Julia Morgan was a notoriously private person who shunned publicity. Little is known about her childhood or personal life. But no matter—she left behind a most lasting impressions on California’s landscape and a hard-to-miss hole in the architecture field’s glass ceiling .
Born in San Francisco and a graduate of UC Berkeley, Morgan was the first woman to graduate of UC Berkeley’s civil engineering program, the first woman ever to be admitted to the prestigious École de Beaux-Arts department of architecture in Paris, the first woman architect licensed in California, and in 2014 she became the first woman to be awarded the AIA Gold Medal for Architecture (more than 50 years after her death)
Morgan holds the record for total completed structures designed by a single American architect—she designed more than 700 buildings (most of them houses), so many that even just her Bay Area contributions exceeds the capacity of any one map or index.
Here are just some of her most visible contributions to the region:
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