San Francisco What Is in the Palace of Fine Arts
Historical Essay
by Grayness Brechin, from "Sailing to Byzantium: The Compages of the Off-white" in The Anthroplogy of World's Fairs, edited by Burton Bridegroom)
The Palace of Fine Arts, 1915, soon after its construction. Rebuilt in 1966
Photo: Shaping San Francisco
Palace of Fine Arts, terminal remnant of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, a world'southward fair to show the globe that San Francisco had completely recovered from the 1906 Earthquake and fire.
Photograph: Art Peterson
A collection of contemporary reactions to and descriptions of Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts, which is one of the Panama Pacific International Exhibition's few surviving structures. Additionally, Grayness Brechin describes Maybeck's initial plan for the Exhibition, which would have included a mirroring structure called the Peace Palace.
Rivaled only by Mullgardt's Courtroom of the Ages, the Palace of Fine Arts was the most beloved building at the fair, its superbly evocative dazzler saving it from ultimate demolition. While the residual of the off-white may have seemed an bamboozlement of eternity, Maybeck's Palace drew much of its success from a melancholic commemoration of the transitory. Frank Morton Todd wrote that "information technology represented the beauty and grandeur of the past. A cloister enclosing zip, a colonnade without a roof, stairs that ended nowhere, a fane with a lonely votary kneeling at a dying flame, fluted shafts that rose, half hid in vines, from the lush growth of an old swamp. . . . "(27) The elegiacal theme was, Todd as well noted, inspired by Arnold Bocklin's moody painting "The Isle of the Dead," while the vocabulary of ruin is clearly taken from the visionary etchings of Piranesi. The melancholic theme-emphasized by the dark and irregular reflecting lagoon, the weeping maidens guarding caskets on the peristyle (meant to hold trees), and the intentional overgrowth that in one case sprang from monumental planter boxes--is meant to express the sadness that both the artist and the viewer feel for the inability of fifty-fifty the greatest art to reach perfection.(28)
The Palace was universally admired, despite the shocking liberties it took with the classical orders. Professor van Noppen of Columbia remarked that "the Palace of Fine Arts is then sublime, so regal, and is the product of such imagination that information technology would take graced the age of Pericles,"(29) while Thomas Edison exclaimed, The architect of that building is a genius. There is non the equal anywhere on globe."(30) In succeeding years, the Palace became exactly what its creator had intended, a vast and decadent ruin whose garish colors bleached to dusk tones of russet and ochre. Asked in old age what he felt should be washed about the collapsing Palace, Maybeck characteristically responded:
I recall the main building should be torn down and redwoods planted effectually--completely around--the rotunda.... As they grow, the columns would slowly crumble at approximately the same speed. And so I would like to design an altar, with the figure of a maiden praying, to install in that grove of redwoods.... I should similar my palace to die behind those great trees of its ain accord, and become its own cemetery.(31)
It appears that the Palace of Fine Arts was meant to complement another domed edifice to the south. Charcoal drawings in the Maybeck papers at Berkeley correspond to a "Peace Palace" that appears on the earliest block plans of the Panama Pacific International Exposition and for which Maybeck prepared advanced schematics. Drawings include elevations, perspectives, and plans of a cardinal-programme Palladian villa on a high arcaded podium connected to the Fine Arts lagoon by an axial pool in a sunken garden. The earliest plans for the Palace of Fine Arts, in fact, show a rectilinear, rather than naturalistic, lagoon extending south toward the projected Peace Palace. The sunken garden itself, it appears, would have been enclosed by John McLaren's living walls (flats of South African iceplant stacked vertically) to create a curious combination of Baroque formality and ruinous overgrowth. The building, probably meant to echo the Peace Palace then existence built with Andrew Carnegie'due south funds in The Hague, was apparently scrapped at an early on date for reasons of economy and replaced by a huge revenue-producing hotel, the Within Inn.
Marina Boulevard looking westward towards Palace of Fine Arts, March 6, 1925.
Photo: SFDPW, courtesy C. R. collection
Palace of Fine Arts
Photograph: Chris Carlsson
Palace of Fine Arts sitting between a sun-emblazoned Pyramid downtown and the bucolic, restored Crissy Field and marsh in the foreground, 2009.
Photo: Chris Carlsson
Palace of Fine Arts roof punctuates view from Inspiration Point northeasterly towards Alcatraz and beyond.
Photo: Chris Carlsson
Footnotes
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Source: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Palace_of_Fine_Arts
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