Sara Boutelle Dies; Rediscovered Work of Architect Julia Morgan

Sara Boutelle, an architectural historian and author who rediscovered the work of Julia Morgan, the architect who designed Hearst Castle in San Simeon, and brought it to wide public notice, has died.

Boutelle was 90 when she died Wednesday at a hospital in Santa Cruz.

Born in Aberdeen, S.D., and educated at Mt. Holyoke College, the Sorbonne and Hamburg University, Boutelle taught architecture at the Brearley School in New York City from 1946 until her retirement in 1974.

Her interest in Morgan began in 1957, when she visited San Simeon and learned that the castle had been built by an architect she had never heard of and that the architect was a woman. That discovery fueled a driving interest in Morgan and her work, and it brought Boutelle to live in Northern California after her retirement from Brearley.

Investigating Morgan’s life was not to be a simple task, however, because Morgan, shortly before her death at 85, had destroyed all of her papers, drawings and office records. She rationalized her action in the belief that “since architecture is a visual, not a verbal art,” her buildings should “speak for themselves.”

There was also little on Morgan in standard architectural references, so Boutelle pieced together the life of the woman she referred to as her “elusive pioneer” through oral histories and by gathering documents from the archives of Morgan’s clients and other sources.

She discovered that Morgan had the longest career on record--1904 to 1951--for a woman architect in charge of her own firm. She found that the San Francisco-born Morgan graduated with a degree in engineering from UC Berkeley and was the first woman allowed to study architecture at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. And she learned that Morgan had designed more than 800 buildings--an output rivaling that of Frank Lloyd Wright.

One of Morgan’s earliest clients was the philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst. With her, Morgan worked on several buildings in Berkeley.

Her career accelerated, as did the careers of other architects, after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. An early commission was the rebuilding of the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco. She got the commission for the hotel after the architect first hired for the job, Stanford White, was murdered at Madison Square Garden in New York City by Harry K. Thaw, the jealous husband of showgirl Evelyn Nesbit.

Boutelle was able to locate several Morgan buildings in Berkeley, including the Women’s City Club, St. John’s Presbyterian Church and the Hearst Memorial Gymnasium. In Pacific Grove, she found that the Asilomar Conference Center was designed by Morgan.

Morgan created homes in the Craftsman tradition, and many of them are considered treasures. “Before designing a house for someone,” Boulle said, Morgan “would visit the family, often sitting on the floor with the children, and make every attempt to understand what the client wanted, however quirky.”

Morgan would concentrate on the plan after gathering such information, designing the building from “the inside out,” with the exterior supposedly of secondary importance.

“Morgan delighted,” Boutelle said, “in the purposeful variation of scale. She used vaulted ceilings or left trusses open to extend the height of even small rooms, and favored open plans that created a feeling of expansiveness, while sometimes juxtaposing the openness with an enclosed recess to give a sense of shelter and privacy.”

The main building and guest houses at San Simeon, the work she is best known for, contain 127 rooms--58 bedrooms, 49 baths, 18 sitting rooms and two libraries--plus two swimming pools, one of them indoors.

Servants’ quarters adjoined the main complex, and there was a zoo.

During construction, it was not uncommon to see the diminutive Morgan climbing scaffolding to direct the workmen at San Simeon.

She took other commissions for William Randolph Hearst as well, including the Herald Examiner building, a Los Angeles landmark.

Boutelle’s book was published in 1988 and received generally favorable reviews. Thomas Hines, writing in The Times, called it “a seminal study [that] will provide the essential base for all future work on Morgan and her world.”

A Smith College art professor who knew Boutelle said her book was “indispensable because before that [Morgan] was virtually an unknown to all but a handful of architectural historians.”

Boutelle’s book was awarded the California Book Award Silver Medal in 1989. After its publication, Boutelle turned her attention to lecturing and architectural preservation. In 1991, she was made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, the highest award the organization gives to someone who is not in the profession.

Boutelle is survived by three sons, Christopher, of Los Angeles, William, of West Chesterfield, Mass., and Jonathan, of Santa Cruz; a sister, Mary Holmes, of Santa Cruz; and six grandchildren.

Boutelle was a firm guardian of the legacy of the underappreciated Morgan.

“To people who ask me about ‘Julia,’ I say they may first-name her only if they refer to Frank Lloyd Wright as ‘Frank,’ ” Boutelle wrote with an indignant sniff.