The current period of change in the arts is leading many critics to reevaluate the work of architects who were largely ignored during the height of modernism. A prime example is Julia Morgan (1872-1957), the first woman in the world to have attended the Architecture section of Paris' distinguished Ecole des Beaux-Arts. A native San Franciscan who practiced in that city for forty-seven years, Morgan is credited with some eight hundred buildings. Although her work includes many kinds of institutions--churches, clubs, schools, hospitals, gymnasiums, and numerous YWCAs--she has remained virtually unknown except to those Bay Area homeowners who cherish her redwood-shingle or Mediterranean style homes. Her most famous work is the world-renowned San Simeon, built for William Randolph Hearst.
Part of a Tradition
Morgan was not by any means the first woman architect in America. Last year, the American Institute of Architects celebrated the centennial of the admission of its first woman member, Louise Bethune, who designed schools, factories, and public buildings located principally in Buffalo. A recent exhibition showing the work of women architects practicing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been traveling around the country. Featured are such women as Sophie Hayden, whose Women's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago won first place in the design competition.
Two years later, an international exposition in Atlanta selected Else Mercur of Pittsburgh as its architect. In California, however, Morgan was the first woman to be accredited as an architect in 1904. In both numbers and variety of commissions, she surpassed not only her predecessors but most contemporary architects, men and women.
In San Francisco in the 1870s, Eliza Woodland Parmelee Morgan and her husband, Charles Bill Morgan, recently of New York and Connecticut, began a family soon to number five. A son, Parmelee, was first, then Julia, and next Emma, with two more boys to follow. As they grew up, both boys and girls were expected to go to the university and to choose careers and further study if they wished. The Morgans were not daunted by either Julia's desire to become an architect or by Emma's wanting to study law. As there was no architectural school in the West, Julia Morgan studied civil engineering at Berkeley. After graduation, she worked one year for Bernard Maybeck, who taught descriptive geometry at a Parisian engineering school. At that time, Paris was the home of the world center for education in architecture, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
The Ecole's teachings emphasized drawing rather than actual construction, using examples from history, particularly from Classical and Renaissance models. Students worked in group studios (ateliers), attended lectures, and participated in competitions that demanded plans, sections, and elevations as independent solutions to problems of design. Principles of symmetry, proportion, and harmony were learned from study of historic models, and prizes and honors were given for individual treatments based on knowledge of past examples.
Julia Morgan had studied Latin and German as part of her college training for science and engineering, but she had to acquire fluency in French to pass her entrance examinations and to participate in the work at the
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