Palace of Fine Arts

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 the only major building the exposition held back from sale, 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.

Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2 (1921), ch. LVIII

At a glance

• Cost: $580,000 (Official Guide; Condensed Facts).
• Gallery frame: three-hinged steel arches of 131-ft span, 36 ft on centers, about 25 tons each, erected in halves (Todd vol. 2).
• Smaller colonnade columns stood 47 ft 5 in overall, the larger ones 55 ft; the tallest columns anywhere on the grounds stood inside the rotunda at 56 ft 9 in (Todd vol. 2).
• Reid's eight dome murals sat in coffers 7 ft deep; the Official Guide gives the panels as 12 by 26 ft.
• The fine-arts exhibition held 11,403 works in 120 galleries; the United States filled 72 of them, about 65 to 70 percent of the building (Todd vol. 4).
• Frederick Carl Frieseke won the Grand Prize in the U.S. section for a group of paintings led by 'Summer' (Todd vol. 4).
• General contractor J. D. Hannah; the steel was erected by J. G. Williams & Co. (Todd vol. 2).
• From mid-May to mid-September 1916 the preserved palace drew more than 47,000 visitors, about 400 a day (Todd vol. 5).

Afterward

Kept after the fair. The San Francisco Art Association ran it as a gallery from 1916, and Congress authorized conveying the Presidio land under it to the University of California (Todd, 1920). The staff-and-wood rotunda and colonnade decayed over the following decades. In 1964 everything but the exhibit hall's steel frame was demolished, and the palace was rebuilt in poured concrete between 1964 and 1967, with the colonnade's end pylons added in 1973–74. The Exploratorium used the hall from 1969 to 2013, and the Palace of Fine Arts Theater opened in 1970. The lagoon and rotunda were restored and seismically retrofitted around 2009–10. It is the only exposition structure still standing on its original site.

Sources

• Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. V (structure), ch. LVIII (description, dimensions)
• Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 1, ch. LXI (Polk and Maybeck at the August 1912 conference)
• Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 4, chs. IV–V (sculpture garden, galleries, 11,403 works)
• Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 5, chs. XXXV, XXXVIII (post-exposition use and preservation)
• Official Guide of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), The Exhibit Palaces; Exposition Sculpture; Murals
• Condensed Facts concerning the PPIE (1915), Area and cost table
• Wikipedia: Palace of Fine Arts, 1964–74 reconstruction, Exploratorium, retrofit