Julia Morgan
First woman licensed to practice architecture in California; author of some seven hundred buildings, one of them enchanted.
Firsts
Morgan took a civil engineering degree at Berkeley in 1894 — the only woman in her class — then spent two years in Paris fighting for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, which had never accepted a woman into its architecture section. She was admitted in 1898 and certified in 1902. Two years later she held California architecture license No. — well, the first one ever issued to a woman.
The practice
Her San Francisco office ran for nearly half a century and produced YWCAs, churches, schools, hospitals, campus buildings, and the Asilomar conference grounds. After the 1906 earthquake she rebuilt the Fairmont Hotel when male competitors said it could not be saved; her reinforced concrete had a habit of staying up. She hired women, paid well, avoided the press, and kept no monuments to herself.
Twenty-eight years on the hill
From 1919 to 1947 Morgan spent most weekends on Hearst’s hilltop: the Friday night train from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo, a car up the coast, a weekend of drawings, and the Monday train back to her other clients. She designed everything at San Simeon from the towers to the bear grottos, managed the crews, tamed the shipping crates, and absorbed three decades of her client’s cheerful revisions — including rebuilding the Neptune Pool three times.
The Hearst–Morgan correspondence, thousands of letters, reads less like artist-and-patron than like two obsessives who found each other. He proposed; she made it stand.
The quiet legacy
Morgan gave almost no interviews and, at retirement, had most of her office records destroyed. "My buildings will be my legacy," she said. In 2014 the American Institute of Architects awarded her its Gold Medal — the first woman so honored, fifty-seven years after her death. The buildings, as promised, were still speaking.