Julia Morgan

Julia Morgan
Morgan in 1926
Born
Julia Morgan

(1872-01-20)January 20, 1872
San Francisco, California, U.S.
DiedFebruary 2, 1957(1957-02-02) (aged 85)
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
OccupationArchitect
AwardsAIA Gold Medal
BuildingsLos Angeles Examiner Building
The YWCA in Chinatown, San Francisco
Riverside Art Museum
Asilomar Conference Grounds
ProjectsHearst Castle

Julia Morgan (January 20, 1872 – February 2, 1957) was an American architect and engineer.[1][2] She designed more than 700 buildings in California during a long and prolific career.[3] She is best known for her work on Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.[4]

Morgan was the first woman to be admitted to the architecture program at l'École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts[1] in Paris and the first woman architect licensed in California. She designed many edifices for institutions serving women and girls, including a number of buildings for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and Mills College.

In many of her structures, Morgan pioneered the aesthetic use of reinforced concrete, a material that proved to have superior seismic performance in the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes.[5] She embraced the Arts and Crafts Movement and used various producers of California pottery to adorn her buildings. She sought to reconcile classical and Craftsman, scholarship and innovation, formalism and whimsy.[6]

Julia Morgan was the first woman to receive the American Institute of Architects highest award, the AIA Gold Medal, posthumously in 2014.[7]

  1. ^ a b (fr) Agorha.inha, Biographie rédigée par Marie-Laure Crosnier Leconte Archived 2016-10-13 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Boutelle was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Erica Reder: "Julia Morgan was a local, in The New Fillmore, 1 February 2011. Retrieved 2015-10-23.
  4. ^ Filler, Martin. "Xanadu's Architect". Retrieved 3 September 2022. The mother of them all was Julia Morgan, the prolific San Francisco Bay Area architect who completed more than seven hundred buildings. {{cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help)
  5. ^ Littman, Julie (March 7, 2018). "Bay Area Architect Julia Morgan's Legacy Wasn't Just Hearst Castle". busnow.com. Retrieved 18 April 2019.
  6. ^ Starr, Kevin (1997). The dream endures: California enters the 1940s. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 55. ISBN 978-0195100792. OCLC 34546312.
  7. ^ Wendy Moonan: "AIA Awards 2014 Gold Medal to Julia Morgan", in the Architectural Record, 16 December 2013