California was the host, and its building was the largest ever raised by a state at any exposition. The Exposition's chief of architecture, George W. Kelham, gave the design to T. H. F. Burditt, who drew on the California missions. There were solid belfry towers with bells hung in thick walls, sloping buttresses like those of Mission Carmel, and curtain walls with engaged columns like Mission Santa Barbara's. The Official Guide gives it five acres; one fact book puts it at about 350 by 675 feet, and seven acres counting its walled court and park.
It held three things. The western wing housed the Exposition's own government: President Charles C. Moore's offices, the directors' rooms, the chamber of the Superior Jury of Awards and the official dining room. The Woman's Board ran the Exposition's social life from here, and Todd called the building "the pivot and focal point" of that side of the fair. Its ballroom, 120 feet long, 55 wide and nearly 43 high, with Alhambra-style plasterwork, was open to the public for free afternoon dancing. The rest of the building, more than 152,000 square feet plus a 39,000-square-foot gallery, was filled with the exhibits of California's counties.
At its heart was the Forbidden Garden, a patio made from the cypress hedges of the old Harbor View baths, with a copy of a mission well-head. A statue of Father Junípero Serra looked down into it from a canopied niche. The building was dedicated on May 11, 1915, under the Bear Flag.
Junipero Serra, father of the California Missions, stood in a canopied niche, looking down into the Forbidden Garden.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, p. 322 (1921)
