The Machinery Palace closed the east end of the main axis the way the Palace of Fine Arts closed the west. Ward & Blohme modeled it on the Roman baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, with triple connected pediments on every face and long runs of cornice. Todd said it looked "immensely solid and enduring" and "successfully inhibited any disquieting thought of the ephemeral nature of the Exposition architecture." The entrance porches had lofty coffered vaults, and their columns rose from man-high friezes of figures working chain pulleys, gears, tongs and crucibles.
It was all wood. Todd calls it in cubic contents "one of the largest wooden structures ever erected." It took 7,500,000 ft of Douglas fir, 45,187 linear ft of piling and 1,447 tons of bolts, rods and small steel. Inside, nothing was hidden: the great barrel trusses stood exposed, "a huge webbing of timber and rods." Traveling cranes ran 50 ft up (two of 30 tons over the nave and one of 20 tons over each side aisle), and railroad tracks crossing the building beneath them let heavy machinery be set down almost anywhere.
It was the first palace started, with its contract let in January 1913, and it was completed on March 10, 1914, nearly a year before opening. That early completion made it useful. The painters of the courts' murals worked together in a studio set up inside it under Jules Guérin's direction. Finished colossal sculptures were stored there. In May 1914 it held the Ball of All Nations, watched over by the plaster giants of the Nations of the East. It was also the building in which Lincoln Beachey made what Todd calls the first indoor flight ever undertaken in an airplane.
Exhibits were about half foreign and half domestic, and nearly three hundred American exhibitors ran working machines. Electricity had so thoroughly won out that the steam boiler installed for exhibitors was never operated, and no compressed-air plant was built.
