Tania Farrelly is an award-winning advertising strategist who has spent over twenty-five years working in Australia’s leading advertising agencies, telling stories for the world’s biggest brands. She has more recently built her own successful, brand consultancy iSPY. She has turned her hand from brand stories to human stories with the help of creative writing courses at RMIT and Fiona McIntosh’s Masterclass.
Today, Tania Farrelly is on the blog to tell us all about the amazing woman architect Julia Morgan, the inspiration behind her new novel, The Eighth Wonder. Read on …
Tania Farrelly
Trailblazing Architect Julia Morgan: A Wonder Woman of her time
If you’ve ever travelled the coast of California, between L. A. and San Francisco, the chances are you’ve come across a monumental Disney-esque estate built into the side of the cliffs at San Simeon, known as Hearst Castle. But behind the walls of William Randolph Hearst’s La Cuesta Encantada – Spanish for Enchanted Hill with its 165 rooms, curated gardens and Roman pools – lies the tale of a trailblazing young woman who, at the turn of the twentieth century, broke all the rules of American and French business to become America’s most prolific architect.
Julia Morgan was born in San Francisco in 1872, one of five children to upper middle class parents. Julia was a whizz at maths and sciences and was one of a handful of girls to enrol at University of California’s Berkeley Campus in the early 1890’s. She completed her Bachelor of Science degree in 1894, the only girl in her maths and engineering class, at a time when women weren’t permitted to dine unaccompanied, show skin above their metatarsals, maintain rights after marriage, nor vote. But Julia forged on regardless and did what she wanted anyway. She pursued her passion for architecture, aiming her sights on the prestigious Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris. (THE place for great American architects to be schooled.) The problem was – they didn’t accept women. Yet.
Like every other applicant she was required to pass an entrance exam (written in French and using the metric system). The first time Julia took the exam she placed 42nd in a field of 376. Pretty good but not good enough – the school only accepted the top 30 applicants. The second time, she placed within the top 30 but the school arbitrarily scaled her marks back because they didn’t want to encourage women! Finally in 1898 she placed 13th and the school was forced to accept her.
‘She pursued her passion for architecture, aiming her sights on the prestigious Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris. (THE place for great American architects to be schooled.) The problem was – they didn’t accept women. Yet.’
After graduation Miss Morgan (as she liked to be called) became a ‘draftsman’ in an architectural firm. That was, until she caught her boss waxing lyrical about her talents to a prospective client and finishing his pitch with a triumphant ‘and the best thing is my draftsman is a woman so I barely need to pay her a thing!’
That’s when she opened the doors to her own practice in 1904, and dedicated her life to her work, becoming arguably, the most prolific architect of her generation. In her forty plus year career she designed over 750 buildings including the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and the Berkley City Woman’s Club that still stands today as a luxurious five-star hotel. Over time, her reputation as not just as a designer of beauty but an engineer of quality preceded her and forced men to re-evaluate their opinions of women, opening the doors to many more.
But in some ways her legacy is best captured in Hearst’s Castle which is a towering reminder that passion, determination and doing is the key to moving mountains. Miss Morgan has been described as a force of feminist change in a floral hat and a quiet feminist, but whatever labels history attaches to her, she is proof that actions speak louder than words. And it was this quality that inspired me to channel Miss Morgan’s indomitable spirit into the fictional protagonist of Rose Kingsbury Smith in The Eighth Wonder.
To learn more about Julia Morgan, the book ‘Julia Morgan Architect of Beauty’ by Mark Anthony Wilson is a good place to start.
—The Eighth Wonder by Tania Farrelly (Penguin Books Australia) is out now.
The Eighth Wonder
New York, 1897. The richest city in the world.
Beautiful, young and privileged, Rose Kingsbury Smith is expected to play by the strict rules of social etiquette, to forfeit all career aspirations and to marry a man of good means. But she has a quietly rebellious streak and is determined to make her own mark on Manhattan’s growing skyline. When the theft of a precious heirloom plunges the Kingsbury Smiths into financial ruin, Rose becomes her family’s most tradeable asset. She finds herself fighting for her independence and championing the ideal of equality for women everywhere...
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