Julia Morgan: An Intimate Portrait of the Trailblazing Architect

Victoria Kastner

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781797205816
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Künstlerbiographien

This new biography—featuring over 150 archival images and full-color photographs printed throughout—introduces Julia Morgan as both a pioneering architect and a captivating individual. Julia Morgan was a lifelong trailblazer. She was the first woman admitted to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the first licensed to practice architecture in California. Over the first half of the 20th century, she left an indelible mark on the American West. Of her remarkable 700 creations, the most iconic is Hearst Castle. Morgan spent thirty years constructing this opulent estate on the California coast for the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst—forging a lifelong friendship and creative partnership with him. Together, they built a spectacular and unequalled residence that once hosted the biggest stars of Hollywood's golden age, and that now welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.This compelling biography draws on interviews, letters, and Morgan's diaries, including never-before-seen reflections on faith, art, and her life experiences. Morgan's friendship with Hearst, her passion for California's landscape, her struggles with familial dementia, and her devotion to architecture reveal her to have been a singularly brilliant and determined artist.PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED CONTENT: Victoria Kastner has spent years compiling photographs, interviews, letters, drawings, and diaries—including material never published before—to create the first truly comprehensive portrait of this amazing woman.OVER 150 PHOTOGRAPHS: This book features over 150 photographs, printed throughout the text. These include both fascinating archival images and beautiful, full-color contemporary shots of Morgan's buildings.INSPIRING STORY: By exploring both Morgan's work and her life, Kastner weaves a captivating tale about courage, vision, and resilience. Julia Morgan forged a path for herself against the odds, and her story will inspire contemporary women and creatives.ARCHITECTURAL ICON: Julia Morgan created 700 buildings during her career, from hotels to churches to private homes. Born in San Francisco and trained in Paris, she developed a distinctive aesthetic that now defines certain regions of California. But only in the last twenty years has her contribution to architecture been fully recognized and celebrated. In 2014, the American Institute of Architects' posthumously awarded her its Gold Medal; she was the first female recipient.Perfect for: • History buffs
• Students, enthusiasts, and professional architects
• Aspiring creatives in all fields
• Feminists seeking role models
• Visitors to Hearst Castle and Morgan's other buildings
• Californians and visitors to California

CHAPTER ONEGLIMPSING THE FUTURE

In the spring of 1919, when Julia Morgan first visited San Simeon, she saw a quiet shoreline bordered by rolling hills. She didn’t realize she was looking at the site that would preoccupy her for nearly thirty years. It was a time of new beginnings. World War I had ended, and America was on the brink of the Roaring Twenties—a decade of unparalleled prosperity. Julia had traveled to San Simeon at the invitation of William Randolph Hearst, a prominent press lord whom she knew well. His mother, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, had introduced them fifteen years before, and Julia had already designed three projects for him: a lavish estate in Sausalito, north of San Francisco (which was never built); a modest cabin on the south rim of the Grand Canyon; and a large Mission-style headquarters for one of his newspapers, the Los Angeles Examiner.¹

Earlier that week, W. R., as Hearst was known, had walked into Julia’s office at the end of the day. Years later, her longtime employee Walter Steilberg related the conversation he’d overheard:

“I was at my table, after five o’clock. I often worked late because it was interesting work, whatever it was. I heard this voice, which I had heard before, but I didn’t realize what a high pitch Mr. Hearst’s voice had. For such a large man, it seemed to me his pitch was very high, so it carried. I heard him say to Miss Morgan, ‘I would like to build something up on the hill at San Simeon. I get tired of going up there and camping in tents. I’m getting a little old for that. I’d like to get something that would be more comfortable. The other day I was in Los Angeles, prowling around second-hand bookstores, as I often do, and I came upon this stack of books called Bungalow Books. Among them I saw one which has a picture—this isn’t what I want, but it gives you an idea of my thought about the thing, keeping it simple—of a Jappo-Swiss bungalow.’ He laughed at that, and so did she.”²

A simple project, W. R. promised. It would take her less than six months, from start to finish.

A few days later, therefore, Julia boarded a train for the eight-hour, overnight journey to San Simeon—the first of what would become her nearly six hundred trips. When her train pulled into the San Luis Obispo station just before sunrise, W. R. was waiting. He led her to a black Model T Ford idling nearby. It was driven by young Steve Zegar, who would eventually amass a fleet of taxis for driving Hearst’s guests the additional 40 miles north to San Simeon. They climbed into Steve’s Tin Lizzie—as these cars were affectionately known—which he eased onto the narrow, bumpy highway.³

W. R. and Julia never had a romance, but they were old friends. They had much in common—including a passion for European art and architecture—though a casual observer would have been more struck by their dissimilarities. Hearst was fifty-six in 1919: a tall, stout man whom actor David Niven once described as “shaped like an avocado.”⁴ He typically wore a finely woven Panama hat, a light-colored linen suit, a necktie of startling brightness, and two-toned wingtip shoes. He had a large head and large features: big hands, big blue eyes, and a long aquiline nose. Surprisingly, he had a high voice. Many years before, the caustic writer Ambrose Bierce—whose column was syndicated in Hearst’s newspapers—described his incongruous tenor as sounding like “the fragrance of violets, made audible.”⁵ Nevertheless, W. R. was a lively and amusing conversationalist.

William Randolph Hearst, who in 1919 approached Julia about a six-month building project at San Simeon. Construction lasted for twenty-eight years.

Julia was forty-seven, very slender, and not much more than 5 feet tall. Her large eyes were framed by round dark-rimmed glasses. She typically wore a navy blue or charcoal gray woolen suit with a long skirt and matching jacket, a crisp, high-collared white shirt, and a bell-shaped hat pinned over her upswept hair. Though slight and soft-spoken, with just a trace of a lisp, she nevertheless carried herself with quiet authority.

From 1900 to 1950, Julia forged an unprecedented career. There were other female architects working in America during that time, but she was the only one who broke through the societal constraints that limited others to designing mostly private homes and women’s clubs. In a profession that relied on social connections as well as ability, Julia competed on an equal footing with her male contemporaries, few of whom could match her energy or her skill. One of her employees described her: “A tiny woman, gentle yet formidable. Her manner was simple. Pleasant, yet rather reserved. Eyes very direct. A low clear voice. I’ve seen strong men tremble when she said: ‘No, it won’t do.’”⁶

As was fairly common among the career women of her day, Julia never married (nor is there any evidence that she had romantic relationships with other women). She devoted her life to architecture, but never became a prudish old maid. Her large social circle included family members, childhood friends, trusted employees, and admiring clients. One of her closest friendships was with the man she rode alongside on that day in 1919, and W. R. felt the same way about her.

Their conversation must have flowed easily on that two-hour drive, as they passed rugged green hillsides dotted with wildflowers and caught occasional glimpses of the windswept coastline. W. R. likely pointed out all the local ranches, where they saw far more cows than people; he knew the region well, having spent time there since his early childhood. They finally pulled up to a large white Victorian house, beyond which the road ended. Julia could see the start of a narrow trail, where two saddled horses stood waiting. This was a most unwelcome sight.

While they shared a love for the California landscape, they viewed it very differently. Julia was born in San Francisco in 1872 as one of five children, all of whom had a comfortable, upper-middle-class childhood, funded by her mother Eliza’s family fortune. The Morgans moved to Oakland in 1874, when the city truly was an “Oak-Land” dotted with Quercus agrifolia, the native Coast Live Oaks that grew above California’s shoreline and within its shady canyons. As a child, Julia had climbed the oaks that grew in her neighborhood, and had joined her family on summer camping trips to Monterey, Santa Cruz, and Catalina (monthlong adventures that made such an impression on her that she reminisced in her diary about certain stargazing and tidepooling trips a full fifty years later). But as an adult, though she loved the region’s scenery, she admired it from a distance.⁷

W. R. was just the opposite. He was born in San Francisco in 1863, the only child of George Hearst, who ranked among the nation’s wealthiest miners, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who was one of its most generous philanthropists. In 1865, the Hearsts took the money from George’s stake in Nevada’s Comstock Lode—the richest vein of silver in the country—and invested it in 48,000 acres of ranchland along San Simeon Bay, a quiet natural harbor 250 miles south of San Francisco. Its nearby mountaintop became a favorite summer campsite, where the weather stayed sunny even when the coastline was blanketed in fog. W. R. learned to ride a horse when he was two, and later joked that as a boy, he found the climb up this mountain so steep that he only managed to keep from falling off by hanging onto the horse’s tail. Camp Hill, as they christened it, remained his favorite place in the world. It was too remote for a year-round home, but he escaped there as often as he could, to enjoy its dazzling views and cherish his happy memories. When he and his wife, Millicent, camped there with their five young sons in 1917, he wrote to Phoebe: “I love this ranch. It is wonderful. I love the sea and I love the mountains, and the hollows in the hills and the shady places in the creeks, and the fine old oaks—and even the hot brushy hillsides, full of quail, and the canyons, full of deer.… I would rather spend a month at the ranch than anyplace in the world.”⁸

San Simeon, located midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, provided the dramatic setting where Julia and W. R. built the estate he christened La Cuesta Encantada (The Enchanted Hill).

Riding a horse up a narrow, 6-mile trail was therefore second nature to W. R., who had been known to downplay the distances and difficulties of horseback rides before. He and Millicent had honeymooned in California in 1903. She was eager to see San Simeon, and anxious to establish her rustic credentials—which were few, since she was a twenty-year-old vaudeville dancer who had grown up in New York City. The forty-year-old Hearst assured her that San Simeon was very close to Monterey. In fact, it was 100 miles south, at the end of a rough overland trail. Many years later, Millicent could still recall that arduous ride: “One night, we slept in a cave that was full of bones and had a funny smell. An old codger we ran into later on the trail laughed at us [and] told us it was a well-known mountain lion den! The couple we started out with turned back after two days, but I stuck it out.… W. R. had told me it was a short ride!”⁹

On that spring morning in 1919, Julia looked sternly at the horses, then sternly back at Hearst. In a tone that brooked no argument, she informed him that she didn’t ride. Furthermore, she didn’t intend to learn. An ingenious solution seemed necessary. As Zegar tells it, he spotted some cowboys riding nearby and called them over. W. R. mounted his horse, but Julia remained inside the taxi, which Zegar drove straight up the steep grassy hillside. He gunned the engine and tried to avoid the largest rock outcroppings as they climbed from sea level to an elevation of 1,600 feet. The cowboys rode alongside, roping the taxi’s bumper so they could pull it over the impassable stretches.¹⁰

It was a bizarre beginning to an incomparable project, over which Julia would preside in its entirety: as architect, interior designer, landscape architect, personnel manager, and overseer of every detail, from shipping enormous quantities of construction materials to housing the hundreds of exotic animals in Hearst’s private zoo. She must have spent that long first day clambering over boulders, keeping a cautious eye out for rattlesnakes and scorpions, and marveling at the mountain and ocean vistas that stretched for hundreds of miles. As she listened to W. R. bubble over with ideas, she soon realized that his six-month construction estimate was completely impossible. By the time Steve had inched his taxi down the hill and completed the two-hour drive to the train station, it was late in the evening. Julia requested an upper berth, since she was small enough to sit upright and work on a lap board.¹¹ As her train clattered through the night, she sketched the first of what would become San Simeon’s ten thousand drawings.

CHAPTER TWOA CALIFORNIA CHILDHOOD

Julia was a lifelong trailblazer. In 1898, she was the first woman admitted to study architecture at the world-renowned École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (found...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Glimpsing the Future
• Chapter 2: A California Childhood
• Chapter 3: Setting a Course
• Chapter 4: Really Mine Now
• Chapter 5: Making a Name
• Chapter 6: Running the Office
• Chapter 7: A Little Something
• Chapter 8: A Widening Scope
• Chapter 9: Descending Fortunes
• Chapter 10: Out from the Shadows
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Selected Bibliography
• Image Credits
• Index
• About the Authors