Julia Morgan graduated as the first woman to earn a degree from the ÃÂcole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris and then became the first women to be licensed as an architect in California. With these credentials, she completed over 700 projects in her career which expressed a distinctly Californian architecture.
Some of her early commissions involved rebuilding after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake based on her engineering expertise in utilizing reinforced concrete. Later in her career, both the Hearst publishing family and the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) employed Morgan as their primary architect. She also designed a number of women's clubs and private homes.
Morgan did not follow a consistent school of architecture, often synthesizing various combinations of Arts & Crafts, Beaux-Arts, Gothic Revival, Mediterranean Revival, Neoclassical, and Spanish Colonial Revival styles. By the time she retired in 1951, her eclectic architecture had fallen out of style and was poorly regarded but the assessment of her legacy gradually improved over time. In 2014, Morgan became the first women to receive the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal, 57 years after her death.
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