The Fine Arts palace was the exposition's surprise. Willis Polk had been given the art building, but at the Architectural Commission's August 1912 conference he pinned up charcoal sketches of a domed loggia rising from a lake before a curving colonnade. Nobody in the room could look at anything else. When they asked where the idea came from, Polk said the drawings were Bernard Maybeck's, and that he wanted Maybeck to carry the design out under his own name. The commission agreed without dissent.
Maybeck's theme was the mortality of grandeur. The official historian Frank Morton Todd described it as the beauty of the classical world seen through its ruin, arranged the way Piranesi arranged his broken columns: a colonnade with no roof, a cloister that enclosed nothing, stairs that led nowhere. Tall chests topped the peristyle, with Ulric Ellerhusen's women standing at the corners, faces turned away, looking in. Nobody could say whether the chests held something precious or something sad, and that uncertainty became one of the enduring images of the fair. Maybeck treated the building and the lagoon as one composition, with the palace as a backdrop to water and trees.
The functional part was more ordinary, and far safer. Because the galleries held millions of dollars of borrowed art, the curving exhibit hall was one of the few steel-framed buildings on the grounds: three-hinged steel arches of 131-ft span set 36 ft apart, with cement-plaster walls only about 2.5 inches thick. The loggia and colonnade in front were wood and staff. Inside, 120 galleries held 11,403 works from 13 national sections plus an International Section. An annex built to the west for the overflow held the Futurists and Cubists, who gave fairgoers something to argue about on the ferry home.
The open rotunda, which Todd called the Temple of Sculpture, stood on a tongue of land pushing east into the lagoon. It sheltered Paul Wayland Bartlett's equestrian Lafayette, and the peristyle doubled as an outdoor sculpture gallery, which the Official Guide calls a first for an exposition. Eighteen searchlights on the palace roofs across the lagoon lit it at night, one 30-inch lamp on the dome, so that the reflected colonnade trembled in the water.
Todd said there was a "stronger and more widely popular demand for its preservation than for that of any other Exposition structure." It was one of the few structures the exposition held back from the sale of its buildings, with the California Building and the Column of Progress, and it reopened as a gallery on January 1, 1916.
A cloister enclosing nothing, a colonnade without a roof, stairs that ended nowhere, a fane with a lonely votary kneeling at a dying flame.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. LVIII (1921)
