Julia morgan style11/16/2023 ![]() She was part of this wonderful, amazing brain trust of Californian architects, whether it’s Charles and Henry Greene or Maybeck, Willis Polk, or John Galen Howard, or Ernest Coxhead. How important was Morgan’s relationship to California in her work? So, I felt that it does bring resonance to all that she did do when you also know all of what she was contending with. She was close with the members of her family, but her life was tinged with all these tragedies. It’s just that I think that the really great architects and more than that, the really great artists, male or female, we want to know about their interior life. I think that the other books-and there have been many and I commend my fellow authors-they’ve been about her buildings. Why did you feel it was important to dive deeply into Morgan’s early life and familial, especially sibling, relationships? She just kept going, and she found another way. She did not feel the injustice in a way that was ever made evident on paper that I could find. But the interesting thing is that even when she’s writing to herself in her diary, it doesn’t come up. I don’t think we can really know how often she was treated in a demeaning way. And until he ripped off that floor, he was not going to get paid. And Morgan North said she gave him the coldest look ever seen anyone give. And then he thrust the paper and a pen under her nose like a vacuum cleaner salesman and tried to intimidate her into signing. She came to inspect, and she wouldn’t approve it. Her nephew Morgan North tells about a man who did a poor job of laying floors on a building. In the book, you note that Morgan rarely discussed being a woman in a male-dominated field, which may lead some people to overlook the challenges she faced. Anyway, when that happened, I think things really changed because suddenly she can be mentioned in the same breath as Robert Venturi, Scott Brown, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan. I really didn’t think they would pick her because she didn’t build on the East Coast and she wasn’t that well known beyond San Simeon. ![]() I was one of the members of the nominating committee. She was the first woman in their 100-year history of giving that award. The other big that happened was in 2014 when the American Institute of Architects (AIA) posthumously awarded her the Gold Medal. ![]() People who had just written off as, you know, Xanadu from Citizen Kane, began to be much more interested and really saw it as a product of its era and an extraordinary place. I saw the pendulum of taste really change in the '80s and early '90s. How have perceptions about Morgan’s work changed over time? The smallest and biggest projects have the same level of consideration. When it’s looked at like that, her whole is tremendously unified. To me, I would argue that that’s a deeper way to talk about her work stylistically. She never forgot that architecture should honor the people it shelters. What she did all throughout her career was marry the formality and the actuality and the elegance and grandeur of the Beaux Arts style with the warmth and the individuality of the Arts and Crafts style. I would respond that the style is an approach. She was definitely denigrated for that, especially in the 1970s and '80s. One assumption that people made is that she didn’t have a style. What are some misconceptions about Morgan? But Kastner’s recently published book, Julia Morgan: An Intimate Biography of the Trailblazing Architect, provides the first holistic look at Morgan’s private life in addition to her architectural work. ![]() In the years since her death in 1957, Morgan’s reputation has risen from relative obscurity to that of one of the United States’ most distinguished architects. Morgan was best known for her longstanding professional partnership with media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, though she completed hundreds of projects throughout her career, which primarily took place in California. Her retirement coincided with her mission to write a book specifically about the castle’s architect, Julia Morgan. She soon left her graduate program and teaching gig to work there, eventually becoming the site’s historian until she retired in 2018. “I went on a tour expecting that that was what I would encounter,” Kastner says.Īs it turned out, she immediately became enamored with the place. She had heard of the site, but back in those days it was considered dark and gaudy, far from an architectural marvel. Victoria Kastner first encountered what is now known as Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, when she was a graduate student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1978.
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