Julia Morgan (1872-1957), California's first licensed female architect, designed both institutional buildings and private homes in the San Francisco area. She preferred to use indigenous materials and carefully designed for often topographically difficult sites.

Julia Morgan was born on January 20, 1872, in San Francisco, California, and died there in 1957. Her career as an architect was shaped by two principal facts: her residence in California, with its distinctive architectural traditions and practical possibilities, and her gender--at the beginning of the 20th century she was a woman attempting to break into a field judged by most of her contemporaries to be the exclusive province of men. In fact, she became California's first licensed female architect.

After graduating with a degree in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1894, Morgan planned to continue her education at the world's most prestigious architectural school, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In applying...