Finding Julia Morgan

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
For someone who’s devoted a good portion of his life telling stories about architecture and design, I haven’t given a ton of airtime to the stories of individual architects. I tend to gravitate towards the big ideas and the small stories of design, and not the achievements of great people. However, some individuals are so remarkable and undeniable, they demand biographical treatment. Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Revere Williams, Isamu Noguchi, and the subject of this episode, Julia Morgan. As a Northern Californian, I am very familiar with Julia Morgan, but many people are not. In a new podcast called “New Angle: Voice” from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation is here to remedy that by telling the stories of women architects that have been egregiously omitted and overlooked — starting with Julia Morgan. Here to tell us her story is the host of “New Angle: Voice,” Cynthia Kracauer.

Cynthia Kracauer:
The first woman to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1890s, the first licensed architect in California, with over 700 building designs to her credit, Julia Morgan should need no introduction. But in reality, it is only in the past few decades that her career has received the recognition and celebration it deserves. For years, she was overlooked. Even at Hearst Castle, her most famous work, she was overshadowed. With the 20 some years of dedication to building the landmark, often reduced to, “Oh, some woman designed this place,” when anyone on tours asked about the architect. Little was known about her until a few committed historians and architects set out to change that starting in the 1970s.

Cynthia Kracauer:
In this episode, “Finding Julia Morgan,” we hear the story of this pioneering, groundbreaking architect, and the equally captivating stories behind those who work tirelessly to bring her legacy into the light it deserves.

Julia Donoho:
I studied architecture at Princeton, and I never heard her name. Until I came out to Berkeley, and my brother says, “Come see the Hearst Mining Building.” My brother and sister-in-law forced me to go to Hearst Castle. “You have to go to Hearst Castle.” I thought, “Oh, this is going to be horrible pastiche, a mishmash of stuff thrown together.” When I got down there, I was completely delighted.

Victoria Kastner:
The first time I heard her name was when I went on a tour of the castle. That was in 1976, even though I had grown up around her buildings. What they said when we were on the tour, they said, “A woman built Hearst Castle, but we don’t know anything about her.” It was astonishing. That was just too tantalizing a problem. It was at that point that I left my freshman composition students after the end of the quarter and started to work at Hearst Castle. I never dreamed that the story of her life would be as inspiring as it is, and I’ve studied her for 30 years.

Victoria Kastner:
I’m Victoria Kastner. I was for many decades the official historian at Hearst Castle. I’ve written three books on the history of Hearst Castle, and I’m coming out with the first personal biography of Julia Morgan. It’s titled “Julia Morgan: An Intimate Biography of the Trailblazing Architect.”

Alexandra Lange:
In 2018, an editor at “The New York Times” emailed asking me if I wanted to write an obituary of Julia Morgan, whom he referred to as the “Hearst Castle architect.” I wrote back immediately and said, “I would love to.” I’d actually checked on some other female architects to see if the Times had covered their deaths, but it never occurred to me to check on Morgan.

Alexandra Lange:
I’m Alexandra Lange. I’m a design critic, and I wrote the “Overlooked” obituary for Julia Morgan in “The New York Times.” The Overlooked series was initiated by the paper because they realized that their obituary section, like much of published American history, skewed very white and very male. There were a lot of people overlooked the first time through with Julia Morgan serving as an amazing example of that.

Karen McNeill:
There’s a big burden placed on Julia Morgan to be absolutely everything because she was the first in so many things. I’m Karen McNeill. I’m a historian and longtime scholar of Julia Morgan.

Karen McNeill:
Julia Morgan graduated with a degree in civil engineering in 1894 from UC Berkeley. And that was the closest she could come to any sort of architectural training in California. Around the time she graduated from Berkeley, she met Bernard Maybeck. He was a charismatic character. He’d studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. He wore capes and was vegetarian, very bohemian character. He taught the first architecture courses at Berkeley beginning in the fall of 1894, just after Morgan graduated. And he invited her to join a group of young men to seminars at his home and basically, all of them went off to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, which at the time, it was the most important architectural school in the world. Bernard Maybeck, he encouraged her to go to Paris, and she arrived there in June of 1896.

Karen McNeill:
This was weeks after the faculty had decided, “Yes, women, you may attend classes at the École.” That decision came about because a group of women unionized. It was the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors. And they fought a seven-year battle against the École just for the right to take courses. So Morgan landed in Paris right when the doors opened. She got to know these women, and they very much supported her. They kept organizing, they kept pressuring the faculty to allow women to take entrance examinations. And finally, the faculty said, “Okay, ladies, you can take the entrance examinations.” Her first opportunity was in July, only five weeks after the examinations had been opened to women.

Karen McNeill:
She was actually a figure of fascination. Just as she was taking the exams, it was already in the papers. This young American woman wanted to pursue architecture. How bizarre was that? Long story short, she failed, but she took that in stride. Everybody failed at least once. These entrance examinations, especially for architecture, were extraordinarily difficult. In October of 1898, she took the examinations for a fourth time. She was 13th out of almost 400 applicants. So now she’s 27 years old, and she had until the age of 30 to accomplish whatever she was going to accomplish.

Julia Donoho:
On a rainy day, she would sit inside a church and sketch. On the weekends, she would travel, paying attention to form, the relationship of buildings, relationship of light and space and color, and she just got better and better.

Julia Donoho:
I’m Julia Donoho. I’m an architect and an attorney and general contractor, and I served on the National Board of the American Institute of Architects. I was in a position to nominate architects for the Gold Medal in Architecture, and that’s how I got involved with Julia Morgan.

Karen McNeill:
Morgan met Phoebe Hearst in Paris when Phoebe was visiting Paris to meet all these architects who were competing to design the new campus for the University of California. Phoebe took a shine to Morgan, and when she came back to California, Phoebe was ready to employ Morgan, and she hired her to remodel her estate out in Pleasanton, which is east of San Francisco, and that project went on for years. They must have gotten on like a house on fire. I mean they just had this enduring working relationship.

Karen Fiene:
What we’re looking at now is the bell tower, which was built in 1904. And then around the oval from that is the Margaret Carnegie Library built in 1906. So to the left of the door, it says, “Designed by Architect Julia Morgan. Dedicated by Susan T. Mills, April 14th, 1904.” And then on the other side, it says, “El Campanil is the first concrete reinforced structure built west of the Mississippi.” Having a clock on a tower seems pretty mundane now. But back then, that was kind of a big deal. It was kind of like the iPhone of its day — very futuristic, forward-looking thing that we would have a bell tower with a clock.

Karen Fiene:
I’m Karen Fiene. I’m the current director of facilities and the campus architect, and we are about to take a tour of Julie Morgan’s five remaining buildings on campus.

Karen McNeill:
Morgan had suffered through a lot of professional abuse during the construction of the Campanil. She was in this battle of wills and egos with the builder, a guy named Bernard Ransome. His father was the leading patent inventor, reinforced concrete guru in the United States. And so then Bernard Ransome saw himself as sort of the heir apparent. He did not like working for this young woman who wanted to call herself an architect. He had gotten top billing at the ceremonies, at the unveiling of the Campanil. There’s this whole drama behind it.

Karen McNeill:
The 1906 earthquake and fires decimated San Francisco as well as damaged significant portions of surrounding areas. One structure that did not fall and was not damaged in any way was the Campanil at Mills College. When the Campanil survived the earthquake without a scratch, it wasn’t Ransome who was remembered, it was Morgan. So Julia Morgan’s daring reinforced concrete Campanil at Mills College survived. Reinforced concrete had been something, a source of debate. It was mostly associated with industrial infrastructure really at the time, but Morgan saw the potential for beauty in it because of its infinite plasticity.

Karen Fiene:
Steel does well in tension and the concrete does well in compression, and so the two together make a really strong bond, and concrete gets stronger as it ages. It still performed remarkably well. And then they would pour the concrete in what they called …

Karen McNeill:
When she designed the Campanil, she was really breaking some boundaries. So many architects who had been hesitant in using reinforced concrete for pretty buildings, they went to Mills College. It became like this laboratory to understand how reinforced concrete could be used. That then really catapulted Julia Morgan’s reputation. This is not just a novelty act. Julia Morgan is a serious architect, an engineer who designs not just pretty buildings, but buildings that will last for generations, and an architect who experiments with the most modern construction technologies to achieve these buildings.

Julia Donoho:
She launched her career, and shortly after she launched her career, the earthquake happened.

Victoria Kastner:
The city first fell down, and then burned up. 400,000 people were homeless. Something like 30,000 buildings were destroyed.

Julia Donoho:
The fire took off through the whole city. They said it was like Pompeii. Julia Morgan was determined to bring it back.

Victoria Kastner:
There was lots of good work for architects afterwards and Julia redesigned, re-engineered the Fairmont Hotel, which had been a brand new building. It had been opened for a month or something before the earthquake.

Julia Donoho:
The whole world was in ruins and she was the only one who knew anything about reinforced concrete. They tried to bring some East Coast architects who might know reinforcing, but the guy who was supposed to come got killed in a duel so then they saw the Mills College Tower sitting there and they were like, “Wow, that’s reinforced concrete and it didn’t fall down.” She’d told all of San Francisco, “We can rebuild the city.” She rebuilt the Fairmont in one year. They had the biggest party. A lot of times, I compare her to Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t understand reinforced concrete. If you go to Fallingwater, everything looks like it’s made out of clay ’cause it’s sagging. Concrete is not supposed to sag. Julia Morgan’s concrete does not sag. Frank Lloyd Wright’s concrete sags ’cause he didn’t really understand engineering, but not hers. Hers is very strong and true. To this day, a lot of her buildings are still standing because she really was an engineer. She knew what she was doing.

Victoria Kastner:
When WR Hearst approached her after he’d received his inheritance, which was in the spring of 1919, she knew him well and she knew the kind of client he was. She knew that he was going to be involved in absolutely every decision and he wanted to know about every little detail because he loved it. And so when he explained to her that he was tired of camping in tents and thought he was getting a little old for that and he was thinking of building a little something, which is exactly what he said because it was overheard by one of her employees who was working late and told that story. He said, “Mr. Hearst had a high voice so it carried.”

Victoria Kastner:
It was the end of the day and Mr. Hearst said, “Well, I was browsing through Los Angeles bookstores as I’m prone to do and I found these bungalow books. And I saw one that I liked.” And he turned the page, it was labeled Japo-Swiss bungalow. Walter Steilberg said he laughed at that and so did she. Walter Steilberg, he was an engineer and he’s very involved in the early engineering, particularly at San Simeon. So he would look up at and say, “Well, there’s the Japo-Swiss bungalow.” It was going to be a modest six months, a single cottage, be over in no time. And then Walter also said, “But within a month, we were going on the grand scale,” and that’s the scale at which WR Hearst operated.

Victoria Kastner:
He met her down at the train station in San Luis Obispo. Steve Zegar was a young man who had a Tin Lizzie and Hearst had hired him. They were, just the two of them at dawn, Tin Lizzie had to drive what today is an hour almost, and back then was certainly two or more. They drove through the metropolis of San Simeon, which back then in 1919 was two hotels and a couple stores and that was really it. They got to the end of the road where there’s a Victorian ranch house and that was where the road stopped.

Victoria Kastner:
Julia looked over and sitting at the end at the start of a dusty trail were two saddled horses. She was 47. She was wearing I’m sure what she always wore. She had a very practical wardrobe for her work and it really was based on something. It was based on the French walking suit. It was imminently practical, but not for horseback riding and she looked at him and she said, “I don’t know how to ride. And furthermore, I don’t intend to learn.” And WR had been going up that hill since he was two. In 1865, his father bought that land.

Victoria Kastner:
So what they did, Zegar saw these cowboys riding by and he called them over. Hearst got on the horse and Julia stayed in the taxi in the backseat, and Zegar gunned the engine and drove it up the hill, 1600-foot elevation where rocks — beautiful, enormous, rugged size — burst out of the landscape. It’s steep and it’s far. The cowboys rode alongside. They roped the bumper and pulled the taxi over the really difficult spots if there was slippery grass or if he was having a hard time getting around there. And that was her first trip to San Simeon. JM wasn’t just the architect. She was also the interior designer and the landscape architect and, essentially, the contractor for the entire job and made an astonishing 568 train trips from San Francisco down to San Simeon.

Karen McNeill:
Her schedule was completely exhausting. She would get on the train on Friday, take the train down to San Luis Obispo. She’d be notorious for working on the train.

Victoria Kastner:
She asked for an upper berth because she was, as you know, diminutive. She’s about 5’2″ I think with the assistance of a hat, maybe even 5’3″ with the assistance of a hat. That hat was important. She could sit upright and draw while the train was heading south, eight hours one way and a two- to two-and-a-half-hour drive from the train station in San Luis Obispo to San Simeon.

Karen McNeill:
She would get a cab and she had a regular driver who would take her to San Simeon, which to this day is still like a 45-minute drive from San Luis Obispo. The roads were smaller — the cars, the wheels, the tires were much smaller then.

Victoria Kastner:
She wrote to Hearst, “It was one continuous skid.” She said, “If you want to break every bone in your worst enemy’s body, treat ’em to the trip after a bad rain.”

Karen McNeill:
She would get there very late. She would spend the weekend at San Simeon, work out whatever issues needed to be worked out on-site there.

Victoria Kastner:
She’d spend the whole day Sunday and meet with Hearst. WR generally came down one or two times a month. On Sunday night, she’d do the whole thing in reverse. One of her draftsmen, he said, “I went along with her and we got back to San Francisco on Monday morning and I was exhausted, and she walked right to the office and went to work.” And that’s how she did it.

Victoria Kastner:
Hearst Castle, it was a very romantic place. It was the site of great love story between Hearst and his companion, Marion Davies. It was a love story about his childhood and his parents and California, and they shared that. And she was kind of the on-site color commentator. It might be 2 in the morning in New York and he’s trying to get an edition out – because that’s when he worked – as a newspaperman. He could send a telegram. “Dear Ms. Morgan, I’ve just bought some columns. Let’s talk about where to put them at the ranch.” And she could write to him about the beautiful sunsets or the alligator pears, which is what they called avocados back then, and how the sunset was blue beyond imagining.

Victoria Kastner:
So one of her employees said she was the only person who never took advantage of him, who never wanted anything from him. And he, of course, was completely and utterly respectful of her and supportive of her authority. This was a collaboration between two remarkable people. They had a long association and in many ways, I would even say a romantic one as long as it is clear that I’m talking about a platonic romance — the romance of two, as Walter Steilberg who was one of her top employees said, “Two long-distance dreamers.” He watched them in the refectory, which is San Simeon’s dining room, 72 feet long and 28 feet high and 27 feet wide. He said, “The rest of us could’ve been a million miles away. He was talking and she was talking and they were drawing,” and he said, “And you could almost see the spark travel from one to the other of their foreheads because these two very different people just clicked.” It was remarkable, the closeness that they had.

Karen McNeill:
Julia Morgan’s career was as dependent upon the California Women’s Movement as the California Women’s Movement benefited from Julia Morgan. By the time Morgan came back to the United States, by the time she got back from Paris, California women were really gearing up into all sorts of organized activities, and her generation was leading the way. She was 30, her friends were in their 30s. They had time, money and education to organize around all different things — suffrage, women in higher education, urban development and beautification, juvenile delinquency, and so you end up with Julia Morgan designing a landscape for those women, this built evidence of a social history and a gender history from the early 20th century. She had a lot of friends who were involved with the Young Women’s Christian Association or the YWCA.

Victoria Kastner:
YWCAs were essential and she literally built more than a dozen.

Karen McNeill:
It was one of the most important organizations nationwide to create social, educational, recreational and residential facilities targeted towards young single women who were moving to the city for the first time to work.

Victoria Kastner:
She mentored via her women’s clubs and YWCAs, which were central to young women leaving their family farms and coming into cities to allow them to work, but not have to live in an unsavory boarding house full of traveling salesmen or be in unsafe conditions.

Karen McNeill:
There was this moral control, social control element to the YWCA combined with the growth of women’s opportunities outside of the home to earn money and independence. It was before marriage.

[SINGING]:
“San Luis Obispo, San Luis Obispo. The best city that I know.”

Vicki Carroll:
I’m Vicki Carroll and I’m the president of the Monday Club and the Monday Clubhouse Conservancy in San Luis Obispo.

Jennifer Alderman:
I’m Jennifer Alderman. I am the treasurer of the Monday Club and the Monday Clubhouse Conservancy and also a past president.

Vicki Carroll:
It is a Julia Morgan-designed building built by the women who own the Monday Club.

Victoria Kastner:
She would do whatever was best for the club and whatever the club could afford, and the club could afford a lot more because she often took no profit whatsoever and donated her services and that’s what she did at the Monday Club in San Luis Obispo.

Vicki Carroll:
The president at the time lived next door to Mr. Zegar who was the taxi driver who would pick Ms. Morgan up in San Luis Obispo and take her to the castle. So our president at the time asked Mr. Zegar if he would speak with Julia about perhaps designing a clubhouse for us, and she agreed to do that and had communications with the club members and settled on a fee of $800. And then she decided that if the members of the Monday Club would house her when she came into town because if you think back to those times in late ’20s, it wasn’t really proper for a woman to stay in a hotel by herself, so our Monday Club members housed Ms. Morgan before she went to the castle the next day. She’d arrive on the train so she’d have to spend the night and she waived the $800 fee.

Vicki Carroll:
Our membership at one time was over 300 so we have photos of this room packed to the gills. This social space was used a lot because there really wasn’t the opportunity for people to go out and socialize other than in bars. San Luis Obispo was still relatively small so they would hold concerts here, plays. From the photos, it looks like they had a lot of fun.

Justin Hoover:
This historic building designed by renowned architect Julia Morgan first opened its doors to the Chinese Young Women’s Christian Association, YWCA in 1932.

Justin Hoover:
My name is Justin Hoover. I’m the executive director of the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco. We were founded in 1963 as a society dedicated to telling the stories of the Chinese in America.

Justin Hoover:
During the ’30s, we’re still in the exclusionary period and so in 1882 was the Exclusion Act and what that meant was the Chinese weren’t allowed in the United States unless they were doing certain vocations and professions. During that period, you get this goal for the Chinese in America to fit in and to do that, the Chinese adapted a kind of hybrid model of life where you get these Chinatowns that looked Chinese-y, and I’m going to use that word ’cause it’s kind of cliché of Chinese that maybe hearkens back to the homeland or to architectural details that are commonly understood and recognized as Chinese, maybe divorcing them from the significance of the original façade or edifice or structure on which they were used.

Justin Hoover:
The use of architectural detail in that way, today, we see that as a sense of Orientalism, but at the time, it was a way for people of the Chinese culture to share their culture with Westerners in America and in that way, find a place where they could hybridize their culture and be accepted, and not fear persecution. The Chinese in America were scared at the time and they still are in many ways today. We’re still facing violence against Chinese and Asians.

Justin Hoover:
The space originally was a YWCA. In the ’30s when it was built, there were not a lot of places where women in San Francisco, especially Chinese women, could feel comfortable. And so the space was designed as a residency and a physical location for community and gathering where they could learn English. They could dance. They could have exercise. They could have community. I’d imagine this would be a bustling place, be a place that’s safe for women. I think there’d be a lot of fun being had here. I’d like to hope that you’d hear a lot of noises of people laughing and having a good time.

Alexandra Lange:
She closed down her office when she was losing clients and slipping into ill health and then, she just lived largely alone in her apartment in Oakland. There are a few people who are still alive that knew her personally and said she just lived this quiet life and then, kind of slipped out of it.

Alexandra Lange:
She retired in 1951, but then she didn’t die until 1957. I think a combination of the Great Depression and the war, which really set back the architecture industry for a significant amount of time, and the stylistic changes post-war, there comes a point in the leading edge of American architecture where everyone wants it to be about modern forms — casting off the old, stripping out the ornament — and that was not something that Julia Morgan ever really did. And then her own ill health meant that she spent the last two decades of her life slipping from the center of architecture.

Alexandra Lange:
When she died, it was written up in the “San Francisco Examiner.” She was known in her city, but it wasn’t like her work was in the air, it wasn’t like people were writing about it as if it was exciting. The new interest had shifted elsewhere.

Alexandra Lange:
There was this whole feminist architecture history moment in the ’70s and early ’80s that I think Morgan benefited from, then like many things went kind of out of fashion for a while and I think it’s coming back now. So it’s interesting to look at Morgan as the beneficiary of this early uprising of women’s power that then goes underground particularly in the post-war era and then rises again in the ’70s. And so the times in which people are interested in Morgan also go along with the times in which there’s a new interest in women and power and expanding the canon in architecture history.

Alexandra Lange:
There’s a really famous exhibition that was held at the Brooklyn Museum during this time and I think that was the first time people said “Oh, wait a second. Where are the women architects?” Yes, we’re trying to increase the number of women in architecture now, but it’s really helpful to know that there are founding mothers. Let’s go find them. Let’s go look for their history.

Interviewer:
“… on KNDR 68. Now I really want to talk with Sara Boutelle. I mean I want to talk with her so bad that if we can’t make a connection here, I’m just going to send a limo for you. Hello, Sara.”

Sara Holmes Boutelle:
“I’m right here.”

Interviewer:
“Oh, good. I’m so glad. Sara Boutelle has written a book as we just mentioned if you just turned on the radio, “Julia Morgan, Architect.” It’s a beautiful, beautiful …”

Victoria Kastner:
There was not very much material and, of course, Sara Holmes Boutelle really was indefatigable. She worked 14 years on her biography, “Julia Morgan, Architect.” She was a one-woman marching band. And she was in her middle 60s so she had kind of Julia Morgan-rate energy.

Interviewer:
“How did your fascination with Julia Morgan begin, Sara?”

Sara Holmes Boutelle:
“It began, as it does with many people, when I went to the Hearst Castle. I had no idea that it was so beautiful and then I discovered it was by a woman architect. And I went everywhere trying to find a book about her or some material about her and since there wasn’t any, finally, it struck me that I had to ferret it out on my own, finding the buildings and finding the information about Julia Morgan. I’ve been on the job for 14 years, seems like a long time to do any one thing. But it was great fun the whole time because it was partly like detective work.”

Karen McNeill:
She went around, she knocked on doors to find clients. She got in touch with the family. She went to organizations. She did a tremendous amount of work.

Julia Donoho:
She devoted her life to it, $30,000 of her own money, tremendous amount of effort on her behalf, and it has created the way for other people to latch on like I did.

Sara Holmes Boutelle:
“Her work was very successful while she was working, but then the period just a little before her death, the modernist international style took over and her work along with that of many other California architects was sort of in the shade so that it wasn’t only her efforts to remain private, but people’s lack of interest in California architecture that made her unknown”.

Roman Mars:
The fight for getting Julia Morgan the recognition she deserves, after this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
Here again is finding “Julia Morgan from New Angle: Voice.”

Beverly Willis:
“Would you believe that as recently as 1978 when we were discussing the Equal Rights Amendment that the president of AIA declared to the press that he would never hire a woman architect? On behalf of these women practitioners, I express our collective and respectful anger.”

Julia Donoho:
I had met Beverly Willis in 2009 at the First Women’s Leadership Summit in Chicago. She had given a presentation and said, “Why can’t the AIA give a gold medal to a woman?” I remember thinking well, that’s silly. You don’t just give a gold medal to a person. They earn a gold medal. It’s a process I’m sure.

Julia Donoho:
Then a couple years in 2012, I’m sitting and watching and there’s three men there and I’m like, “Oh, this is how you do it.” This is the room where they vote on the gold medal. I’m like, “Well, who gets to nominate you to be one of those three people?” It’s not like a lottery thing, you say, “Dear God, give me a gold medal, give me a gold medal.” And God says, “Of you want to win the lottery, you have to buy a ticket.” So I sat there and said, “Well, how do you buy a ticket to be one of those three people?” You have to make a portfolio and you have to submit the portfolio and the portfolio has to demonstrate a body of work that’s of significant stature to be worthy of the gold medal. So how do you do that? You look at the guy who’s winning this year and say, “How can I find a woman who has a portfolio like that?”

Julia Donoho:
I started scouring all the books. I sat there and I read. I was like, “I can nominate someone,” and I was like, “Who could I nominate?” And I spent two weeks going through this process of calling on my friends and saying, “Who could we nominate?” I would say, “What about this person?” And then they’d say, “Too young. They’ll get it someday.” Or “What about this person?” “No, not enough work,” or whatever. So then I just sat down with some books of women architects and I started going through them. The only one that had a portfolio that was significant enough was Julia Morgan.

Julia Donoho:
I said, “Well, I’ll just call up Helene Combs Dreiling,” who’s president and her first week in office, I called her up and said, “Can I bring Julia Morgan forward for the AIA Gold Medal?” She wrote back and said, “Well, that would be fabulous.” And I never knew anything about her until this. And I told my daughter for the next six months, she could sit at the kitchen table and do her homework while I would sit at the dining table and do my homework, and that was what we would be doing. We spent everything from January until June when I got this portfolio done. I went to work, but I came home at night and that’s all I did was Julia Morgan.

Julia Donoho:
I just brought her up in every conversation. Oh, they were talking about disaster. “Oh, did you know that Julia Morgan saved the city of San Francisco from total disaster by knowing about reinforced concrete?” Oh, did you see the watercolors so and so did? “Did you know that Julia Morgan was an excellent watercolorist? She learned that at École des Beaux-Arts ’cause none of the guys would with her and so she went off into the landscape and drew things like Monet.”

Julia Donoho:
When I finally left the board, I remember Bruce Sekanick said to me, “When are you going to stop talking about Julia Morgan?” And I said, “I will stop talking about Julia Morgan,” — I tried to bring her in every conversation — “I will stop talking about her when you talk about her more than I do.” So I tried to bring her into every conversation in that sort of way to really just open the mental thinking and I really worked the room.

Julia Donoho:
By then, I understood that I need to have really nice letters from really important people. We wrote to Maria Shriver and asked her to write a letter and she agreed. Senator Feinstein, she lives across the street from a Julia Morgan building.

ARCHIVAL TAPE:
“At a time when there were few women in the professional world when we weren’t even allowed to vote, Julia was a real trailblazer.”

Julia Donoho:
I went to see Michael Graves. He said, “Oh, yeah. Sure, I’ll help you.” I got Frank Gehry as well because Maria Shriver, turns out, she has this very strong relationship with him and she can call him up and say, “Frank, why don’t you help with this?”

ARCHIVAL TAPE:
“She paved the path, not just for women architects, but for all women. She faced many challenges in the male-dominated architecture industry. She is a living proof that no matter the obstacles, no matter the status quo, you can achieve greatness.”

Julia Donoho:
The portfolio goes to this jury. I was waiting at home and saying, “Well, maybe she’ll get it, but we will probably have to do it a couple times, but we’ll see what happens,” and then I got this beautiful letter that says, “You have been selected for the shortlist.” So then I was like, “What do we have to do? We have to do another presentation in front of the board.” I ended up asking Jeanne Gang to do the presentation. I said, “This will be training for you to get your gold medal,” and she wrote back and says, “I’m going to take this really seriously and I want to do a good job.”

Julia Donoho:
The room had started falling like dominoes. People were saying this for this, and this for this guy, supportive statements for all these other ones. And gradually, it became more and more for Julia Morgan. The votes were cast on secret paper ballots and then, they were taken into a backroom and counted and then we were all sitting there. First, they told us who won and then they brought the guest back in so Jeanne Gang is sitting there, and I can’t restrain myself so I walked over to her and I just … I didn’t tell her what had happened, but I just gave her this huge hug and I had this huge smile on my face and tears were coming down my face.

Julia Donoho:
I was so excited about her getting the FAIA. I think I was more excited about that. It’s a very, very quiet ceremony. They have to get everyone across the stage to get their medal and get their handshakes and so they say, “Please hold all the applause ’til the very end.” And then they came to Julia Morgan and the whole room erupted in this standing ovation. That’s when I really truly cried (applause) ’cause I was just like, “Wow, this really means something.” It’s not just that we finally have a woman whose name is going to be carved in granite, that we’re finally shattering the glass ceiling and getting recognition for all types of people. The whole room recognized it, it was just a beautiful moment.

AIA GOLD MEDAL CEREMONY:
“We are very proud to posthumously award the AIA Gold Medal to Julia Morgan, FAIA, the early 20th-century architect whose copious output of quality work secured her position as the first woman great female American architect.”

Julia Donoho:
All the little quotes that we have of her, they’ve all been ingrained in my brain now. I have learned for myself to now pursue things in a more dogged way the way she does, just pursue excellence in everything that I do.

Victoria Kastner:
The form that she filled out for the AIA membership in 1946, the form said the architect will list what he has done and she circled the “he” and wrote a giant exclamation point over it.

Julia Donoho:
She’s really been a guidepost for me that she could have an engineer way of thinking and also be an exceptional Beaux-Arts architect and live in a modern age and use glass and steel and light and form and really embrace all the things that were changing around her and the social changes that were happening for women and families and how we interact in the world.

Alexandra Lange:
She must’ve been so tough to make it through her attempts to get into the École des Beaux-Arts, to make it through the École des Beaux-Arts, to launch her own business in California when so few women own their own businesses. So I just see that toughness carrying through and I don’t think she could’ve been as successful as she was if she wasn’t really, really focused on doing the work.

Cynthia Kracauer:
Special thanks in this episode to Alexandra Lange, Julia Donoho, Karen McNeill, Victoria Kastner, the women of the Monday Club of San Luis Obispo, Karen Fiene at Mills College and Justin Hoover at the Chinese Historical Society of American. The archival audio of Sara Holmes Boutelle is from her Julia Morgan Collection at Cal Poly University, San Luis Obispo Special Collections and Archives. To learn more about the life and work of Julia Morgan, you can visit our website, bwaf.org where you will find a rich collection of archival material from her career and read extended interviews with additional Julia Morgan scholars not heard in this episode. “New Angle:Voice” is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation and produced by Brandi Howell. Our editorial advisor is Alexandra Lange and research is provided by Aislinn McNamara. I’m your host, Cynthia Kracauer.

Roman Mars:
I’m so excited about this podcast. Few things have me as delighted as listening to the first episode of “New Angle: Voice.” Go subscribe right now.

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Roman Mars:
99% Invisible is Delaney Hall, Kurt Kohlstedt, Swan Real, Emmett FitzGerald, Vivian Le, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Sofia Klatzker, and me, Roman Mars.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building — in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.