Born: 20 January 1872, United States
Died: 2 February 1957
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Architect and engineer Julia Morgan designed more than 700 buildings in her career, but like many women trying to enter male-dominated fields in the early 1900s (and still today), she had a difficult start. After L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts began allowing women to take entrance exams in 1897, Morgan applied. The college would only accept the top thirty applicants to the architecture program, and in her first attempt, she ranked forty-second. Not to be deterred, she studied even harder, gained experience in local architecture firms, and tried again the following year—and placed in the vaunted top thirty. However, school officials artificially lowered her scores to justify rejecting her again because they “did not want to encourage young girls.” She wrote in a letter home: “I’ll try again next time anyway even without any expectations, just to show ‘les jeunes filles’ are not discouraged.” On her third and final attempt, she placed thirteenth out of 376 applicants, high enough that they were forced to admit her. Even then, the school only allowed people to study there until the age of thirty, meaning she was now racing the clock to complete her certificate before her thirtieth birthday—which she did, completing in three years a program that typically took five.
This entry is reprinted with permission from the National Women’s History Museum (United States of America). It was written by Despina Stratigakos. All rights reserved.
Julia Morgan is arguably the best-known female architect in the United States, thanks in part to having had William Randolph Hearst as a loyal patron. Although millions of visitors have admired Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, Morgan’s architectural legacy is found throughout the state, where she designed more than seven hundred buildings during her long and prolific career. Morgan also has the distinction of having been the first woman to be accepted for architectural study at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which she entered in 1898. Morgan’s many accomplishments were recently acknowledged by the AIA, which awarded her the 2014 AIA Gold Medal. Almost sixty years after her death, Morgan became the first female architect to receive the AIA’s highest prize, which has been awarded since 1907.
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