Julia Morgan: The Architect Hearst Erased

In nineteen four, Julia Morgan became the first woman licensed to practice architecture in California. She had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, one of a small number of women admitted during a period when the institution's admissions committee debated openly whether women belonged there. She returned to California and built a practice that would eventually include seven hundred completed projects, among them hospitals, YWCAs, private residences, and college buildings. She was known for finishing on budget and on schedule, which in the construction industry of that era, as in this one, was considered unusual.

In nineteen nineteen, William Randolph Hearst hired her to design a country house at San Simeon. He never stopped changing his mind, and she never stopped adapting to it. Over the next twenty-eight years, Morgan made more than five hundred trips from her San Francisco office to the ranch, managing a workforce of craftsmen, structural engineers, antique importers, and landscape architects. Hearst's original vision of a "comfortable" cottage expanded into a sprawling estate of roughly one hundred sixty-five rooms that mixed Spanish Colonial Revival, Mediterranean, and Moorish elements according to Hearst's shifting enthusiasms. Morgan accommodated each revision and made it structurally coherent.

Hearst was demanding in the way that clients are when they believe their money entitles them to impossibilities. Morgan delivered the impossibilities. She never complained in writing, or if she did the complaints have not survived in the accessible record.

For most of the Castle's public history, her name appeared in a subordinate clause. The story was Hearst's; the architect was a detail. Docent tours at the state park now more explicitly credit Morgan's role, and scholarship, particularly the interpretive history by Nancy Loe associated with the Hearst state monument, has begun to correct the imbalance.

The building you are looking at is Julia Morgan's work. Hearst told her what he wanted. She determined whether it could stand.