1913-28, Northern California, Asilomar, YWCA Conference Center
Pacific Grove
Julia Morgan
Here one can obtain a clear picture of Julia Morgan's informal wood Craftsman architecture, ranging from the early stone gates at the entrance to the Administration building. The later additions by Warnecke, and by Smith, Barker, Hanssen show how well the Bay Tradition of the 1950s and 60s merges with the much earlier buildings.
Buildings by Julia Morgan: Entrance Gates, 1912-13; Administration Bldg., 1913; Chapel, 1915; Crocker Hall, 1927; Scripps Hall, 1927; Merrill Hall, 1927-28 (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 469-70).
Asilomar is approximately 120 miles south of downtown San Francisco (about 105 miles from San Francisco International Airport) and about 75 miles south of San Jose. Take Highway 101 South to Highway 156 West to Highway 1 South to Highway 68 West to Pacific Grove. Highway 68 West overlaps a portion of Highway 1 for about 4 miles. Stay on Highway 68 West/Highway 1 and take the Pacific Grove exit. For about 3-1/2 miles you will then be on a portion of Highway 68 West that is also called the Holman Highway. Stay on Highway 68 West/Holman Highway until it becomes a city street called Forest Avenue. Continue on Forest Avenue for about 1 mile and make a left turn onto Sinex Avenue. In just under 1 mile, Sinex Avenue ends right at the front gates to Asilomar.
That same year [1912], the YWCA hired Julia Morgan, a San Francisco architect, and work began immediately. With funds donated by YWCA members and supporters, the Administration Building (Phoebe Apperson Hearst Social Hall), the Engineer's Cottage, the tent houses, and the large granite entrance gates were built. In July 1913, those were the only structures when 300 young women attended Asilomar's first YWCA student leadership conference.
In the beginning, the Pirates ["pie rats"] lived in tenthouses near the garage at the south end of the property. But, in 1923, Mary Sroufe Merrill and Miss A.C. Johnson donated money to the YWCA to build "proper housing for these young men." That year, Julia Morgan designed and built their lodgings, which the Pirates dubbed the "Pirates' Den" (now called Tide Inn). They installed a mast, flag, and binnacle lights, and brought in a sea chest and ship's clock for the fireplace mantel. In 1927, one Pirate brought his parrot to Asilomar as a mascot!
In 1987, the Julia Morgan-designed buildings were designated a National Historic Landmark. (Delaware North Companies Parks and Resorts, Inc.).
1914, Northern California, C. C. Moore entertainment lodge
High Street, Santa Cruz
Julia Morgan
Another dramatic Crafts building by Morgan is at the edge of domestic architecture. C. C. Moore, the president of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, had a country place in Santa Cruz on Monterey Bay. The year before the exposition he asked Morgan to remodel the main house and to build some guest houses and an "entertainment casino" on the grounds there, as he planned to entertain widely and wanted to have the best possible facilities, with private golf course, a yacht in the harbor, and luxurious amenities close at hand. Working in redwood and minimizing the disturbance to the site, she managed to convey to visitors that they were staying in a kind of wooded paradise. Dorothy Stone Wolff, who was a classmate of Moore's daughter, Josephine, at the Katherine Delmar Burke School in San Francisco, often visited the casino:
It was a very attractive large rustic building with a wide porch, with an overhang on two sides, one of which was covered with purple bougainvillea. This side faced toward a beautiful fountain, which was constantly splashing, with a delightful sound effect.
The "Casino" consisted of a large recreation or game room with a huge stone fireplace. There were restrooms included. In the room was a pool table, a Klondike table [a card game], a piano and card tables.
There was another building that Julia Morgan designed, to replace the old ranch house that was on the property, originally. It consisted of a large dining room and lounge on the main floor with bedrooms upstairs. Adjoining the daughter's was a delightful sleeping porch...
Julia Morgan also designed the guest cottages, each having two bedrooms and two baths opening onto porches. They were unique and very artistic. (Note 1: Dorothy Stone Wolff to author, July 15, 1978.)
The casino was reported by the local newspaper to be 50 by 90 feet, with an immense stone fireplace in the 30-by-50-foot main room, which had a billiard table, a piano, and a screen for moving pictures. Its roof was decorated with a long copper flower box, which proved difficult to engineer properly. Clerestory windows admitted daylight, which was somewhat obscured at ordinary window level by the wide overhang and by the splendid veranda on three sides. Early photographs of the interior show a Victrola with a large horn and three copper lamps by Dirk Van Erp, who had a copper shop in Oakland until 1910, when he moved to San Francisco. Several other early Morgan interiors were photographed with these special lamps, almost as much a favorite of hers as the Chinese parchment ones that she and Maybeck both ordered through a Chinatown merchant. Extensively remodeled by owner (Boutelle 1988: 137-39, 256).
1914, Civic Center, Century Club of California
1335 Franklin St., San Francisco
Julia Morgan
A chaste Classic Revival facade, originally a private home that for two years after 1906 housed the State Supreme Court of California (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 113).
1915, East Bay, James L. Lombard house (Harrow Manor)
62 Farragut St., Piedmont
Julia Morgan
Unique in Morgan's work is a building constructed to suit a client's image of English architecture. James L. Lombard applied to Morgan's office with a turn-of-the-century English watercolor by Young and Mackintosh, of Croydon, England, showing a large house with sagging roof, half-timbering, and gables, which he wanted Morgan to re-create for him on a whole block that he had acquired in Piedmont. She replied that she had never designed or built anything from a picture, as she regularly began with the plan, but that it might be interesting to see what she could do with it.
The finished house (1915) does indeed resemble the watercolor, which hangs in the place of honor in the living room. Ornamental plaster ceilings, examples of an art now priced almost out of existence, distinguish the living room and dining room. The house is most impressive for its siting and for the formal order of the spaces. Incised in its brick wall is "Harrow Manor," and the knocker on the master bedroom door is in the form of the lion crest of Harrow school in England, the client's alma mater (Boutelle 1988: 148, 150, 256).
1915, East Bay, Wells House
6076 Manchester Rd., Oakland
Julia Morgan
A manorial house in Julia Morgan's personalized version of the Prairie School style, now painted gray and adorned with Regency wrought iron detail (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 301).
1915, Northern California, Asilomar chapel
Pacific Grove
Julia Morgan
The successful food sales in the YWCA building at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 and additional contributions by California women funded construction of Morgan's next two important buildings at Asilomar: the chapel, dedicated in 1915 to the memory of Grace H. Dodge; and the dining hall and kitchen, a gift from Mary Crocker in 1918. The chapel, which also served as auditorium and music hall until Merrill Hall was erected in 1928, was sited so that its wall-size altar window frames a natural picture of pines, sand, and sea. This modest cottage-like building, again in unpainted wood inside and out, is distinguished not only by that window wall but also by a carved frieze of gold-incised letters punctuated by shell motifs:
Sing, O Heavens and be joyful O Earth:
And break forth into singing O Mountains! (Isaiah 49:13)For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace:
The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing. (Isaiah 55:12)
The chapel is warmed by another huge stone fireplace and chimney, similar to that in the Administration Building (Boutelle 1988: 89, 255).
1915-16, Forest Hill, Miss Alice Gay house: repairs
196 Clarendon St., San Francisco
Julia Morgan
Designed by Bernard Maybeck (Boutelle 1988: 257).
1915-16, Russian Hill, David Atkins (originally, John Brickell) house
1055 Green St., San Francisco
Julia Morgan
This is an Italianate House built originally in 1866 and remodeled by Julia Morgan 1916 (Gebhard, David, Robert Winter and Eric Sandweiss 1985: 54).
Russian Hill's Green Street has the distinctive flavor that we like to think of as singularly San Franciscan. The John Brickell house...is one of the row in the 1000 block of Green Street that were saved from the flames in 1906. Julia Morgan remodeled it in 1916; the name and the date of remodeling are inscribed on the keystone over the front door. Today it has a very different façade (Alexander and Heig 2002:109).
In 1915-16 Morgan had made a similar alteration for David Atkins, an importer of artworks, whose daughter, Avesia, was a draftsperson in Morgan's office. In this adaptation Morgan removed the upper floors of a Victorian house on Green Street in San Francisco, changed the fenestration to three tall arched windows in the center, and added an ironwork balcony over the front arched entrance. A wide frieze under a projecting cornice banded the whole, while the low-pitched symmetrical hipped roof works as a pediment for the façade.
David Atkins house: remodeling of Victorian house into Italianate residence (Boutelle 1988: 160, 257).
1915-18, East Bay, Dr. E. L. Mitchell and Dr. M. L. Williams house
834 Santa Barbara Road, Berkeley
Julia Morgan
Two women physicians, Dr. M. L. Williams and Dr. E. L. Mitchell, had Morgan build them a redwood-shingle cottage on a steeply sloping hillside lot in Berkeley. It appears from the street to be one story, symmetrical, its porch exactly centered, with the building covering most of the lot. To the right is the entrance to the porch and to the built-in one-car garage (innovative for the period), its door ornamented with a Celtic design on each of four panels. The porch has wooden bungalow columns, with the front door and the small adjacent window decorated with cast-iron versions of the same Celtic pattern. An ample bay window of three twelve-panel sections illuminates the doctors' office at left. Compact and utilitarian, the cottage was obviously intended for a servantless household, for the garage opens directly into the kitchen which directly adjoins the dinning room, without the separate pantry that was usual in a more formal ménage. The wide entrance hall leads past the office with its own bathroom to the living room, which has four-foot windows and floors boxes at either side of a large fireplace; there is a deck with glazing at one side, and bookshelves line the remaining walls. Brilliant views of San Francisco Bay seem to enlarge the living room and the adjacent dining room. A change of scale from living to dining room is established by the shift form the high handcrafted open trusses and supports of the living room to the dining room's comparatively low ceiling and doorway, which are set off by brackets that give the feel of an alcove to the dining area. The later, glazed on two sides, has a glass door at the back, which directs light to the steps leading to the floor below.
Downstairs are two main bedrooms, brilliantly daylighted, one of which is further warmed by a fireplace. On the side toward the street is a separate study, or office, and another spacious bedroom and bath. A third floor down has one more room and storage space. Morgan used a reverse plan and an almost upside-down arrangement on a marginal site to create a light-filled house that has served for nearly seventy-five years as a snug, delightfully comfortable shelter, modest and horizontal from the street, brilliantly vertical at the hillside. Presently occupied by a Berkeley professor, only the third owner, it has been maintained almost unchanged since 1915 (Boutelle 1988: 139-40, 256).
1916, Santa Clara Valley, Saratoga Foothill Women's Club
Park Pl., Saratoga
Julia Morgan
This is another worthy, warm and woodsy Shingle style women's club by California's great woman architect (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 199).
She designed several independent women's clubs along Arts and Crafts lines. The Saratoga Foothill Women's Club, for example, had been chartered in 1907. When Morgan was called in to design a building for them in 1915, she offered four possible plans for their site (according to club records and local newspapers), and built the one unanimously chosen for under $5,000. The gabled redwood structure with pergolas leading to the gardens is simple and timeless, evoking a kind of sophisticated country style. Wooden benches at the sides of the doorway express a welcoming hospitality.
That the Foothill Women's Club was up-to-date for its period is shown by Morgan's inclusion in the original blueprints of a motion-picture projection booth, opposite an alcove where a screen could be pulled down. The main assembly room, equipped with a stage, has served as auditorium for many local presentations, from dancing-school classes to serious drama. Windows make up two sides of the room, and more light pours in through a large round window above. Another glazed wall faces the broad hallway, which leads to rest rooms and kitchen. In its park-like setting the club discreetly brings the outdoors in (Boutelle 1988: 122, 256).
