About the
House:
The large palatial dwelling
designed by Morgan in 1928 was designed for Seldon and Elizabeth
Glide Williams. It presents a formal symmetry, with seven tall
shuttered windows evenly spaced across the second floor. The
iron-grilled balcony over the wide front door and the broad windows
recall the Mediterranean style, as does the red-tile
roof.
Quoining punctuates the corners,
while the wing to the west (at right) has Venetian Gothic windows
on all three exteriors.
When they commissioned the house
the clients were planning for an active social life, but Seldon
Williams died after they had been in the house only a year or two.
His wife retreated to the upstairs apartment, closed the rest of
the house except for periodic cleaning, and almost never left it
for the forty-two years until her death in her nineties. She kept
the furniture covered and the house intact in its 1928 splendor
during all that time, with the help of a part-time maid and a
gardener. Just before she died in 1970, she agreed to sell it to a
committee of friends of the University of California for use as the vice president's house, with
proceeds to go to a charity she favored. The original Italian
furniture was still in place and much of it was sold with the
house. |
About the
Architect: Julia Morgan
Julia Morgan
was born in San Francisco on January 20, 1872 and grew up in nearby
Oakland. Miss Morgan was one of the first women to graduate from
University of California at Berkeley with a degree in civil
engineering. At Berkeley one of her instructors, Bernard Maybeck,
encouraged her to pursue architectural studies in Paris at the
Ecole Nationale et Speciale des Beaux-Arts. Arriving in Paris in
1896, she was initially refused admission because the Ecole had
never before admitted a woman. After a two-year wait, Julia Morgan
was admitted and became the first woman to receive a certificate in
architecture. She returned to San Francisco to work for architect
John Galen Howard, who was the supervising architect of the
University of California's Master Plan. She designed the Hearst
Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus and a number of other
structures.
Morgan opened her own architectural firm in 1904, quickly
establishing herself as a fine residential architect, and designing
a mumber of homes in Piedmont, Claremont and Berkeley Morgan's
style was characterized by her use of the California vernacular
with distinct arts and crafts attributes, including exposed support
beams, horizontal lines that blended with the landscape and
extensive use of shingles, California Redwood and earth tones.
Other notable projects included the design of Hearst Castle in San
Simeon, for Wm. Randolph Hearst, the belltower at Mills College and
the rebuilding of the Fairmont Hotel after the 1906 quake, the
Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, Ca. After forty-five
years in practice, during which she shared all her profits with her
atelier-like staff, she closed her office and had her records
destroyed. She insisted that the buildings should speak for her,
adding that "architecture is a visual, not a verbal
art." |