My Word with Douglas E. Welch

Julia Morgan, American Architect – JSTOR Daily

The architecture of Julia Morgan is inseparable from the built environment of California. A prolific designer, her work helped define what Californian architecture was and continues to be. More than 700 of her designs were built during her 46-year career as a licensed architect. Her best-known work, Hearst Castle, designed for the media mogul William Randolph Hearst Sr., exhibits the wealth that many have sought in the state, whether during the Gold Rush of the mid-1800s or in today’s Silicon Valley. Morgan’s designs for Mills College in Oakland helped create a specifically Californian architectural vocabulary for a college that needed to develop its own identity between the competing worlds of the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. But overall, Morgan’s career was shaped by a legacy of “firsts” and by her own understanding of how a woman architect needed to perform in a male-dominated field.

Read Julia Morgan, American Architect – JSTOR Daily