Julia Morgan

The money in the house came from her mother's side. Her father, a New England mining engineer, drilled for oil at Santa Paula and lost, cofounded an iron company that dissolved in 1875, and never made a venture pay, so the family lived on a New York cotton trader's fortune. A childhood bout of scarlet fever left her prone to ear trouble for life, and a cousin's husband who happened to be an architect told her to go and get an education. She took it at Berkeley, in civil engineering, because Berkeley had no architecture program, and was often the only woman in the room. She graduated with honors in 1894. In her final year an engineering lecturer named Bernard Maybeck began teaching her architecture at his house.

Paris took her three tries. The École des Beaux-Arts had never admitted a woman to architecture and opened its exams only in 1897, and when she placed well the next year the examiners lowered her marks. On the third attempt she came 13th out of 376. The school barred students past 30, so she took the certificate in three years rather than five, the first woman to hold one. Back home she drafted for John Galen Howard, who told a colleague he had an excellent draftsman he paid almost nothing because it was a woman. She was licensed in California in 1904, again the first woman. Her concrete bell tower at Mills College came through the 1906 earthquake uncracked, and the work never stopped: some 700 buildings, YWCAs from Hawaii to Utah, and 28 years at San Simeon.

She left almost nothing to work with. Morgan never married, had no romantic relationship anyone recorded, gave few interviews and wrote nothing about herself. Her staff knew her as J.M. A colleague said she dressed like a nobody. She ate and slept little and turned down public honors, taking an honorary doctorate from Berkeley in 1929 and not much else. The contradiction is what she is famous for. Most of those 700 buildings went up for institutions serving women and girls, the YWCAs and the Mills College campus and a home for elderly women on Laguna Street, and the one everybody knows is a private hill in San Luis Obispo County where a newspaper magnate kept enlarging his idea of a house until his health gave out.

She closed the office in 1950 and died in San Francisco on February 2, 1957, at 85. She is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. The reappraisal came slowly and mostly through the buildings. Asilomar is a state conference ground. The Chinatown YWCA was restored in 2001 and holds the Chinese Historical Society of America. The Los Angeles Examiner building went onto the National Register over the objections of the Hearst Corporation, which had been looking at demolition, and now houses commercial tenants and a university. In 2014, 57 years after her death, the American Institute of Architects gave her its Gold Medal. She was the first woman to receive it.

Julia Morgan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• El Campanil, Mills College building
  A 72-foot reinforced concrete bell tower, and her first structure in the material 1904
• Fairmont Hotel restoration, San Francisco building
  Rebuilt in under a year after the earthquake and fire. She called the work all structural. 1907
• Asilomar Conference Grounds building
  Begun for the YWCA at Pacific Grove and now run by the state of California 1913
• Los Angeles Examiner Building building
  Her first commission from William Randolph Hearst in southern California 1914
• Julia Morgan Building, 3400 Laguna Street building
  A home for elderly women for the San Francisco Ladies Protection and Relief Society 1925
• Hearst Castle, San Simeon building
  Begun in 1919 and worked on until Hearst's health failed 1947

• 1874 aged ~2 The family crosses the bay to a house they build in Oakland She was two. Her grandmother and the Parmelee money followed in 1880.
• 1894 aged ~22 Takes a Berkeley B.S. in civil engineering with honors The first woman to do so. Berkeley had no architecture program at the time.
• 1896 aged ~24 Sails for Paris to prepare for the Beaux-Arts entrance examination The school had never let a woman study architecture and opened its exams only in 1897.
• 1898 aged ~26 Places inside the top 30 on her second attempt, and the examiners lower her marks
• 1902 aged ~30 Earns the Beaux-Arts architecture certificate weeks before her 30th birthday The school barred students past 30. She finished in three years rather than five.
• April 1904 aged 32 Completes El Campanil at Mills College and takes her California license
• April 18, 1906 aged 34 The earthquake takes her office and leaves her tower standing The commissions that followed, the Fairmont among them, made her practice.
• 1919 aged ~47 William Randolph Hearst hires her for La Cuesta Encantada at San Simeon The work went on until 1947.
• February 2, 1957 aged 85 Dies in San Francisco at 85

• William Randolph Hearst 1863–1951
  Publisher whose sensational newspapers and national media empire wielded immense cultural and political power. principal patron
• Frederick Law Olmsted 1822–1903
  Landscape architect who designed Central Park and established public parks as essential American civic infrastructure. earlier builder of American public places
• Jane Addams 1860–1935
  Social worker and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who founded Hull House and the settlement house movement. built for the same movement
• Maya Lin b. 1959
  Designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial whose work transformed American memorial architecture. later woman in the same argument
• Jane Jacobs 1916–2006
  Writer and activist whose defense of mixed, walkable neighborhoods transformed urban planning. inherited the fight over what cities keep