Julia Morgan Memorial

In the backyard of a turn-of-the-century house along The Presidio Wall, we designed an ode to the architect of the residence: beloved Bay Area architect Julia Morgan. Drawing from Morgan’s own legacy of creating harmonic relationship between interior and exterior, we pulled inspiration also from the Ohlone Tribe’s tradition of building, where communal space was created within the land itself.

Pulling the sloped land up into a soft, grassy knoll, the view from the top of the hill overlooks the water and distant mountains of the San Francisco Bay. Embedded into the hill, following the natural slope of the land, is a path lined with wood shingles, which collects in a 9-foot-deep space marked by a single, central tree. The gentle grade allows for countless degrees of communion with the landscape and the experience of the natural layers of earth, flora, and sky from an embedded space within the ground.

Year: 2015
Location: Pacific Heights, San Francisco, CA
Square Footage: 1,800
Typology: Memorial / Land Art