![]() Her work caught the eye of Phoebe Randolph Hearst, a philanthropist and major benefactor of UC Berkeley, and it was through her patronage that Morgan embarked upon some of her most ambitious projects. A belltower Morgan had designed on the Mills College campus miraculously survived, which sent more clients flocking to Morgan’s firm in the building boom after the quake. In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake struck. Image courtesy of the Julia Morgan Collections, Environmental Designs Archives, University of California, BerkeleyĬatastrophe kick-started Morgan’s career. Julia Morgan’s plans for Berkeley City Club’s swimming pool. Even in death, she is still racking up firsts, as when she became the first woman to win the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2014. Morgan went on to become the first female student to earn an architecture degree at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, where she reported that her instructors “always seemed astonished if I do anything that shows the least intelligence.” Upon her return to California, she became the first woman to get an architecture license in the state. While studying at Berkeley, she encountered Bernard Maybeck, the famous Bay Area architect who would become her mentor and, later, her collaborator. Her younger brother chaperoned her commute by horse-drawn street car from their home in Oakland to the campus, until she moved into the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house, an experience of a communal women’s space that would shape the rest of her career-not as an engineer, but an architect. When she arrived at Berkeley in 1890 to study engineering, she was often the only woman in her math and engineering classes. But she was comfortable in places where she didn’t belong. If there were no pools, was it really summer at all?ĭespite her many pool designs, Morgan wasn’t much of a swimmer. As our summer sheltering in place draws to a close, for many it marks the first summer of their lives that they didn’t set foot in a swimming pool. Though Morgan is best known for her design of the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, not to mention numerous buildings on the Berkeley campus, it is her swimming pools that call out to me these days. Where there should be the echo of rhythmic splashing bouncing off tile, there’s a cavernous silence. There’s a swimming pool inside, its untouched water reflecting the aquamarine, cloistered arch ceiling above. The club, originally imagined as a space to foster women’s civic engagement, was designed by the famed architect Julia Morgan (B.A. In late June, visitors find the doors of Berkeley City Club locked, signs imploring would-be entrants to wear masks. But the architect who designed leisure spaces for women appeared to have none of her own.
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