Julia Morgan: The Work Behind the Drawing

Among the student work preserved in Julia Morgan's papers at Cal Poly is an undated assignment from the École des Beaux-Arts. The university's exhibition places it near the beginning of the story of a California architect. It is a sensible place to begin, so long as we are clear about what kind of object we have in front of us. A school drawing records work done for an assignment. Its reader was someone who could assess a design. A drawing later sent to a contractor would have a different reader, one who needed to know what to build or what still required a decision.

We can follow Morgan's career through changes in the people who needed to read her work. At school, her drawings had to meet the requirements of an institution. On a building commission, an office might produce several drawings for people with different responsibilities. A letter might explain a choice, ask the client to approve a change, or record an instruction that would otherwise be lost. The papers are valuable because some of these ordinary working documents survived alongside the objects made for public view.

Morgan was born in San Francisco in 1872 and studied civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley before going to Paris to study architecture. The two courses of study are facts of her education. They do not tell us how she settled any particular design question. For that we need a closer record. One way to get closer is to ask what a drawing allowed its reader to do next.

The Cal Poly archives preserve correspondence from Morgan's years in Paris with Pierre and Lucy Le Brun, her cousins. The library's guide describes letters about her attempts to enter the École and her travels in Europe. A letter home is a different kind of record from the educational documents held in the same collection. The latter can establish a credential. A letter can establish that a decision remained open when she wrote. Neither kind of evidence should be asked to do the work of the other.

Morgan returned to California in 1902 and joined John Galen Howard's practice. Cal Poly's exhibition credits her with drawing elevations and designing decorative details for the George Hearst Mining Building and Greek Theatre at Berkeley. The name of the architect who leads an office can survive on a project while the names of people working on particular sheets fall away. Reading the assignment of work matters here. It lets us discuss what Morgan did without transferring the whole building to her or treating the work she carried out as incidental.

In 1904 she became the first woman licensed to practice architecture in California and opened her own office in San Francisco. A license marks a change in the capacity in which a person can act. It does not tell us what happened inside the practice after that change. For that, we have to follow separate commissions, and be prepared for the records of some to be fuller than the records of others.

One early commission was the bell tower at Mills College. The tower stood through the 1906 earthquake, and Cal Poly's exhibit connects its survival to the attention Morgan's work subsequently received. The exhibit also recounts her work on the damaged Fairmont Hotel. Its reproduction of a period interview records Morgan drawing a distinction between the structural work she had done and decoration done by another firm.

That distinction helps us read the interview without reenacting the reporter's surprise. A public account may file the whole job under the name of a hotel. The architect has to describe work at a scale closer to the actual responsibility. Someone's role in a repair cannot be determined from a photograph of the finished lobby. In this case, Morgan's own explanation, as transmitted in the published interview, gives the reader a better place to start.

The two commissions offer distinct kinds of evidence. The tower's survival is a documented outcome for that structure in that event. It is no general demonstration about how every building in the practice would perform. The hotel interview records the way Morgan drew the boundaries of her responsibility in one job. Both help explain her emerging professional reputation when kept at the scale at which the evidence speaks.

Asilomar began in Pacific Grove as a summer camp and conference site for young women associated with the YWCA. Phoebe Apperson Hearst supported the project. California's historic-property record dates the Morgan buildings from 1913 to 1928, and the National Register file treats the grounds as a district. The length of that building period matters. A visitor can arrive on one afternoon and see a place that took years to assemble.

The National Register inventory offers a way to see that change in concrete terms. It dates the chapel to 1915 and the Crocker kitchen and dining room to 1918. It dates Merrill Hall to 1927–28. The hall had room for about a thousand people according to the inventory, which describes its timber construction, rough-cut granite and tall windows. These are observations about the building that survived and the capacity for which it was designed. They help distinguish the site in its later years from the camp as it began. A person attending an early gathering could not have used a hall that was still years away from construction.

A conference site needs more than a room in which a speaker can be heard. People arrive, find where to stay, gather, eat and go back out. A building that serves one part of that pattern has to work with the rest of the place. This is a way to read the type of commission, rather than a claim that we have recovered every instruction Morgan received. The district description gives a reader evidence of buildings in relation to one another, while the drawings and project files offer a route to more particular questions.

The inventory records less conspicuous work as well. The building known as Outside Inn originally provided housing for the engineer, and Hilltop housed college women employed there during summer vacations in the 1920s. Those uses help explain why an inventory of a conference district includes cottages and lodging alongside a large assembly room. The people who ran the grounds also needed places to live. A plan that marked only the destinations of visitors would leave some of the work of the conference invisible.

The state preservation office describes the historic buildings in the context of the First Bay Tradition. A style term can help a reader compare forms and materials. The institutional client supplies another line of inquiry. What was this place meant to support, and how did the parts let the program take place? That question keeps the history of the YWCA's project visible beside the history of the architect's practice.

In 1919 Morgan and William Randolph Hearst began planning the estate at San Simeon. Cal Poly's digitized correspondence spans 1919 to 1946. The extent of the surviving series is itself useful, even before one turns to any one exchange. It makes it possible to study a commission as a succession of decisions rather than as a single instruction that somehow contained the eventual estate.

A collection date range cannot establish that work happened at a constant pace. It also cannot tell us whether a suggestion in a letter was carried out. A reader who wants to follow a particular decision needs to identify the date and sender, compare what was asked for with any reply, and then look for a drawing, record or photograph tied to the same part of the project. An idea, an authorization and a built result can fall on different dates. When only one survives, the absence of the others leaves the question open.

San Simeon and Asilomar were different kinds of commissions. One can be read through a long series of exchanges with a private client. The other can be read as a conference landscape for an organization and its participants. We need both clients in the account because the practices of commissioning shaped the kinds of work Morgan had to do. The contrast also gives us a way out of treating the estate as a key that unlocks every other project. At each site the drawing had to serve a particular use, and someone had to act on it.

The Cal Poly finding aid takes issue with the idea that Morgan destroyed the records of her long practice when she retired. It describes architectural drawings, office records, photographs, correspondence and project files that survived and were later given to the university. That list matters to the history of work. A drawing without its accompanying correspondence can show the lines of a design while leaving the reader uncertain about why the sheet was made. A letter without the drawing can mention a revision whose shape the reader cannot reconstruct.

The finding aid also describes additional donations. What we call the archive is therefore the result of preservation at more than one moment. Morgan kept many records. Heirs and later donors helped move them into institutional care. Archivists organized and described them. Cal Poly's online guide says that not everything is digitized. What can be found from a screen is a portion of the collection, and a search that produces no result can simply indicate the limits of that portion.

Reading with these limits in view makes it possible to credit more than a signature. A preserved working sheet can show that an office needed to communicate clearly. A project record can identify a client or supplier. The presence of those records is an invitation to look for who prepared, approved, built or maintained something, not a reason to assign names to tasks without evidence.

Morgan retired in 1951 and died in 1957. The school assignment, the interview about the hotel and the long file of estate correspondence can still be read in relation to the work that produced them. Their readers have changed. The person evaluating an assignment and the person waiting for a project decision once had immediate reasons to read. An archival reader can ask how those reasons shaped the object that survived.

Return to the school drawing. We began with a sheet whose first purpose was educational. The career that followed took Morgan into rooms where requirements were set by a different set of people and where a drawing could have consequences beyond assessment. The records never make every contributor visible. They do allow a reader to pause before attributing a finished result to the most famous name on a project. That pause is part of looking carefully at Morgan's work. It makes room for what she actually did, and for the people who had to read her work and carry it forward.

Cal Poly Special Collections, Julia Morgan online exhibition and archive guide. The exhibition identifies the undated École assignment, presents the period Fairmont interview, and supplies the institutional chronology used here. The guide describes the Le Brun letters and the Morgan–Hearst correspondence series. The account uses those catalogue and exhibition descriptions and does not claim a transcription of unexamined correspondence. https://guides.lib.calpoly.edu/juliamorgan/onlineexhibit and https://guides.lib.calpoly.edu/juliamorgan/online

Nancy E. Loe and Denise Fourie Menu, Guide to the Julia Morgan Papers, 1835–1958, Cal Poly. The archival finding aid describes the surviving working records, dates and donations. https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/lib_spc/5/

National Park Service, Asilomar Conference Grounds National Historic Landmark documentation, and California Office of Historic Preservation's district entry. The inventory lists the dated buildings and describes the original uses of Outside Inn and Hilltop, and the form and intended capacity of Merrill Hall. The state entry gives the conference use, date and district context. Observations about the sequence of activities at a conference site are interpretations of the building type. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NHLS/87000823_text and https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/ListedResources/Detail/N1487