Despite designing over seven hundred buildings, the pioneering female architect Julia Morgan is now best known for a single, extremely eccentric commission: San Simeon, the estate of the legendary newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst.

Half a century ago, second-wave feminism swelled into a social tsunami that wrought profound changes in American life. Among them was a concerted effort to correct the underrepresentation of women in occupations that had systematically excluded them, including architecture. As the history of women in the building art began to be charted for the first time, the profession’s earliest female practitioners were also rediscovered and became the subject of serious study.

The mother of them all was Julia Morgan, the prolific San Francisco Bay Area architect who completed more than seven hundred buildings. Her impressive output—which in addition to many private residences (some four dozen in Berkeley alone) included many university and school buildings, several churches, and a host of commissions from the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA)—spanned a broad stylistic spectrum, from the distinctive Bay Area variant of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the Spanish Colonial Revival that became the favored architectural mode of early-twentieth-century California, and from Beaux-Arts Classicism to the regional Neoclassical subgenre now known as Hollywood Regency...

The New York Review: Xanadu’s Architect