The 150th birthday of Julia Morgan, California’s famous first licensed female architect and William Randolph Hearst’s estate designer, seems the perfect excuse to get out and explore he…
in downtown Oakland. Morgan grew up just blocks away, when it was a well-to-do Victorian neighborhood. Today, this small business and events district offers preserved turn-of-the-20th-century homes with impeccable lawns and historically representative benches and street lamps.
She later lost her sense of equilibrium from inner-ear problems and a botched surgery, which would have been a setback for most architects, for whom clambering up partially built projects was part of the job. But she compensated by sticking a finger into the pocket of coworkers and having them lead her up scaffolding. On one occasion, while working on a job, she suddenly tumbled three stories down into a river.
Morgan unified more than a dozen women’s clubs in Berkeley by designing a grand edifice for gathering and recreation, now the Berkeley City Club. It’s an atmospheric lair that blends Gothic, Romanesque and Moorish influences, with leaded windows and interior courtyards galore. The swimming pool is so stunning, it has a public viewing balcony.
Hearst also wanted Morgan to build him a medieval-style museum in Golden Gate Park to rival the Cloisters in New York. He went as far as purchasing part of a 12th-century monastery in Spain and having the stones shipped to San Francisco. The project foundered, but Morgan was able to experiment with monastic architecture nevertheless by redesigning the Chapel of the Chimes, a crematory and mausoleum in Oakland.
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