Morgan took a degree in civil engineering at Berkeley, then became the first woman admitted to the architecture section of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the first to leave it with a certificate, in 1902. Two years later she was the first woman licensed to practise architecture in California. Her engineering training decided her material: she built in reinforced concrete when almost nobody in California did, and when her unreinforced-masonry contemporaries lost their buildings in 1906 hers stood. Over roughly forty-five years she produced some seven hundred works — YWCA buildings, women's clubs, churches, schools, houses, and the long campaign at San Simeon for William Randolph Hearst. She kept no publicity office, gave no interviews, and destroyed her drawings on retirement. The AIA gave her its Gold Medal in 2014, the first woman to receive it, fifty-seven years after her death.
