The hotel’s owners, determined to rebuild, turned to a young architect, Julia Morgan. Only three years earlier she had built a bell tower on the campus of Mills College, and it had withstood the earthquake unscathed — proof that Morgan was as experienced in reinforced concrete as she was in European design.
But word that a woman had been hired to renovate the luxurious hotel was met with astonishment. Was the building really in the charge of a woman?, Jane Armstrong, a reporter for The San Francisco Call, asked the project’s foreman in 1907 on a visit to the hotel’s ballroom after Morgan had restored it to its original splendor.
Yes, the foreman answered, it was in the charge of “a real architect, and her name happens to be Julia Morgan, but it might as well be John Morgan.’ ”
“To him it was work well done,” Armstrong wrote. After she toured the building with Morgan, she added, she was so inspired that she “wanted to emblazon above it the part that a woman has played.”
As the first woman to receive an architect’s license in California, in 1904, Morgan early on was used to skepticism about her abilities. But she came to allay those doubts by building a sterling reputation with projects now known around the world, including the Asilomar conference grounds on the Monterey Peninsula and, most notably, the Hearst Castle at San Simeon. By the time she retired in 1951, at 79, she had designed hundreds of buildings and sites.
Morgan was born in San Francisco on Jan. 20, 1872. Her father, Charles Bill Morgan, had settled in California in 1867, having reached it from Brooklyn, New York, by sailing around the tip of South America accompanied by his new bride, Eliza Woodland Parmelee. A mining engineer, he had seen the West as the place to make his fortune. Julia Morgan and her four siblings were raised in a large Victorian house across San Francisco Bay in Oakland.
Morgan enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied civil engineering. When she was a senior, she met architect Bernard Maybeck, who would go on to design one of the defining works of the Bay Area School of architecture, the First Church of Christ, Scientist (1910) in Berkeley, as well as the neo-Classical Palace of Fine Arts (1915) in San Francisco.
Maybeck was a charismatic teacher and mentor who encouraged many of his students, including Morgan, to study, as he had, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then the world’s most prestigious architecture school.
She applied, and at 26 became the first woman to pass the school’s entrance exams. The San Francisco Examiner hailed her achievement with the headline, “California Girl Wins High Honor.”
Morgan returned to Oakland in 1902, degree in hand, and soon established an independent practice. She adopted the dark suit and tie of the rank-and-file male architect, but with a skirt rather than trousers.
“Eschewing a regular purse, which would encumber her hands, she utilized suit pockets to carry necessaries,” Elinor Richey wrote in the book “Eminent Women of the West” (1975).
Her first office, at 456 Montgomery St. in San Francisco, was also destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, an event that precipitated a construction boom.
At the time, a growing women’s network, developed through campaigns for the abolition of slavery, temperance and women’s suffrage, was primed to help a female professional. And in 1903, Mills College, a women’s school in Oakland, asked Morgan to design El Campanil, a 72-foot-tall reinforced concrete bell tower in the red-roofed Mission style then popular in the West; like many of her beaux-arts-trained contemporaries, Morgan was a master of historical styles and worked in many genres specific to California.
The Young Women’s Christian Association also became a major client, for which Morgan designed a dozen centers on the West Coast, as well as one in Honolulu.
In 1913 Phoebe Apperson Hearst, whom she had met through Maybeck, hired Morgan to transform 30 acres on the Monterey Peninsula into the YWCA conference center, renamed Asilomar, or “refuge by the sea.” Over the next 16 years Morgan would add 16 buildings, most in a rustic Arts and Crafts style featuring dramatic exposed wood trusses, redwood walls and stone fireplaces. Asilomar became a state park in 1956, and in 1987 Morgan’s buildings were added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Phoebe Hearst also introduced Morgan to her son, newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, for whom she designed the block-long white stucco Examiner Building in 1915.
Four years later he hired her again, initially asking her to help him build a modest bungalow at his ranch in San Simeon, California. Soon his ambitions changed.
The commission would turn into an extraordinary, long-running architect-client relationship that would produce a vast castle of fantastic, Pan-European architecture augmented by fragments of buildings, mostly from Italy and Spain, that Hearst had collected and shipped to California. Morgan spent 25 years working continuously with Hearst, spending a majority of her weekends on-site.
The castle became Morgan’s most famous work.
“She could do any style, castles for Hearst up at Mount Shasta, Italianate, stucco, little cottages and Craftsman buildings,” said Lynn Forney McMurray, the daughter of Morgan’s longtime secretary, Lillian Forney, and her goddaughter. “Her houses were built from the inside out; she thought about how the people were to live. That was what was important to her.”
But eventually those skills went out of style. In the 1950s, the emphasis was on the new, the modern, and the heroic — not to mention on architecture to house the masses. Morgan was largely forgotten.
The profession “has tended to lionize only those architects who break new formal ground or dramatically cut stylistic ties from their predecessors,” former Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote in an appreciation of Morgan in Architect magazine in 2014.
Her reputation was restored, however, largely thanks to a 1988 biography, “Julia Morgan, Architect,” by architectural historian Sara Boutelle.
Boutelle’s biography examined the vast extent of Morgan’s work and her hundreds of clients and commissions beyond Hearst, including the Chinese YWCA in San Francisco (now the Chinese Historical Society), the Berkeley City Club and dozens of homes across California.
Morgan, who never married, died Feb. 2, 1957, at her apartment in San Francisco. She was 85.
Architecture, construction and engineering remain fields dominated by men, and yet “all the biases against her she turned into assets,” said Julia Donoho, an architect and lawyer who successfully nominated Morgan for the 2014 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal — the first time the organization had given its highest honor to a woman.
She added, “I don’t know why we didn’t learn about Julia Morgan in school, but I hope that will never happen again.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.