For one of Julia Morgan’s first commissions in 1903, the magnificent El Campanil bell tower at Mills College in Oakland, the soft-spoken young architect had to deal with a male contractor who wasn’t happy that she was the boss.
In fact, he worked to undermine Morgan’s authority by claiming she didn’t know how to use steel-reinforced concrete for her 72-foot, Mission-style tower. He was wrong, of course, because the Oakland-reared Morgan had learned all about this new construction method, necessary to build 20th-century skyscrapers, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The year before, she had become the first woman to ever graduate from this world-renowned architectural training program.
“She was right there on the ground floor of some of the most path-breaking experiments with concrete,” said Oakland-based Julia Morgan historian Karen McNeill.
But it didn’t matter. In a time before women could vote, the female president of Mills College was still inclined to listen to the man and let him take credit for Morgan’s elegant design.
This wasn’t Morgan’s first experience with sexism, but it confirmed that she wouldn’t be able to avoid it throughout her trailblazing, 46-year career, as McNeill wrote in her essay “Julia Morgan: Gender, Architecture, and Professional Style.”
The situation also demonstrated the ways that Morgan — a modest, diminutive woman out of the Victorian era, given to wearing prim suits and her hair pinned back into a bun — didn’t conform to a popular idea of the genius American architect whose buildings define eras.
Unlike her contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright or the fictional “starchitects” imagined by Ayn Rand and in the film “The Brutalist,” Morgan didn’t come across as a swaggering, larger-than-life cultural figure. She wasn’t given to displays of ego, superiority or a tortured personality, even if she privately faced professional and personal heartbreak.
Morgan was seen as a “tiny, fragile-looking woman,” though she still managed to use a “wonderful quiet power” to command respect, one client once said. The breadth of her output also shows a master builder who helped define the look of the Bay Area as much as any architect.
After starting her own firm in 1904, she designed an estimated 700 projects throughout the Western United States in the first half of the 20th century. The first woman licensed to practice architecture in California, she gained the trust of philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst and her newspaper tycoon son, Willam Randolph Hearst, spending 28 years building his opulent Hearst Castle at San Simeon, considered one of America’s great private houses.
Morgan’s output included an array of regular homes, schools, churches, office buildings and clubhouses, while she became a name brand by just getting on with the work. Unlike other “starchitects,” she also didn’t court media attention — and, most strikingly, she didn’t crusade for a signature bold style or theory. Instead, in the service of her clients, she worked in various styles – Mission, Arts and Crafts, First Bay Tradition, neo-Classical, Gothic and the Spanish renaissance that inspired Hearst Castle.
Unfortunately, this deference to clients long led some critics to ignore her work, especially when modernism was in its ascendancy, writes biographer Victoria Kastner in “Julia Morgan: An Intimate Portrait of The Trailblazing Architect.” In a 1966 essay, Joan Didion seemed to deride the “phantasmagoric barony” of San Simeon, without naming Morgan, while later saying that her lack of a singular style suggested a lack of talent.
Whether Morgan’s solicitousness was a function of her gender, McNeill argues that Morgan’s genius came from her desire to create beautiful spaces that served clients’ needs. “Actually, if you study her buildings, particularly alongside the stories of her clients, then you very much have a signature style, which was from the inside out, bottom up,” McNeill said.
Morgan was “a sensitive person and sensitive artist, whose extraordinary attention to the surroundings and comfort of others have left us with a lasting legacy of hundreds of buildings, all of which are strong, useful and beautiful,” adds Kastner, the former historian at Hearst Castle.
Morgan’s independent spirit and love for beautiful spaces were apparent early on. Born in 1874, she grew up in a prominent Oakland family, with a strong-minded mother, Eliza, who was proud of their well-appointed home. That home, near downtown, also boasted a lush garden, where Morgan could indulge in “unlady-like” pursuits with her four siblings, like turning somersaults and shooting arrows.
Morgan showed an early talent for art and music and was encouraged to excel in school and go to college. But like other young women of her social class, she knew that she couldn’t have a career if she got married.
That Morgan didn’t marry has made her the subject of speculation about whether she was a lesbian. Kastner said there’s no documented evidence that she had romantic relationships, saying that her great love affair probably was with architecture.
McNeill agrees that Morgan never wrote about any romantic relationships. But she noted that she had had multiple same-sex couples as clients and was empathetic to how, for example, a pair of co-habitating female doctors wanted their Berkeley home designed to accommodate their lifestyle.
Morgan’s trailblazing began as a teenager at UC Berkeley in 1890, where her older brother still escorted her to campus at the insistence of their parents. But she became the first woman to graduate with a degree in civil engineering and thereafter found work and a mentor in Bernard Maybeck, the pioneering architect of buildings in the “woodsy” First Bay Tradition style. Maybeck also encouraged Morgan to study at his alma mater, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
But gaining admission became a rigorous, multi-year process that involved apprenticing at an atelier, where her male colleagues regularly targeted her for frat-boy-style pranks. The École resisted welcoming female students, but was finally “shamed” into admitting Morgan after she scored exceedingly high on her third try on the entrance exam. She then had to cram about six years’ work into three years in order to graduate by age 30.
Morgan returned to the Bay Area in the midst of a building boom. Through Maybeck, she became acquainted with Phoebe Hearst and got early jobs working on buildings that the philanthropist funded at UC Berkeley, including supervising construction of the Greek Theatre.
Morgan’s design for Mills’ El Campanil tower was intended to underscore the school’s commitment to women’s suffrage and other Progressive ideals. Fortunately, the sexist contractor didn’t do lasting damage. In fact, Morgan got more ambitious work, both at Mills and elsewhere, after the tower and the nearby campus library that she designed both withstood the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
‘You know, she was a human being,” Kastner said. “That the bell tower and the library both survived the earthquake must have been a moment of at least quiet triumph, knowing that this blowhard didn’t know what he was talking about.”
While the “blowhard’s” name has been lost to history, Morgan responded to his meddling by adopting a professional style to navigate a male-dominated profession, McNeill said. For her next “big, big” job, she successfully supervised hundreds of male workers across different trades to rebuild San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel after it was damaged by the earthquake.
“She could swing a sledge hammer with the strength of a hefty man,” a 1974 San Francisco Chronicle profile of Morgan said. “She spoke softly, but when she issued orders, it was with the finality of a Marine drill sergeant.”
During the Fairmont job, Morgan first got media attention for her “Quarkerish” plain-tailored jackets and skirts, according to McNeill. It’s likely that Morgan wanted to exude professionalism, akin to male architects, with her unfussy fashion. Morgan also was known to wear large pockets to dispense with purses and trousers underneath her skirt if she had to move around a building site, but she still showed a feminine touch by wearing silk blouses from Paris.
Morgan’s career flourished at a time when women sought an increased presence in public life and spaces to organize on behalf of civic engagement, education, children’s welfare and women’s rights. She soon became the go-to architect for women’s groups wanting clubhouses, from Saratoga to Sausalito. After she began working on Hearst’s San Simeon estate, she also designed one of her favorite buildings — the Berkeley City Women’s Club, a six-story “fantasy” of Romanesque, Gothic and Moorish architecture, with a serene indoor pool and dining and assembly rooms for a range of social and recreational programs benefitting girls and women.
Morgan moreover enjoyed a decades-long collaboration with the YWCA, which provided safe housing, classes and community for young women who had left families, farms and even their home countries to work in U.S. cities. For the YWCA, she designed more than 30 buildings in Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco’s Chinatown as well as the Arts and Crafts-style buildings for the organization’s Asilomar women’s conference center in Pacific Grove.
When she died at age 85 in 1957, she got no mention in a Life magazine story about Hearst Castle opening to the public that year as a glittery new attraction in the California State Parks system, Kastner wrote.
But critics like San Francisco-based Alan Temko began to speak up, saying she deserved “as high a place as does Mary Cassatt in American painting or Edith Wharton in American letters.” In 2014, McNeill and other scholars succeeded in accomplishing another first on her behalf: the American Institute of Architects awarded her its first Gold Medal to a woman. Frank Gehry, one of North America’s still living “starchitects,” praised her as an innovator, while Kastner said, “She never stopped creating … and she was one of the 20th century’s finest architects, yet she never lost her humility or desire to improve.”
Visit Julia Morgan’s best Bay Area buildings
Saratoga Foothill Club: Morgan designed the Arts and Crafts-style women’s clubhouse in 1915, at the request of one of its founding members, who had been in the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority with the architect at UC Berkeley. The club regularly hosts public events, such as concerts and author discussions.
Berkeley City Club: Morgan’s “Little Castle” at 2315 Durant Ave. houses a members-only club, fitness center and swimming pool as well as a hotel and two restaurants, Julia’s Restaurant and Morgan’s Bar and Lounge, which are open to the public. On the fourth Sunday of every month, except December, the club also offers a public tour of Morgan’s gorgeous architecture, www.berkeleycityclub.com.
Chapel of the Chimes: You can go on a virtual or in-person tour of this historic1909 columbarium on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, which Morgan designed with Spanish-Moorish Gothic flourishes and indoor gardens.
The Berkeley Playhouse: One of Morgan’s most important early projects was her design for the sanctuary of St. John’s Presbyterian Church, considered one of the finest examples of the East Bay Arts and Crafts style. The building now houses the Berkeley Playhouse, which produces family musicals and provides theater education, 2640 College Avenue, Berkeley,
