![\"Julia](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/MAG-L-MORGAN-01_c2e7ec.jpg\")
Julia Morgan’s El Campanil bell tower, circa 1905 (Special Collections, F. W. Olin Library, Northeastern University, Oakland)\u00a0<\/p>\nFor one of Julia Morgan\u2019s first commissions in 1903, the magnificent El Campanil bell tower at Mills College in Oakland, the soft-spoken young architect had to deal with a male contractor who wasn\u2019t happy that she was the boss.<\/p>\n
In fact, he worked to undermine Morgan\u2019s authority by claiming she didn\u2019t know how to use steel-reinforced concrete for her 72-foot, Mission-style tower. He was wrong, of course, because the Oakland-reared Morgan had learned all about this new construction method, necessary to build 20th-century skyscrapers, at the E\u0301cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The year before, she had become the first woman to ever graduate from this world-renowned architectural training program.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was right there on the ground floor of some of the most path-breaking experiments with concrete,\u201d said Oakland-based Julia Morgan historian Karen McNeill.<\/p>\n
But it didn\u2019t matter. In a time before women could vote, the female president of Mills College was still inclined to listen to the man and let him take credit for Morgan\u2019s elegant design.<\/p>\n
Julia Morgan’s El Campanil bell tower, circa 1905 (Special Collections, F. W. Olin Library, Northeastern University, Oakland)\u00a0<\/p>\n
This wasn\u2019t Morgan\u2019s first experience with sexism, but it confirmed that she wouldn\u2019t be able to avoid it throughout her trailblazing, 46-year career, as McNeill wrote in her essay \u201cJulia Morgan: Gender, Architecture, and Professional Style.\u201d<\/p>\n
The situation also demonstrated the ways that Morgan \u2014 a modest, diminutive woman out of the Victorian era, given to wearing prim suits and her hair pinned back into a bun \u2014 didn\u2019t conform to a popular idea of the genius American architect whose buildings define eras.<\/p>\n
Unlike her contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright or the fictional \u201cstarchitects\u201d imagined by Ayn Rand and in the film \u201cThe Brutalist,\u201d Morgan didn\u2019t come across as a swaggering, larger-than-life cultural figure. She wasn\u2019t given to displays of ego, superiority or a tortured personality, even if she privately faced professional and personal heartbreak.<\/p>\n
Morgan was seen as a \u201ctiny, fragile-looking woman,\u201d though she still managed to use a \u201cwonderful quiet power\u201d to command respect, one client once said. The breadth of her output also shows a master builder who helped define the look of the Bay Area as much as any architect.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/SJM-L-RAINYDAY-0128-03_7241ef.jpg\")
The Berkeley City Club is a Gothic\/Ramanesque hotel originally designed by architect Julia Morgan in the 1920s with a renowned swimming pool and cozy tavern called Morgan’s Bar and Lounge. (Trevor Johnson\/Courtesy of the Berkeley City Club)\u00a0<\/p>\n
After starting her own firm in 1904, she designed an estimated 700 projects throughout the Western United States in the first half of the 20th century. The first woman licensed to practice architecture in California, she gained the trust of philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst and her newspaper tycoon son, Willam Randolph Hearst, spending 28 years building his opulent Hearst Castle at San Simeon, considered one of America\u2019s great private houses.<\/p>\n
Morgan\u2019s output included an array of regular homes, schools, churches, office buildings and clubhouses, while she became a name brand by just getting on with the work. Unlike other \u201cstarchitects,\u201d she also didn\u2019t court media attention \u2014 and, most strikingly, she didn\u2019t crusade for a signature bold style or theory. Instead, in the service of her clients, she worked in various styles\u00a0 \u2013 Mission, Arts and Crafts, First Bay Tradition, neo-Classical, Gothic and the Spanish renaissance that inspired Hearst Castle.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, this deference to clients long led some critics to ignore her work, especially when modernism was in its ascendancy, writes biographer Victoria Kastner in \u201cJulia Morgan: An Intimate Portrait of The Trailblazing Architect.\u201d In a 1966 essay, Joan Didion seemed to deride the \u201cphantasmagoric barony\u201d of San Simeon, without naming Morgan, while later saying that her lack of a singular style suggested a lack of talent.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/SJM-MORGAN-03086.jpg\")
The Julia Morgan Performing Arts Center formerly Old St. John’s Presbyterian Church, was designated as an historic landmark by the city of Berkeley in 1975, under the city’s current Landmarks Preservation Ordinance. Measure LL on the Ballot calls for revising that ordinance. Undated photo by Betty Marvin\u00a0<\/p>\n
Whether Morgan\u2019s solicitousness was a function of her gender, McNeill argues that Morgan\u2019s genius came from her desire to create beautiful spaces that served clients\u2019 needs. \u201cActually, if you study her buildings, particularly alongside the stories of her clients, then you very much have a signature style, which was from the inside out, bottom up,\u201d McNeill said.<\/p>\n
Morgan was \u201ca sensitive person and sensitive artist, whose extraordinary attention to the surroundings and comfort of others have left us with a lasting legacy of hundreds of buildings, all of which are strong, useful and beautiful,\u201d adds Kastner, the former historian at Hearst Castle.<\/p>\n
Morgan\u2019s independent spirit and love for beautiful spaces were apparent early on. Born in 1874, she grew up in a prominent Oakland family, with a strong-minded mother, Eliza, who was proud of their well-appointed home. That home, near downtown, also boasted a lush garden, where Morgan could indulge in \u201cunlady-like\u201d pursuits with her four siblings, like turning somersaults and shooting arrows.<\/p>\n
Morgan showed an early talent for art and music and was encouraged to excel in school and go to college. But like other young women of her social class, she knew that she couldn\u2019t have a career if she got married.<\/p>\n
That Morgan didn\u2019t marry has made her the subject of speculation about whether she was a lesbian. Kastner said there\u2019s no documented evidence that she had romantic relationships, saying that her great love affair probably was with architecture.<\/p>\n
McNeill agrees that Morgan never wrote about any romantic relationships. But she noted that she had had multiple same-sex couples as clients and was empathetic to how, for example, a pair of co-habitating female doctors wanted their Berkeley home designed to accommodate their lifestyle.<\/p>\n
Morgan\u2019s trailblazing began as a teenager at UC Berkeley in 1890, where her older brother still escorted her to campus at the insistence of their parents. But she became the first woman to graduate with a degree in civil engineering and thereafter found work and a mentor in Bernard Maybeck, the pioneering architect of buildings in the \u201cwoodsy\u201d First Bay Tradition style. Maybeck also encouraged Morgan to study at his alma mater, the E\u0301cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.<\/p>\n
But gaining admission became a rigorous, multi-year process that involved apprenticing at an atelier, where her male colleagues regularly targeted her for frat-boy-style pranks. The E\u0301cole resisted welcoming female students, but was finally \u201cshamed\u201d into admitting Morgan after she scored exceedingly high on her third try on the entrance exam. She then had to cram about six years\u2019 work into three years in order to graduate by age 30.<\/p>\n
Morgan returned to the Bay Area in the midst of a building boom. Through Maybeck, she became acquainted with Phoebe Hearst and got early jobs working on buildings that the philanthropist funded at UC Berkeley, including supervising construction of the Greek Theatre.<\/p>\n
Morgan\u2019s design for Mills\u2019 El Campanil tower was intended to underscore the school\u2019s commitment to women\u2019s suffrage and other Progressive ideals. Fortunately, the sexist contractor didn\u2019t do lasting damage. In fact, Morgan got more ambitious work, both at Mills and elsewhere, after the tower and the nearby campus library that she designed both withstood the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.<\/p>\n
\u2018You know, she was a human being,\u201d Kastner said. \u201cThat the bell tower and the library both survived the earthquake must have been a moment of at least quiet triumph, knowing that this blowhard didn\u2019t know what he was talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the \u201cblowhard\u2019s\u201d name has been lost to history, Morgan responded to his meddling by adopting a professional style to navigate a male-dominated profession, McNeill said. For her next \u201cbig, big\u201d job, she successfully supervised hundreds of male workers across different trades to rebuild San Francisco\u2019s Fairmont Hotel after it was damaged by the earthquake.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe could swing a sledge hammer with the strength of a hefty man,\u201d a 1974 San Francisco Chronicle profile of Morgan said. \u201cShe spoke softly, but when she issued orders, it was with the finality of a Marine drill sergeant.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the Fairmont job, Morgan first got media attention for her \u201cQuarkerish\u201d plain-tailored jackets and skirts, according to McNeill. It\u2019s likely that Morgan wanted to exude professionalism, akin to male architects, with her unfussy fashion. Morgan also was known to wear large pockets to dispense with purses and trousers underneath her skirt if she had to move around a building site, but she still showed a feminine touch by wearing silk blouses from Paris.<\/p>\n
Morgan\u2019s career flourished at a time when women sought an increased presence in public life and spaces to organize on behalf of civic engagement, education, children\u2019s welfare and women\u2019s rights. She soon became the go-to architect for women\u2019s groups wanting clubhouses, from Saratoga to Sausalito. After she began working on Hearst\u2019s San Simeon estate, she also designed one of her favorite buildings \u2014 the Berkeley City Women\u2019s Club, a six-story \u201cfantasy\u201d of Romanesque, Gothic and Moorish architecture, with a serene indoor pool and dining and assembly rooms for a range of social and recreational programs benefitting girls and women.<\/p>\n
Morgan moreover enjoyed a decades-long collaboration with the YWCA, which provided safe housing, classes and community for young women who had left families, farms and even their home countries to work in \u00a0U.S. cities. For the YWCA, she designed more than 30 buildings in Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco\u2019s Chinatown as well as the Arts and Crafts-style buildings for the organization\u2019s Asilomar women\u2019s conference center in Pacific Grove.<\/p>\n
When she died at age 85 in 1957, she got no mention in a Life magazine story about Hearst Castle opening to the public that year as a glittery new attraction in the California State Parks system, Kastner wrote.<\/p>\n
But critics like San Francisco-based Alan Temko began to speak up, saying she deserved \u201cas high a place as does Mary Cassatt in American painting or Edith Wharton in American letters.\u201d In 2014, McNeill and other scholars succeeded in accomplishing another first on her behalf: the American Institute of Architects awarded her its first Gold Medal to a woman. Frank Gehry, one of North America\u2019s still living \u201cstarchitects,\u201d praised her as an innovator, while Kastner said, \u201cShe never stopped creating \u2026 and she was one of the 20th century\u2019s finest architects, yet she never lost her humility or desire to improve.\u201d<\/p>\n
Visit Julia Morgan\u2019s best Bay Area buildings<\/p>\n
Saratoga Foothill Club:<\/strong> Morgan designed the Arts and Crafts-style women\u2019s clubhouse in 1915, at the request of one of its founding members, who had been in the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority with the architect at UC Berkeley. The club regularly hosts public events, such as concerts and author discussions.\u00a0 https:\/\/saratogafoothillclub.org.<\/p>\n Berkeley City Club:<\/strong> Morgan\u2019s \u201cLittle Castle\u201d at 2315 Durant Ave. houses a members-only club, fitness center and swimming pool as well as a hotel and two restaurants, Julia\u2019s Restaurant and Morgan\u2019s Bar and Lounge, which are open to the public. On the fourth Sunday of every month, except December, the club also offers a public tour of Morgan\u2019s gorgeous architecture, www.berkeleycityclub.com.<\/a><\/p>\n Chapel of the Chimes:<\/strong> You can go on a virtual or in-person tour of this historic1909 columbarium on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, which Morgan designed with Spanish-Moorish Gothic flourishes and indoor gardens. https:\/\/oakland.chapelofthechimes.com.<\/a><\/p>\n The Berkeley Playhouse:<\/strong> One of Morgan\u2019s most important early projects was her design for the sanctuary of St. John\u2019s Presbyterian Church, considered one of the finest examples of the East Bay Arts and Crafts style. The building now houses the Berkeley Playhouse, which produces family musicals and provides theater education, 2640 College Avenue, Berkeley, https:\/\/tickets.berkeleyplayhouse.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n Originally Published: July 11, 2025 at 12:53 PM PDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For one of Julia Morgan\u2019s first commissions in 1903, the magnificent El Campanil bell tower at Mills College…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":58561,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[2513,1037,648,1032,15173,276,1033,12463,171,20240,2765,1370,1165,20909,1072,1164,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-58560","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-architecture","9":"tag-art","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-bay-area","13":"tag-california","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-editors-picks","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-home-and-garden","18":"tag-keywee","19":"tag-latest-headlines","20":"tag-lifestyle","21":"tag-pm-report","22":"tag-things-to-do","23":"tag-travel","24":"tag-united-states","25":"tag-unitedstates","26":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114838127581951338","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}