Architect Julia Morgan

By Maggie Riechers

  "If William Randolph Hearst had sent to central casting for an architect to design and build his castle in San Simeon, he couldn't have chosen any better than Julia Morgan,"says archivist Nancy Loe. "She was a civil engineer, had classical training at the École des Beaux-Arts, was a native of California, and understood the environment he prized." In 1919 publisher Hearst chose Morgan to design and supervise the construction of the monumental project. She would work on the Hearst Castle, as it came to be known, for nearly thirty years.

  Loe is assistant dean of California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) at San Luis Obispo, and overseer of the university's Julia Morgan archive.

  The collection dispels two myths about Morgan. The first was that Hearst "discovered" her, pulled her from relative obscurity to design his palatial estate, gambled on her qualifications, and then, monopolized her career. By the time Morgan began working on San Simeon, she had been practicing for twenty years and had already completed 450 projects. The first woman in the state to be licensed as an architect, she headed her own thriving practice in San Francisco. Morgan was much in demand to design all kinds of buildings-residences, churches, civic centers. She continued running her business even while working on the Hearst project.

  The second myth about Morgan is that she destroyed the records of her fifty-year practice when she retired in 1951. "In fact, she carefully preserved thousands of architectural plans, drawings, photographs, correspondence, project files, and other personal and professional papers, which were given to Cal Poly by her heirs," says Loe. The library holds nearly three hundred linear feet of architectural drawings, documents, and photographs in its Morgan archive. With support from NEH, Cal Poly is arranging and preserving archival material, creating digital images and electronic finding aids, and enhancing access for researchers.

  Julia Morgan was born in 1872 in San Francisco and grew up in Oakland. Her father was a businessman and left the raising of Morgan and her four siblings to their mother, who encouraged her two daughters to pursue their interests. Morgan's sister became a lawyer. Julia displayed a facility for mathematics and physics, and, after finishing high school in 1890, decided she wanted to become an architect. Her choice may have been influenced by her mother's cousin, architect Pierre LeBrun. There were no architectural schools on the West Coast at that time, so Morgan enrolled in the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. She became the second woman at Berkeley to graduate with a degree in civil engineering.

  Armed with her degree, Morgan followed the advice of one of her professors, the architect Bernard Maycock, who suggested she pursue architectural studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. When she got to Paris, Morgan failed the entrance exam twice. She wrote to LeBrun that she had been failed on purpose because she was female. "I'll try again next time anyway," she wrote, "even without expectations, just to show 'les jeunes filles' are not discouraged." She was finally accepted and went on to win medals for her work in mathematics, architecture, and design. "There is a great deal of work from that period, thousands of sketches of her time in Europe, showing her to be a talented artist," says Loe.

  When Morgan returned to San Francisco in 1902, she went to work for John Galen Howard and helped design several buildings at the University of California, Berkeley, including the Hearst Mining Building and the Hearst Greek Theater. The buildings were financed by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, wife of mining magnate George Hearst and mother of William Randolph Hearst. Phoebe Hearst developed a great respect for Morgan, a connection that would influence Morgan's career in many ways.

  Morgan opened her own practice in 1904 and received a number of commissions for residences in the Piedmont, Claremont, and Berkeley neighborhoods. Her designs reflected the natural California environment and she favored local types of woods and stone. "Her early redwood shingle houses contributed to the emergence of the Bay Area shingle style," writes architectural historian Elinor Richey in Notable American Women, The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary. "She was also a decade ahead of most of her contemporaries in using structure as a means of architectural expression."

  Morgan was one of America's early users of reinforced concrete, a building material she had learned about in Paris. In 1904, Mills College asked Morgan to design the school's bell tower. Morgan built a seventy-two foot tall tower of reinforced concrete. The tower withstood the shock of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

  "This was a significant event in Morgan's career," says Loe. "The bell tower didn't fall. This brought her local acclaim and new commissions, including rebuilding the earthquake-damaged Fairmont Hotel. From this point, Morgan's career was assured, and her practice thrived." Soon her commissions extended throughout San Francisco and the surrounding area.

  "Morgan created lovely interior details such as built-in bookshelves, pantries, and woodwork and architectural detail," says Loe. "While most architects like to put their own imprint on their buildings, Morgan paid scrupulous attention to what the client wanted. She would talk to everyone in the family, even the children, to find out what and where they played.

  "She was not known for one style," Loe continues. "She employed Mission style, Greek revival, Arts and Crafts, and a generous use of shingles. Her philosophy was to please the client."

  One-third of Morgan's clients were women or women's organizations. She designed twenty-eight buildings for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in fifteen cities in California, Utah, and Hawai'i. One of her largest YWCA commissions was to design thirteen buildings for Asilomar, the organization's seaside retreat near Monterey. Built in the Arts and Crafts style, the complex has hosted thousands of visitors since its founding in 1913. Today it is a state historical park and conference center.

  According to historian Virginia Drachman, Morgan "never forgot the needs of the single, working-class women whom the YWCA sought to help.

  "She designed buildings for them that provided such homelike comforts as private kitchenettes and dining areas. Her commitment to creating residences that combined beauty with practicality revealed her respect for the needs of working-class women," writes Drachman in Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American Business. "However, her careful attention met some opposition: 'But these are minimum wage girls,' protested some women on the YWCA board, 'why spoil them?' Morgan responded simply and directly: 'That's just the reason.'"

  Morgan did not describe herself as a feminist, but she employed women, encouraged them, and considered them part of her family. Morgan herself never married.

  "Morgan was a workaholic with a laser-like concentration on architecture," Loe says. "Even her grocery lists would be used to sketch a design." She focused on her work, not herself, and the vast archive contains little personal reflection. She famously said, "My work speaks for itself."

  One of the influential women who championed Morgan's work was Phoebe Hearst. She had recommended Morgan for some of the YWCA commissions and hired her to design the indoor and outdoor swimming pools at the family's estate outside Berkeley. When Phoebe Hearst died in the 1919 flu epidemic, William Randolph Hearst inherited the land on which San Simeon now sits, along with other property and eleven million dollars. He was already familiar with Morgan's work. Four years earlier, Morgan had completed a Mission Revival building for the Los Angeles Examiner, Hearst's flagship newspaper. Hearst asked Morgan to design a main building and guest houses for San Simeon.

  From the beginning, he told her he wanted "something a little different from what other people are doing in California." Hearst appreciated the no-nonsense approach Morgan took to the project. Their twenty-eight year correspondence about the construction of the estate remained formal in tone, always using Miss and Mr. in their letters, and focused entirely on the work. She designed the main building (Casa Grande) and three guest houses, the grounds and terraces, indoor and outdoor pools, tennis courts, zoo, and workers' camp. The main building-what has come to be known as the Hearst Castle-rises in two towers. Morgan used her favorite building material, reinforced concrete, with a white stone covering. The Hearst Castle includes a library, a dining room for thirty people, and a private theater. It has fifty-eight bedrooms, fifty-nine bathrooms, eighteen sitting rooms, and two kitchens. Morgan supervised everything from the overall design to minute details of tile and ornamentation, and she oversaw the work of countless tradesmen and artisans.

  The Hearst Castle was Morgan's weekend job. "Every Friday night she took the train to San Luis Obispo where a car would meet her for the fifty-mile drive to San Simeon, and every Sunday she would go back again," says Loe. Her correspondence with Hearst was frequent and focused on the details of the construction. "There was a constant crisis," says Loe, as Hearst frequently changed his mind about details, large and small. Morgan, however, "took a lot of care to build this incredible estate, and Hearst was never, ever upset with her," says Loe. There are countless examples in their correspondence of Hearst's impulsiveness and Morgan's acquiescence.

  For example, the outdoor pool, named the Neptune Pool, began as a garden with a small ornamental lily pond, which Hearst called the Temple Garden. On March 31, 1924, Hearst wrote,

  I am sending back the plan of the temple garden with the suggestion that we make the pool longer than it is . . . and that we make it eight feet deep so that we can use it as a swimming pool. Mrs. Hearst and the children are extremely anxious to have a swimming pool, and unwilling to wait until we can get the regular swimming pools built. . . . Therefore, if it seems practicable, please make this a swimming pool- temporarily at least.

  Morgan converted the design to a pool that would fit the site, and by July of 1924 it was ready for the family's use. Two years later Hearst requested a much larger pool with a cascade and more statuary. Morgan designed the changes, and the construction crews began jackhammering the old pool.

  Unfortunately, the grand estate was never completed; Hearst ran out of money for the project. The zoo, two more guest houses, and an additional wing that would have housed an art gallery were never built. Morgan would design other homes and buildings for Hearst, including Wyntoon, a Bavarian village on the McCloud River, and the hacienda at Babicora-a million-acre ranch in Mexico-that was never built. But she made her mark with the Hearst Castle. The estate is now a state historical monument, and has attracted thirty-five million visitors since it opened to the public in 1958.

  Morgan's practice continued to thrive even during the war years, despite shortages of building materials and skilled labor. In 1951, she closed her office and retired. She died in 1957 at the age of eighty-five.

  In 1972, Sara Boutelle, who taught architectural history at the Brearley School in Manhattan, visited Hearst Castle for the first time and was horrified to find that the state historical records described Julia Morgan as Hearst's private secretary. Boutelle dedicated the rest of her life to researching and collecting material by and about Morgan. Boutelle's 1989 biography, Julia Morgan, Architect, received the California Book Award Silver Medal. Her complete archives of research and papers are now part of the Cal Poly collection.

  "I have renewed respect for Julia Morgan every day," says Nancy Loe. "She worked hard her whole life, and her body of work does speak for itself."

California Polytechnic State University received $248,988 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to arrange and create digital images and online finding aids for the Julia Morgan collection.