Maybeck designed the palace and the water as a single picture, and the lagoon did as much work as the colonnade. It separated the art palace from the eight-palace main group, so visitors had to walk around one end of it. That was deliberate. When there was talk of building causeways across, Maybeck asked Director of Works H. D. H. Connick to stop it, and Connick "conveniently found it impossible to get hold of any money for the causeways" (Todd).
The planting around it was among John McLaren's best. Todd wrote that the inlets, capes and two small islands were planted so informally that they "seemed like the vestiges of some primeval swamp." There were even dead trees, left as nature might have left them, and walls of mesembryanthemum flanking the rotunda that looked like "green-clad, eternal cliffs." Visitors seldom saw the palace whole from across the water; Maybeck wanted it partly hidden. Gulls and mallards fed on the pool.
In front of the rotunda a massive altar rose from a ledge in the water, and Ralph Stackpole's kneeling figure tended its flame. Todd said that seen across the pool it "seemed more like a living person than any one of the other statues." Loan sculpture was placed along the margins, including Pratt's Whaleman at the north end and Anna Coleman Ladd's Wind and Spray in a sharp little bay at the south end, bordered with buttercups and calla lilies.
On the east bank ran the Avenue of Administration, lined with tall eucalypti that had already been growing on the site. Behind them rose the west walls of the Palaces of Education and Food Products, with their two great half-domes (Philosophy and Physical Vigor) and Charles Harley's archaeological niche sculptures facing the water.
The Palace and Lagoon he thought of and treated throughout as parts of one composition; neither one wholly effective without the other.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. LVIII (1921)
