Julia Morgan was born in Oakland and in 1894 graduated from the College of Civil Engineering at University of California, Berkeley, where she met architect Bernard Maybeck. She was the first women to graduate in architecture (1901) from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Morgan returned to the Bay Area and worked for John Galen Howard, the UC Berkeley campus architect. In 1905 she opened her own office in San Francisco and later moved her practice to Oakland. Morgan collaborated with architects Ira Wilson Hoover, Maybeck, and engineer Walter Steilberg. Morgan is well known for her residences, but she also designed numerous institutional buildings such as churches, schools, hospitals, university buildings, swimming pools and a series of YWCA buildings.