Morgan, Julia, 1872–1957, American architect, b. San Francisco, B.S. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1894. Trained as an engineer, she became the first woman to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (grad. 1902) and to be a licensed architect in California, setting up her practice in 1904. One of her first projects, a reinforced-concrete campanile in the Mission style at Mills College (1904) withstood the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and helped establish her reputation, as did her rebuilding of San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel (1907). Designing some 800 buildings, including educational facilities, churches, office buildings, and private residences, in a wide variety of styles, she became known for her California projects, many of them in the San Fransisco Bay area. Her most famous building is William Randolph Hearst's lavish San Simeon castle. She created a number of other buildings for Hearst, including the Los Angeles Examiner Building (1915) and Wyntoon (1924–43), a family retreat modeled after a Bavarian village. She also designed a number of centers for the YWCA, another major client, and other buildings at Mills College.
See biographies by S. H. Boutelle (1988), C. James (1990), and G. Wadsworth (1990); studies by T. Coffman (2003) and M. Wilson (2012).
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