Build Your Dreams!

March 5 - Today's post contributed by Celeste Mannis

Build Your Dreams!

The Legacy of Julia Morgan, Architect

Julia Morgan

It is a joy to see Julia Morgan celebrated during Women’s History Month this year. The theme of “inspiring innovation through imagination” was made to order for her. As both a biographer and the mother of two young women, her story speaks to me.  Julia Morgan didn’t just dream of fairy-tale castles, she built them!

My unlikely introduction to Miss Morgan was through the pages of the New York Times Magazine, in a spread replete with evening-gown clad models draped like jewels against an opulent backdrop. A footnote identified the location as San Simeon, the legendary estate of William Randolph Hearst. What’s more, it had been designed and constructed by California architect Julia Morgan. “A woman?” I exclaimed, both surprised and intrigued. So began the research for Julia Morgan Built a Castle.

Julia was the product of a well-to-do Victorian family. A mining engineer by training, her father was also a hapless speculator.  Her mother, a cotton heiress, was a woman of tremendous discipline, intelligence, and intestinal fortitude. Charles and Eliza Morgan moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco shortly after the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869, at just about the same time that a young William Randolph Hearst headed east by train with his mother Phoebe to begin his first European tour.

Julia Morgan as a young girl

Born in San Francisco, Julia settled with her family in Oakland when she was two years old. Never a typical girl, Julia preferred jumping on the trampoline in the family’s barn with her brothers to hosting tea parties with her sister. She had a habit of taking things apart to see how they worked, and then putting them neatly back together. She liked to tour construction sites in bustling San Francisco with her father, who would explain how buildings were engineered.

But not everything was goodness and light in young Julia’s life. Throughout her childhood, Julia’s family also experienced financial vicissitudes brought on by father Charles’ poor business sense. At one point, Eliza Morgan brought Julia and her siblings back to New York for an extended visit with her family while cash strapped Charles rented the family home and removed to a San Francisco “hotel” while trying to improve the Morgan family finances. This loss of the family home, and the traumatic absence of her father, while only temporary, no doubt contributed to the importance Julia later placed on being a financially independent professional.

While in New York, Julia contracted scarlet fever, which would result in frequent ear infections during her childhood. A frustrated Julia was often forced to stay indoors in spite of her youthful exuberance. This forced “confinement” may well have influenced much of her architectural work, which emphasized access to the outdoors and celebrated nature.

Through elementary and high school, Julia excelled academically, and was especially interested in math and science. When other girls capped off their graduation from high school with debutante balls, Julia opted to attend the University of California at Berkeley, the only female Civil Engineering major in her class.  She would have preferred to study architecture, but the nearest schools of architecture were back east and her parents did not approve of her moving away from home at such a young age. As it was, her brother escorted her to and from classes during her freshman year.

Upon graduating from the University of California with honors, Julia went to work for her mentor and friend Bernard Maybeck, a pioneering west coast architect, who soon encouraged her to apply to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, France. This she did, struggling to gain admission to the school for more than two years, before the French relented and admitted their first female architecture student. Even then, Julia was sometimes forced to sit in the hallway to hear lectures, as certain professors refused to allow a woman in their classrooms. All the while, Julia collected one accolade after the next, the result of participating in “blind juries” meant to weed out favoritism at the Ecole. This system, whereby projects were presented anonymously for judging, proved a blessing for the talented Miss Morgan, as it ensured that sexism did not come into play either. She won countless medals for her work, and  graduated, again, with honors.

Letters Julia wrote to friends and family during her student years in Paris revealed a woman as determined as she was gracious, as vibrant of mind as she was modest of manner. But later, Julia Morgan, architect, didn’t talk or write much about her own work. Instead, she felt her work should speak for itself. It does just that.

Classical proportions and flourishes reflect Julia’s Beaux-Arts training, especially in projects for universities and other major institutions. But a distinctly California influence shines through. Homes in particular seem to grow out of the natural landscape, not to dominate it. Julia created this “organic” feeling by building along the natural contours of sites, incorporating local woods and river rock into her designs, and adding decorative touches inspired by California plants and animals.

Yet Julia’s primary concern was that her buildings meet the needs of those they served. When building for a family she had the client’s children draw pictures of features they wished their home to include. Not surprisingly, many of these homes contain secret hideaways under stairwells, and mystery doors that lead nowhere.

St. John's Presbyterian Church, Berkeley

When Julia was hired to design Saint John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, her budget lacked enough money to paint walls and plaster ceilings – so she didn’t! Instead, Julia turned unpainted redwood walls and an intricate framework of structural beams and trusses into bold design elements. A potential problem became the catalyst for an architectural masterpiece.

A major commission to repair San Francisco’s earthquake-damaged Fairmont Hotel in 1906 was followed by an endless stream of commissions for homes big and small, women’s organizations, hospitals, churches, commercial buildings, and eventually even a castle. Every completed project was as well-engineered as it was beautiful.

Asilomar (Wikimedia)

Philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst was one of Julia’s first patrons and dearest friends. Through Hearst’s influence Morgan became a key architect for the Young Women’s Christian Association.  Julia’s biggest project for the YWCA was Asilomar, a seaside conference center and summer camp for girls in Pacific Grove, California. Now a state park, this spectacular Arts and Crafts complex is still enjoyed by thousands of visitors each year.

Hearst Castle (Wikimedia)

But perhaps what Julia Morgan is best known for is the estate she designed and constructed for William Randolph Hearst on the central coast of California.  Built largely over a period of 23 years, from 1919 to 1942 (and never actually completed), San Simeon cost almost $5 million dollars, much of the construction being accomplished during the Great Depression.  Miss Morgan was well aware that she was creating a multitude of jobs, and thankful that she could. The main building on the property, La Casa Grande, is 60,645 square feet, and hosts 115 rooms, including 36 bedrooms and 41 bathrooms. The estate is 90,080 square feet overall, and sits on 128 acres of gardens. The sheer scale of the estate is mind-boggling, as is its guest list. Hearst did almost all of his entertaining at San Simeon, and over the years he was host to guests such as President Calvin Coolidge, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, playwright George Bernard Shaw, aviators Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh and Howard Hughes, and Hollywood luminaries such as Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo and Cary Grant.  San Simeon, the opportunity of a lifetime for any architect, sat securely on the shoulders of the diminutive Julia Morgan.

Hearst and Morgan

It is said that Hearst trusted three women in his life: his mother Phoebe, his long-time mistress Marion Davies, and his architect, Julia Morgan. I imagine Miss Morgan would chuckle at the notion.

Of all Julia Morgan’s projects, from tiny cottages to fairy-tale castles, my personal favorite is Dodge Chapel at Asilomar. This lovely sanctuary was designed as a place where young women could find inspiration and develop skills. Windows flood its polished wood interior with sunshine and frame lush forest views. Alcoves and movable partitions provide intimate spaces for study and conversation. And behind the altar, an enormous picture window overlooks windswept dunes and the boundless blue Pacific.

One glorious spring day, as I sat alone in the sanctuary, the warmth, light and grace of the structure filled my senses. “Build your dreams,” the chapel seemed to say. “Anything is possible.”

Celeste Davidson Mannis is the award-winning author of several works of non-fiction and poetry for children, including Julia Morgan Built a Castle, winner of the California Library Association’s Beatty Award. When she is not writing, Celeste enjoys teaching Children’s Literature: The Golden Age for the University of California at Berkeley. http://extension.berkeley.edu/catalog/course104.html She resides in Los Angeles with her family. 

Beautiful Minds: Teaching about Women in the Sciences through Picture Books

March 11 - Today's post provided by Teach with Picture Books

Nothing speaks more loudly than a good role model. As a teacher and a father to two daughters, I absolutely believe that. I therefore love picture books which chronicle the lives of women who, from their very childhoods, proved themselves to be innovative, independent, and incredibly resolute.

Additionally, I believe that picture book biographies serve a universal role in helping students realize that childhood dreams and interests may determine the paths they follow as adults.

Take, for example, Julia Morgan, who as a child loved to build. In her mind, buildings were huge puzzles, and she spent hours seeking to discover how all the pieces fit. Greatly influenced by her engineer father and her cousin Pierre LeBrun, an architect who designed many of Manhattan's stone churches and its first skyscrapers, Julia dreamed of becoming an architect.

The book Julia Morgan Built a Castle, written by Celeste Davidson Mannis and illustrated by Miles Hyman, describes Julia's dogged determination to first enter the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and to then gain acceptance as a competent professional (unlikely for a woman in the early 1900's). Her success in both endeavors is inspiring to read, yet the story doesn't end there.

Morgan was a tireless architect who completed hundreds of projects while simultaneously working on William Randolph Hearst's incredible San Simeon estate (the "castle" of the book's title), which required twenty eight years to complete. In her design, Morgan ingeniously suspended the estate's massive 345,000 gallon Neptune Pool from steel reinforced concrete beams so that it would sway, rather than buckle, during California's frequent earthquakes. A simple narrative and Miles Hyman's glowing, sculpturesque illustrations combine to make this book a satisfying journey through the life of one remarkable woman. 

Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor, written and illustrated by Emily Arnold McCully, describes how a curious girl became one of America's most prolific inventors. McCully helps readers see that Mattie's childhood fascination with how common things work (a sled, a kite, a foot warmer) fueled her adolescent desire to improve the way machinery operated. While working in a textile mill at age twelve, for example, Mattie witnesses a serious injury when a rogue shuttle ejects from a loom and strikes a friend in the head. Young Mattie mulls the problem over; her solution, a metal guard, is adopted by all of the factories in Manchester. Injuries from flying shuttles cease immediately.

Mattie's later invention of a machine designed to create flat-bottomed paper bags (yes, those same bags we still use today) revolutionized the industry. Earlier flat bags needed to be held with one hand when packing, and ripped easily when overfilled. When she tries to file her patent for the machine, however, Mattie finds herself in a patent war with a man who most certainly stole her idea just days earlier. Fortunately, Mattie's detailed diagrams and meticulous notes prove her "priority of invention," and from that point forward she pursues a life as a professional inventor. Her obituary refers to her as "the Lady Edison."

Stone Girl, Bone Girl: The Story of Mary Anning, written by Laurence Anholt and illustrated by Sheila Moxley, provides readers with a more personal look at a scientist's childhood. This makes perfect sense in the case of Mary Anning, since she was only twelve when she discovered the fossil of a great sea monster on the coast of England. This ichthyosaur would be just the first of hundreds of rare fossilized animals Anning would uncover over her lifetime.

But the road to her success is not an easy one. At the age of fifteen months, Mary survived a bolt of lightning which killed her nurse and two other girls. Her father, who encouraged her interest in fossils, died when Mary was just a girl. The children who should be her friends teased her, calling out, "Stone Girl, Bone Girl, Out-on-your-own Girl!" Despite these obstacles, Mary Anning pursued her passion for the past, paving the way for other scientists in the field of evolution.

If you dig (pardon the pun) that story, you might also be interested in two other versions of Mary Anning's story. Catherine Brighton's The Fossil Girl: Mary Anning's Dinosaur Discovery tells the story of Mary's discovery through graphic novel format, complete with frames and speech bubbles. Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon, written by Jeannine Atkins with pictures by Michael Dooling, presents a much more mysterious, shrouded England, offering the reader just the slightest glimpse of the actual ichthyosaur. The emphasis is more on Mary's determination to see the job through. Teachers might consider sharing all three versions with students to generate discussion about choices made by writers and illustrators alike.

If you're seeking a book aimed at more independent readers, look no further than Jane Goodall: Researcher Who Champions Chimps, written and illustrated by Mike Venezia. (This book is from Getting to Know the World's Greatest Inventors and Scientists, just one of the excellent biography series created by Venezia).

From her earliest childhood, Jane dreamed of traveling to Africa to study the animals of that continent. Jane's father was a race car driver, often absent from the home scene, so Jane and her mother would spend hours in the garden observing plants, insects, and small mammals. Later, when evacuated from London during the bombings of World War II, Jane spent time exploring the rocky cliffs and pine forests of Bournemouth. She and her friends even formed a nature club, where a favorite pursuit was racing snails. During this time she continued to feed her imagination with tales of Tarzan and Dr. Doolittle.

Eventually Jane traveled to Africa where she met the legendary Dr. Louis Leakey and his wife, Mary. Leakey assigned her the task of observing chimps in a remote area, previously unexplored by human beings. Goodall's discoveries about those creatures amazed even Leakey himself. Jane was one of the first scientists to observe, for example, that chimps created and used tools. Scientists had believed that only humans did this!

Jane Goodall: Researcher Who Champions Chimps differs from the other books listed here in one special way: it introduces students to many standard conventions of nonfiction text: bold words, captions, a glossary, and an index. For that reason, this book would serve as a terrific transitional text to more formal textbooks which students will be seeing as they progress through school.

An equally intrepid yet much less celebrated explorer of Africa is brought to life in Uncommon Traveler: Mary Kingsley in Africa, one of many fascinating biographies written and illustrated by Don Brown. Unlike Jane Goodall, Mary Kingsley experienced a childhood which was by all measures bleak and uninspiring: her mother was constantly bed-ridden, her father was habitually traveling, and her brother was simply absent (sent off to school, although he was younger than Mary). Mary's only companionship were the many books in her father's library, and she devoured them (though how she even learned to read was a mystery).

With the passing of her mother, Mary was finally free of all obligations. Her dream? To explore West Africa. At the time such an enterprise was unthinkable, for West Africa was a land hostile even to its own people. How could a woman, a single woman for that matter, survive? But survive she did. Mary battled crocs, swam with hippos (not intentionally!), tumbled from a ledge through a thatched roof, stumbled into a spike-filled animal trap, was thrown from a canoe, and survived all manner of insects and other discomforts. She not only lived to tell her tale, but to write it as well, in two books which became best sellers. Her collected specimens not only filled her own home, but the showcases of the British Museum of Natural History as well. Mary was thirty when her mother died, and passed away herself at age thirty-eight, yet she lived more in those eight years than most people do in a lifetime!

Discussing the Books

The following questions might prove useful in discussing any of these books with children:

• What are your interests? How might those interests affect what you choose to do for a living?
• What is success? How does a person become successful?
• What kinds of things might create obstacles, or problems, for someone who is trying to pursue their dreams?
• Did women always have the same opportunities as men? What were some jobs that women were expected to do? What were some jobs reserved for men alone?
• This book begins by telling us about _____'s childhood. Why do you think the author started there? 
• Was following her dream difficult? What made it so hard? Who or what may have encouraged her, and convinced her to continue?
• What is determination? How was it exemplified through _______'s actions?
• If this woman were alive today, what advice might she give us?
• Let's look again at the illustrations. How do they help us understand the story better? What information do the illustrations supply that the text doesn't? How did the book's illustrator know what these events looked like?
• What other information does the author provide?
• What questions do we still have about ___________?
• If ___________ were alive today, what would surprise her most about how the world has changed since her time?
• If we had to give __________ a nickname, what would we choose?

As a follow up activity, students could create a new book jacket for any of these books. You might even consider covering the book's actual cover while reading it aloud, and only uncovering it later once all students have completed their designs. At ReadWriteThink you'll find a nice interactive which explains the elements of a traditional picture book cover, and you can additionally have students create the entire book cover online (or just a cover or back) using the cool interactive Book Cover Creator. (Personally, I might have some parent helpers cut down some brown paper shopping bags, and use the reverse blank sides for the project; this would be a neat homage to Margaret E. Knight).

Online Explorations of Women in Science

Women's Adventures in Science features a cool look at real, live scientists practicing in their fields. Students can choose from Ten Scientists, and each is linked to a kid-friendly site featuring a biography, videos, games, and related links. These biographies are rich, and definitely made for the third grade and above crowd. As a class project, students could be paired and assigned a scientist to research using this site.

You'll also find an Interactive Timeline (1900 to present), which, while not well populated, definitely points out that the number of women in the fields of science has increased dramatically during the last century. The Ask It section allows students to pose their questions about science to real scientists. They can also browse answers to dozens of questions already asked. And, of course, a Games section!

Another terrific site to explore is PBS's very hip SciGirls, which is filled with projects, profiles, and videos featuring women in science. This site is awesome in that it helps students (okay, mostly the girls) realize that they, too, can be scientists, right now! (Note that site features a section which allows girls to interact socially, so standard precautions should be taken to address Internet safety issues). The Teacher's Overview provides a number of different approaches as well as additional resources for using the site.

I personally think a SciGirls Club sounds like a pretty awesome idea for a school or homeschool group, and this site would be a great place to start! Don't forget, though, to inspire your girls with some real-life role models, and those provided in the books I've shared are highly recommended.

Need one more? Cool interactive games to learn about inventions and inventors (including lots of women inventors!) can be found at Inventive Kids. No registration or annoying pop-ups, just easy-to-play games that teach as kids play
Looking for more on- and off-line explorations in science? Check out Exploring Invention with Picture Books at Teach with Picture Books. In addition to the dozen plus sites listed there, be sure to check out some terrific science bios written by author Kathleen Krull, a recent contributor to the Kidlit Celebrates Women's History Blog.

Editor's Note: Keith Schoch is a sixth grade Reading/Language Arts teacher in Bedminster, NJ. In addition to presenting workshops and writing teaching guides, Keith shares practical teaching tips through three blogs: Teach with Picture Books, How to Teach a Novel, and Teaching that Sticks.