Guide to the Julia Morgan Papers, 1835 – 1958
Nancy Loe2006
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
This collection contains architectural drawings and plans, office records, photographs, correspondence, project files, student work, family correspondence, and personal papers from the estate of California architect Julia Morgan, who practiced in San Francisco during the first half of the twentieth century. The bulk of the collection extends from 1896, when Morgan left for Paris to study architecture at the Beaux-Arts, to 1945 when her practice began to wind down. A persistent misperception exists that she destroyed records from her fifty-year practice when she retired in 1951. In fact, she carefully preserved many original architectural drawings and other business records, which were given to California Polytechnic State University by her heirs.
Related papers
Julia Morgan's Natural Environment
University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley Newsletter, 2015
A brief overview of the "Bay Tradition Style" and the influence of nature in Julia Morgan's life and career in the wake of the relocation to and adaptive reuse of UC Berkeley's Senior Women's Hall (now Julia Morgan Hall) at the university's Botanical Gardens in the hills above the campus.
Julia Morgan: Gender, Architecture, and Professional Style
Pacific Historical Review, 2007
Architect Julia Morgan (1872-1957) cultivated a professional style that enabled her to exert authority in a male-dominated profession. This article focuses on three aspects of that style: her costume, her relationship to the media, and her downtown San Francisco offi ce. Rather than a shy woman who sought anonymity, Morgan was a savvy professional with a strong gender consciousness who actively sought success and shaped her own destiny. Her story provides insight into the history of women in the professions and the gendered landscape of the Progressive Era city. Since Julia Morgan left behind few words regarding her social views, professional intentions, or architectural philosophy, this article is also an interdisciplinary exercise that investigates the intersection of biography, material culture, gender, and the built environment.
Willard D. Morgan: The Early Architectural Photography Connections
Southern California Architectural History, 2018
The purpose of this post is to shed light on the brief, but significant, architectural photography career of Willard D. Morgan, a much overlooked persona in the formative Los Angeles and Southern California modern architectural photography circles of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Morgan had the foresight to marry UCLA art student and faculty member Barbara Johnson in the fall of 1925 and to become involved in coteries surrounding architects R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra and Lloyd Wright, artist Annita Delano and dancer Bertha Wardell of the the UCLA Art and Physical Education Departments and photographer Edward Weston. As part of this group Morgan was exposed to the architecture of besides Schindler, Neutra, and the Wrights, Schindler circle friends Irving Gill, Kem Weber, John Weber and J. R. Davidson, as well as befriending Schindler-Neutra apprentices Harwell Hamilton Harris and Gregory Ain. (For much more detail on the Schindler-Neutra circle influence on the Morgans see my "Foundations of Los Angeles Modernism: Richard Neutra's Mod Squad" and "Bertha Wardell: Dances in Silence: Kings Road, Olive Hill and Carmel")
Preserve the Memory of San Francisco's Victorian Architecture
2020
The article deals with the topic of photogrammetry applied to the historical architecture of San Francisco, one of the iconic buildings of the so-called Painted Ladies. These buildings are Victorian and Edwardian houses and buildings repainted, in different colors that embellish or enhance their architectural details, starting in the 1960s. The document will address a methodological discussion concerning the construction of parametric models of historic buildings. The research is prompted by the modern need to have databases full of exhaustive information, through which we can preserve the memory of the historical heritage present in the Californian reality, monitoring conditions and planning the future.
ARCH 382-001: History of Architecture IV for Art & Design Students
2018
The historic sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.-T S Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", 1919 How do architects and their professional colleagues (interior designers, engineers, builders) create works of significance? What conditions and values conspire to influence the making of memorable and lasting built works? British Prime Minister, historian, and writer Winston Churchill remarked that "We shape our buildings and afterward they shape us." 1 How does that cycle work? What circumstances come together to shape the design of a building? How does that building in turn influence the cultural landscape and the built environment which follow? Architecture 382-001 HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE IV READING BUILDING(S) IN CONTEXT: Examining Forces Shaping Modern Architectural Design 1850-2010 3 of 15 Reading Assignments & Exam Schedule Link to Littman Library website for posted readings: http://librarius.njit.edu/vwebv/search?browseFlag=N&instructorId=35%7CHarp%2C++Cleve&depart mentId=0&courseId=0 §ionId=0&recCount=25&searchType=5&page.search.search.button=Search For assistance, contact Littman Librarian Danielle Reay
Long and Important Practices Rendered Too Briefly: The Architecture of Alfred and Jane West Clauss
Philadelphia Socieity of Architectural Historians The Elusive Philadelphia School – The Many Guises of Philadelphia Modernism”, 2022
The work of Alfred and Jane West Clauss seems to suffer an unhappy fate as did PSFS when it comes to topical journals and the contemporary press. When its written-up, it’s often because of a negative, rather than its architectural or historical value – the New Jersey Departments of Health and Agriculture Building being the most recent example. The unexpected commencement of its demolition was announced on the pages of the US DoCoMoMo’s website on April 28th of last year, just a month before that organization’s annual conference. The Trenton Health and Ag Building was one of Alfred and Jane West Clauss’s largest and most significant projects from the later part of their Philadelphia-based career. Completed two decades after their relocation to Philadelphia from Knoxville, razed just as it was about to pass over that elusive threshold from outdated and ungainly, to historic and significant. This story, however, takes us back to the beginning, before Alfred was practicing with Bellante at their Rittenhouse Square office in Philadelphia; before Jane West Clauss was teaching Interior Design at Beaver College or sat for the Pennsylvania Architectural Registration Exam; before their work was winning top awards in the annual Progressive Architecture Magazine program in the 1950s and potentially influencing one of of Louis Kahn’s iconic and early works, and before their experimental work on what is arguably the first enclave of international style houses in the United States, situated on a relatively isolated hilltop, in East Tennessee. Either by predilection or circumstance, Alfred seemed a somewhat conflicted internationalist (albeit an ill-defined term at its birth) —perhaps because of the substantive influence Jane West had on his thinking. One thing is clear; that the architecture he practiced while in Knoxville, was materially, and perhaps most importantly, situationally, a highly contingent architecture, quite unlike that of his former mentors Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.
Selected Publications of Esther McCoy: Patron Saint and Myth Maker for Southern California Architectural Historians
Southern California Architectural History, 2010
Esther McCoy is acknowledged by most fans of our rich Southern California architectural heritage as the true pioneer in keeping the flame of recognition alive for numerous Southland architects, from former Louis Sullivan apprentice Irving Gill to the Case Study House Program participants. She will also forever be remembered as a forerunner in the preservationist movement for those architects' now iconic structures. Her papers are well-cataloged and safely housed at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C. and have recently been digitized. I highly recommend spending an afternoon or two browsing her extensive archive. Also must reading is her oral history conducted in 1987 by Joseph Giovannini two years before her passing to get a sense of her intriguing life and letters which led to her highly successful career as a chronicler of Southern California's modernist architectural history.
Related topics
Related papers
CLARA CHRONICLE 2018 No. 1 Morgantina Revisited: An Architect's Recollections
2018
The ancient Greek site of Morgantina in central Sicily is well known to students of architecture, city planning, numismatics, and other related fields in Classical Studies. It was first settled on the Cittadella hill in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The arrival of Greeks in the early sixth century BC resulted in the creation of a settlement also on Cittadella with a shrine (naiskos) decorated with brightly colored architectural terracottas and with houses. Imported Greek pottery found within the settlement and in the tombs bears witness to extensive trade, and Morgantina also minted its own coins. 1 The next phase of Morgantina's history witnessed the attack in 459 BC by Ducetius, a native Sikel ruler, who may have been responsible for the foundation of a new settlement on the Serra Orlando ridge where the new city was laid out according to a grid plan. 2 After a few years, the city came under the control of Syracuse, then Camarina, and again of Syracuse. It flourished first under t...
Morgantina Revisited: An Architect’s Recollections
CLARA, 2018
The ancient Greek site of Morgantina in central Sicily is well known to students of architecture, city planning, numismatics, and other related fields in Classical Studies. It was first settled on the Cittadella hill in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The arrival of Greeks in the early sixth century BC resulted in the creation of a settlement also on Cittadella with a shrine (naiskos) decorated with brightly colored architectural terracottas and with houses. Imported Greek pottery found within the settlement and in the tombs bears witness to extensive trade, and Morgantina also minted its own coins.
REDISCOVERING MORGAN RUSSELL: Reflections on a Review of the Artist’s Notebooks [2006]
Morgan Russell Archives and Collection: A Comprehensive Guide, 2006
JANE JACOBS, AMERICAN ARCHITECTURAL CRITICISM AND URBAN DESIGN THEORY, 1935–1965 (First draft of BECOMING JANE JACOBS, 2009)
The first draft of BECOMING JANE JACOBS, University of Pennsylvania, 2009. This document is provided to scholars and close readers who might be interested in comparing this work with trade press publications by other authors.
"Jane Jacobs Before Death and Life" (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Mar. 2007)
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2007
Summary of Discussion Points with Architect William Morgan Regarding the US Courthouse, Fort Lauderdale Interview
2011
William N. Morgan (1930-2016) was a Florida architect who specialized in modern architecture, particularly that adapted to the geography and climate of Florida. Morgan had studied under Walter Gropius and Jose Luis Sert at Harvard (MArch '58) after serving in the US Navy in the 1950s. He was an avid student of the prehistoric architecture of the Americas and the Pacific and wrote several books on the subject. He died on January 18, 2016. This paper is the summary that I prepared of an interview with Morgan that my colleague, Jeffrey Jensen, and I conducted on behalf of the US General Services Administration's Public Building Service in 2011 on the topic of his design for the United States Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale in 1976 and which was completed in 1979.
The Documentation and Preservation of Art-in-Architecture of Michigan: The Section of Fine Arts Projects
2007
The Section of Fine Arts' Art-in-Architecture program created public and permanent cultural artifacts that expressed and recorded American beliefs, values, and stories for future generations. Many of these artworks have been saved. Sadly, others have been neglected, mistreated, or forgotten. This project focuses on The Section's post office art installations in Michigan. The Section of Fine Arts, one of FDR's New Deal programs of the Depression era, operated under the auspices of the Treasury Department. The program utilized symbols of the common man to tie together a nation's scattered and often isolated communities, to promote a common heritage and purpose, and to relate the past to the present while giving hope for the future. The documentation of these art-in-architecture projects is essential as is the need to conserve them. Although challenging, the effort is vital to insure the survival of these records of an important and distinctive American chapter. iv
Documenting Twentieth-Century Architecture: Crisis and Opportunity
The American Archivist, 1996
Architectural records come in many different formats and are used by a variety of users for diverse reasons. The records share, however, some common characteristics--their awkward sizes, their fragile physical form and increasing electronic existence, and their ever increasing volume. Little has been written on the archival view of appraisal and selection criteria for architectural records. With this in mind, and with the belief that a documentation strategy would provide a useful beginning to set appraisal guidelines, the Working Conference on Establishing Principles for the Appraisal and Selection of Architectural Records was held in April 1994 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. At the conference, archivists, curators, and users gathered to discuss the inherent principles and problems in the appraisal and selection of architectural records, and to propose an agenda for the future analysis of these issues and for the development of a model documentation strategy.
Jane Jacobs, American architectural criticism and urban design theory, 1935-1965
2009
I have been fortunate to learn from and have the support of many people and institutions during the years of working on this manuscript. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor David Leatherbarrow, whose teaching provided the foundation of this study's interpretive possibilities, both as written here and those yet to be discovered. My debt of gratitude to my committee members David Brownlee and
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.