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Elizabeth A.Sackler Center for Feminist Art

Julia Morgan

b. 1872, San Francisco; d. 1957, San Francisco

Julia Morgan trained in the architectural office of Bernard Maybeck after receiving an engineering degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1894. She became the first woman to study architecture at the École des Beaux-arts in Paris. After graduating in 1902, Morgan returned to San Francisco and in 1904 opened an architecture office. Over the next forty years, she designed some 800 buildings (many of them after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake). In 1919, Morgan was commissioned to design the estate of businessman and art collector William Randolph Hearst. The palatial compound at San Simeon, California, is now called Hearst Castle.