

The Julia Morgan School for Girls in Oakland is named after her. The school is the only middle school for girls in the East Bay.^[1] They occupy Alderwood Hall at Mills College, a 1924 building designed by Morgan.^[2]

Her best-known works not commissioned by Hearst include the YWCAs in San Francisco's Chinatown and in Oakland, the Mills College Bell Tower, St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, and the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove near Monterey, California. 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 is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.