was on the move, scaling the scaffolding of her projects, traveling up
and down the state each week to visit construction sites. Responsible
for
, she worked long hours at her firm's
office in the Merchants Exchange Building in San Francisco. In her spare
time, she enjoyed hiking the hills near her vacation home in Monterey,
outpacing her niece and nephew well into her 70s. Ironically, many of
Morgan's most inspired spaces are ones of great peace and leisure.
Working with a group of socially conscious women, Morgan helped change
the landscape of urban building. She would spend much of her career
creating elegant, efficient communal living spaces for many people, from
working class city girls to one of the richest men in the United
States.
Julia Morgan was born to a wealthy family in San Francisco in 1872
and grew up in a large Victorian home in nearby Oakland, graduating from
Oakland High School in 1890. In an age when the vast majority of women
did not go to college, Morgan enrolled in the University of California
at Berkeley. Already
, inspired in
part by a relative who practiced in New York, she majored in civil
engineering. Even more uncommonly for a woman of her time, she lived in
her sorority house instead of at home. Here, she got her first taste of
institutional living and the freedom and companionship that came with
boarding with her contemporaries. "Living at the sorority house helped
cut the apron strings," explains Morgan scholar and historian Karen
McNeill. "She could focus just on her schoolwork and not have to go home
and have domestic responsibilities."
Encouraged
by her instructor, the architect Bernard Maybeck, Julia moved to Paris
after graduation to study at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in
Paris, where she was the first woman ever admitted. For her first year
in Paris, she lived at the strict American Club for Girls, a home
dedicated to "vulnerable"(i.e. young and single) American female
artists. "It was perfect for the first year because it helped her
transition into this foreign place," says McNeill. But soon "she
realized she wanted to entertain and break away from the rules and
constraints of such an environment." In 1902, Morgan received her
certificate of completion from the Ecole. In 1904, she became the
first woman licensed to practice architecture in California.
Morgan came on the scene as wealthy women were
asserting their power through social welfare projects
all around the country, and in Morgan they found the perfect partner.
In the 19th century, women's groups had mostly repurposed existing
buildings for social institutions. At the beginning of the 20th century,
their industrial-capitalist husbands began dying, leaving the women the
money for new buildings. These widows also took a much more active role
in public life, working on the front lines of campaigns to raise
additional funds. "Morgan had that fire and that spark and determination
of her own," McNeill says. "That was then fostered by this confluence
of women, institutions, and money all coming together in urban building
to make that really the core of her career."
California women in general, and Julia Morgan in particular, had no bigger champion than the socialite
Phoebe Hearst.
Now known mainly as the mother of William Randolph Hearst, she was a
tireless benefactress to not only UC Berkeley, where she gave Morgan one
of her first commissions, but of the Young Women's Christian
Association. The YWCA, which originated in Britain, came to the U.S. in
1858. Local YWCAs worked to provide safe housing, training, and
recreational opportunities for the thousands of women flooding American
cities during the first half of the 20th century. With her experience as
a young woman in the big city and her ability to build elegant, complex
structures relatively cheaply and in a variety of styles, Morgan would
work happily on various YWCA projects for two decades.
 |
| [Merrill Hall at Asilomar. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.] |
Julia's first big commission for the YWCA was Asilomar, the
organization's national conference center. Phoebe Hearst donated 30
acres of beachfront property in Pacific Grove, California. Over 16 years
beginning in 1913, Morgan designed
16 rustic buildings on the
property. Done in a minimal Arts and Crafts style and utilizing
California woods and rocks, the "buildings really blend into the
landscape, and you really get that sensibility of a love for the
environment," McNeill says. According to biographer Ginger Wadsworth,
Julia strived to "make the center a retreat where members could rest and
renew their spirits." Here, women—who many still believed should remain
sedentary and indoors—slept in Morgan's ingenious tent houses and
laughed together around floor-to-ceiling fireplaces in spacious common
rooms. Today, Asilomar is California's second most popular state park,
after another Morgan creation, Hearst Castle.
In 1913, Morgan also began the Oakland YWCA, the first of numerous
local YWCA chapters she was to build, including ones in Pasadena,
Riverside, Fresno, Hollywood, San Francisco, San Diego, Salt Lake City,
and her personal favorite, Honolulu, Hawaii. She also designed many
non-YWCA women's clubs and residences,
including the exquisite Berkeley Women's City Club, the Phoebe Hearst
Memorial Gymnasium for Women, and two versions of her old sorority,
Kappa Alpha Theta. She drew on her own experiences living in a sorority
and boarding house, as well as input from young women. Women who boarded
with her at her home in San Francisco in later years would remember her
coming into their rooms and making polite inquiries about their design
choices and needs.
 |
| [Two views inside the Berkeley City Club. Photos by Hadley Meares.] |
Morgan's belief that women paying nominal fees to live in these
residences should have more than just a bed and basin often put her at
odds with the powers that be. Women on the boards of the organizations
for which Morgan built "were very much entrenched in the class system,"
McNeill says, "so they didn't feel the need to create entertainment
opportunities—that's just fostering sin. But Morgan had been there" as a
young woman and respected the residents' requests for kitchen and
entertaining spaces. So she put in cheap, reliable
Pullman kitchens, normally used on trains.
A board member on one project recalled that Morgan "wanted…to have a
room where the girls could do sewing…and have a little beauty parlor,
and could do their laundry…the next time we were together she planned
these rooms…She just quietly did what she wanted to do." When members of
the YWCA in Chinatown asked for a gym where they and their children
could exercise and play sports safely, Morgan built them a beautiful gym
that doubled as an auditorium. And although she probably never learned
to swim due to inner ear problems, she became a master builder of
innovative, elegant pools
that were expressions of women's expanding freedom. In 1934, Morgan
would tell a correspondent, "I have 22 pools now in operation and have
come to some quite definite conclusions." Among those conclusions,
McNeill says, is that the pools and recreational spaces were among the
most important aspects of the YWCAs. The women "
wanted to be free. And the clothes they had to wear—think about how freeing a pool would be even in those heavy, hot bathing costumes."
 |
| [The Neptune pool at Hearst Castle. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.] |
Julia Morgan would design grand recreational areas for a totally
different kind of client through her work with William Randolph Hearst.
If Phoebe Hearst was Morgan's fairy godmother, then W.R. was her
scheming, dreaming little brother. The two shared a great love of the
natural wonders of California and adventurous natures. Throughout the
1920s, Morgan worked on Hearst's
San Simeon and various YWCA
projects concurrently—and the two complemented each other. Both
generally required changing rooms, lockers, and spaces that comfortably
fit large, boisterous groups.
With Hearst, Morgan constantly had to contend with a new piece of ancient Greek sculpture or an
entire medieval European room
that he had bought. Rather than being exhausted by Hearst's
never-ending acquisitions and ideas, she was inspired by them. At San
Simeon's Hearst Castle, Morgan created two of the most breathtaking
pools in America. The massive "Neptune pool," considered by many
architects to be "
the most sumptuous swimming pool on earth," was
built with Vermont marble around an ancient Roman temple facade. The
exquisite indoor "Roman pool," inspired by the Galla Placidia in
Ravenna, Italy, is covered in exquisite smalti glass tiles of deep blue,
orange, and fused gold.
 |
| [The pool at the Berkeley City Club. Photo by Hadley Meares.] |
Morgan closed her practice in 1951. She died in 1957. In December,
the American Institute of Architects posthumously awarded her its 2014
Gold Medal, making her the first woman to receive the award. Morgan
herself would probably take pride in the fact that many of her
structures are still used for a variation of their original purpose. On a
recent visit to the Berkeley City Club, members swam in the beautiful
lap pool, read in the peaceful library, and conversed in the center
courtyard. Julia Morgan increased the quality of life for thousands of
people, from the working class to the country's elite. But every night,
she went to sleep in a spare room on a plain cot. In Dr. McNeill's
words, "She wasn't really in it for herself."
—
Special thanks to Dr. Karen McNeill
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