What Does It Say on the Palace of Fine Arts
Historical Essay
by Gray Brechin, from "Sailing to Byzantium: The Architecture of the Fair" in The Anthroplogy of World's Fairs, edited by Burton Benedict)
The Palace of Fine Arts, 1915, soon later on its construction. Rebuilt in 1966
Photo: Shaping San Francisco
Palace of Fine Arts, final remnant of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, a world's off-white to show the world that San Francisco had completely recovered from the 1906 Earthquake and fire.
Photo: Fine art Peterson
A collection of contemporary reactions to and descriptions of Bernard Maybeck'southward Palace of Fine Arts, which is one of the Panama Pacific International Exhibition's few surviving structures. Additionally, Grey Brechin describes Maybeck's initial plan for the Exhibition, which would have included a mirroring construction called the Peace Palace.
Rivaled only past Mullgardt's Court of the Ages, the Palace of Fine Arts was the most honey building at the fair, its superbly evocative dazzler saving it from ultimate demolition. While the rest of the fair may have seemed an bamboozlement of eternity, Maybeck's Palace drew much of its success from a melancholic commemoration of the transitory. Frank Morton Todd wrote that "it represented the beauty and grandeur of the past. A curtilage enclosing nothing, a pillar without a roof, stairs that ended nowhere, a fane with a lone votary kneeling at a dying flame, fluted shafts that rose, half hid in vines, from the lush growth of an old swamp. . . . "(27) The elegiacal theme was, Todd too noted, inspired by Arnold Bocklin'due south moody painting "The Isle of the Dead," while the vocabulary of ruin is clearly taken from the visionary etchings of Piranesi. The melancholic theme-emphasized by the dark and irregular reflecting lagoon, the weeping maidens guarding caskets on the peristyle (meant to agree trees), and the intentional overgrowth that one time sprang from monumental planter boxes--is meant to express the sadness that both the artist and the viewer feel for the disability of even the greatest fine art to achieve perfection.(28)
The Palace was universally admired, despite the shocking liberties information technology took with the classical orders. Professor van Noppen of Columbia remarked that "the Palace of Fine Arts is so sublime, so majestic, and is the product of such imagination that it would have graced the age of Pericles,"(29) while Thomas Edison exclaimed, The architect of that building is a genius. At that place is not the equal anywhere on earth."(thirty) In succeeding years, the Palace became exactly what its creator had intended, a vast and decadent ruin whose garish colors bleached to sunset tones of russet and ochre. Asked in old age what he felt should be done nigh the collapsing Palace, Maybeck characteristically responded:
I remember the chief building should be torn downwards and redwoods planted effectually--completely around--the rotunda.... As they grow, the columns would slowly crumble at approximately the same speed. So I would similar to design an altar, with the figure of a maiden praying, to install in that grove of redwoods.... I should like my palace to die backside those keen trees of its own accord, and become its ain cemetery.(31)
It appears that the Palace of Fine Arts was meant to complement some other domed building to the south. Charcoal drawings in the Maybeck papers at Berkeley correspond to a "Peace Palace" that appears on the primeval cake plans of the Panama Pacific International Exposition and for which Maybeck prepared advanced schematics. Drawings include elevations, perspectives, and plans of a central-plan Palladian villa on a high arcaded podium connected to the Fine Arts lagoon by an axial puddle in a sunken garden. The earliest plans for the Palace of Fine Arts, in fact, bear witness a rectilinear, rather than naturalistic, lagoon extending south toward the projected Peace Palace. The sunken garden itself, it appears, would have been enclosed by John McLaren's living walls (flats of South African iceplant stacked vertically) to create a curious combination of Baroque formality and ruinous overgrowth. The building, probably meant to echo the Peace Palace so beingness built with Andrew Carnegie's funds in The Hague, was apparently scrapped at an early date for reasons of economy and replaced by a huge revenue-producing hotel, the Inside Inn.
Marina Boulevard looking westward towards Palace of Fine Arts, March 6, 1925.
Photograph: SFDPW, courtesy C. R. collection
Palace of Fine Arts
Photo: Chris Carlsson
Palace of Fine Arts sitting between a dominicus-emblazoned Pyramid downtown and the bucolic, restored Crissy Field and marsh in the foreground, 2009.
Photo: Chris Carlsson
Palace of Fine Arts roof punctuates view from Inspiration Point northeasterly towards Alcatraz and beyond.
Photo: Chris Carlsson
Footnotes
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Source: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Palace_of_Fine_Arts
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