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.
