The Walled City

At earlier American fairs, each great hall had been designed by its own architect and could be walked around and admired on its own. San Francisco did it differently. Eight of its exhibit palaces were joined into a single block behind one continuous, mostly blank outer wall, and they faced inward onto a chain of courts, like a walled Mediterranean town. The whole thing was painted from one palette and planted from one nursery. Todd put the difference this way: the work was divided among the architects "not … building by building, but court by court."

The setting

The site was a crescent of filled land on the south shore of the Golden Gate, about 2⅓ miles long (see The Story of the Fair for how it was assembled and filled). It fell into three parts. The amusement Zone was at the east end, from Van Ness Avenue to Fillmore Street. The main group of exhibit palaces, courts and gardens took up 244 acres in the middle. West of that, on Presidio land, lay the pavilions of the states and foreign nations, then the livestock section, the racetrack and the drill ground. The main group had the bay at its back. Visitors entered it from the city side at the Scott Street gate, through the South Gardens. Todd, who found it hard to overpraise the setting, said the domes recalled those of St. Sophia and the Mosque of Sultan Achmet, and that architects had never had a setting so noble.

The Architectural Commission

The plan was made by committee, and it worked well. In the summer of 1911 the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects balloted to suggest names. On August 4, 1911, the Exposition's directors appointed a preliminary advisory committee: William Curlett, John Galen Howard, Albert Pissis, Willis Polk and Clarence R. Ward. Curlett, Howard and Pissis soon resigned. From September 13, 1911, an Executive Architectural Council of three ran the work: Polk as chairman, Ward, and William B. Faville of Bliss & Faville. The Director of Works, H. D. H. Connick, sat in on their meetings.

In January 1912 the Council added national talent. It brought in Thomas Hastings of Carrère & Hastings, Henry Bacon, and McKim, Mead & White, all of New York, along with George W. Kelham and Louis Christian Mullgardt of San Francisco. Robert D. Farquhar of Los Angeles joined in February, and Arthur Brown Jr. of Bakewell & Brown came in as an associate. The rules were unusual. Commission members supplied pencil drawings only and were "not required to furnish any working drawings, structural designs, specifications." The engineers of the Division of Works did the rest. Members of the Council were paid $15,000 each, in six half-yearly installments. The sources don't fully agree on who counted as a member. The Official Guide omits Polk, and Mullgardt lists nine permanent members and treats Bakewell & Brown and Maybeck as "Exposition Architects" commissioned later.

The layout itself started with Edward H. Bennett, whom President Moore appointed on October 11, 1911, to prepare a block plan. About 150 plans and variations followed. Todd gives Bennett "much praise" for the plan finally adopted. He adds that the Commission members each drew their own block plans and that the result was "a composite of the best ideas of all of them." Mullgardt and Neuhaus credit Polk and Bennett jointly. The Commission first met in San Francisco from February 19 to 23, 1912. On the last day the members divided the courts and buildings among themselves. Todd says: "It was all done in fifteen minutes, in a most unselfish spirit." (His text dates the first conference to 1911, which the sequence of events shows must be a slip for 1912.) A second session in August 1912 brought in the new chiefs of sculpture and color. A final conference in December 1912 formally adopted the drawings. George W. Kelham had been made Chief of Architecture on August 22, 1912, to carry the design through construction.

Sources: Todd, vol. 1, chs. LVIII and LXI, and vol. 2, ch. V; Official Guide (1915); Condensed Facts. The eight palaces inside the wall (Education, Liberal Arts, Manufactures, Varied Industries, Mines and Metallurgy, Transportation, Agriculture and Food Products) had no single architect each. Faville designed their outsides, the court architects designed the walls facing their courts, and the Division of Works engineered the rest.

Court by court

The plan put eight palaces in two rows on an east–west axis, forming a solid rectangle. Three courts ran through its middle: the Court of the Universe at the center, the Court of Abundance to the east and the Court of the Four Seasons to the west. Two half-courts, the Courts of Flowers and of Palms, opened off the south wall. Between the palaces, narrow passages were themselves treated as courts. No gap between palaces was wider than 150 feet. The huge Palace of Machinery closed the east end of the group and the Palace of Fine Arts the west. In front of the wall, the Official Guide places Festival Hall at the east end of the South Gardens and the Palace of Horticulture at the west end. The Official Guide told visitors they could walk through all eight palaces and all five courts and "never set foot on a main boulevard."

Faville designed the wall that tied it all together. At the August 1912 session he presented his scheme for a "Walled City" and suggested the low, Byzantine-looking domes that crowned the palaces.

"Faville developed his scheme for the 'Walled City' effect he proposed to give the facade; following faithfully the old California mission adobe wall, blank for long distances, but plastered and topped with tile, to keep the rain from dissolving the sun-dried brick."

Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 1 (1921)

Todd describes the result as the fair "turned inside out," like "one great Oriental city, with the embellishment on the open courts." The walls rose about 65 feet, and the main domes were 100 feet across and 162 feet high. The ornament faced inward on the courts. The outer walls stayed plain, relieved by great portals, niches, and a 20-foot hedge of green ice plant along the south side.

The courts

The Court of the Universe. The central court, by McKim, Mead & White, was an ellipse about 712 by 520 feet, according to Todd. The Exposition's own Condensed Facts gives "700 feet long and 900 feet wide." Its east and west ends were closed by two wooden triumphal arches, the Arches of the Rising and the Setting Sun. Todd gives them as 157 feet high, or 188 feet to the top of their sculpture. They were topped by the colossal Nations of the East and Nations of the West. A sunken garden filled the middle. From its north side a Forecourt of Stars led out to the 185-foot Column of Progress on the bay, which W. S. Richardson designed from Calder's idea. See Sculpture and Murals.

The Tower of Jewels. Hastings designed the fair's centerpiece, which stood over the main entrance into the Court of the Universe. It rose 435 feet in stepped stages from a base 120 feet square set on 600 piles, and its arch rose 119 feet. Its 1,460-ton steel frame went up in 220 days. It cost $413,709, and about 102,000 cut-glass "jewels" hung on it, which gave the fair its nickname, the Jewel City (see Illumination). Not everyone admired it. Eugen Neuhaus complained that it lacked "oneness of conception" and that Berkeley's campanile looked taller although it was 133 feet shorter.

"One feels too much the stacking up of story after story … very much as a boy sets up blocks of diminishing size, one on top of the other, until he can go no further because there are no smaller blocks."

Eugen Neuhaus, The Art of the Exposition (1915), on the Tower of Jewels

The Court of Abundance. Mullgardt's court (first called the Court of the Ages) was about 340 feet across. It was crowned by the 219-foot Tower of Ages. Todd says "the hypercritical found fault" with its ornament. At night it came alive with steam and gas flames (see Illumination).

The Court of the Four Seasons. Henry Bacon, whom Todd identifies as the architect of the Lincoln Memorial, designed an octagon about 340 feet across, with a great half-dome and a broad central basin.

The Courts of Palms and Flowers. Kelham's two half-courts opened off the south wall. Each was marked by a slender Italian-style tower about 200 feet high; Todd gives 204 feet and Condensed Facts 200. Kelham's towers came in for criticism over their pink plaster patterning, which Barry's architect defended. Fraser's End of the Trail and Borglum's The Pioneer stood at the two court entrances.

The palaces

The eleven exhibit palaces covered just under 2.8 million square feet, over 64 acres, and cost $4,382,560, which works out to about $1.57 a square foot. They were built of wood on piles, a frame for the plaster skin. Todd's figures:

Source: Todd, vol. 2, ch. I.

Machinery. The biggest building on the grounds was Ward & Blohme's Palace of Machinery, 367 by 967 feet. The contract went to W. W. Anderson & Co. on January 7, 1913, and the building was finished by March 1914. Todd calls it, by cubic contents, "one of the largest wooden structures ever erected." Inside were three naves 75 feet wide and 101 feet high, with cross aisles 117 feet high. It took 7.5 million feet of Douglas fir and 1,447 tons of bolts, rods and steel. Lincoln Beachey once flew an airplane through it, which Todd calls the first indoor flight.

Horticulture. Bakewell & Brown's glass palace had a dome 152 feet in diameter and 185 feet high, built on 24 steel ribs with 47,000 square feet of glass. Todd notes that the dome of St. Peter's is 139 feet across inside and the Pantheon's 142. At night the dome was lit from inside with moving colored patterns.

Festival Hall. Farquhar's concert hall, at the east end of the South Gardens, had a dome 140 feet across with a lantern 221 feet above the ground. Built to seat 2,800, it was enlarged during the season to 3,782 and cost $276,968. Its great organ was later moved to the Exposition Auditorium.

Imitation travertine

The fair's buildings had to look like old stone in a new city. The idea came from W. S. Richardson of McKim, Mead & White at the August 1912 session. His model was the imitation-travertine plaster he knew from the interior of New York's Pennsylvania Station. The Exposition hired Paul E. Denivelle of New York, a specialist whose patents the work used; his name is spelled "Denneville" in the Official Guide and in Barry. Denivelle came to San Francisco late in 1912 and was put in charge of architectural modeling.

The material was "staff," a mix of plaster and fiber cast in molds and fixed to wooden frames. The plaster was a high-grade gypsum from Nephi, Utah. The pigments, chiefly Turkey raw umber, Italian burnt sienna and French ochre, were mixed in at the mill, and the Exposition tested every carload. Plain walls were stippled horizontally with a wide brush and then troweled, which left the streaky surface of travertine. For ornament, workmen poured lines of color into the molds from "veining cans with multiple nozzles." The same methods produced imitations of Numidian marble, red Siena and verde antique. Carded hemp from old rope held the casts together. Barry thought the result "so close to Travertine marble as to be almost indistinguishable."

Guérin's colors

The painter Jules Guérin was appointed Chief of Color on July 24, 1912. His instructions covered everything the visitor could see. He picked the tints of the walls, domes, columns and statuary, the pink of the sand on the paths, the colors of the flagpoles, the benches, the guards' khaki uniforms and even the garbage cans, which were painted a "travertine shade."

"In coloring a vast city of this kind, I treated it as I would a canvas for a picture. The first tonal value was the travertine, and on this travertine the other colors were applied; always having in mind the strong light of California, and keeping colors well toned down and mellow."

Jules Guérin, letter quoted in Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 1 (1921)

The Official Guide gave his palette as eight colors laid over "an old ivory tint, colored after the famous Travertine stone":

1. French green, for garden lattices
2. Deep cerulean blue, for recessed panels and vaulted ceilings
3. An orange-pink, for flagpoles
4. A pinkish red with a dash of brown, for the backgrounds of colonnades
5. Golden burnt orange, for small domes and moldings
6. Terra cotta, for the domes
7. Gold, for statuary
8. Verde antique, for urns and vases

Other writers counted differently. Todd names the working shades the painters used, including "dome green," "lattice green," "mud pink," "apron pink" and "wall red." Neuhaus distinguishes three greens, one of them an "abalone shell green" on the flagpole bases. They all agreed that there was no white. "No 'White City' would have been tolerable in the ardent California sun," Todd wrote, with a glance at Chicago's "White City" of 1893. The pink paths were made of Monterey beach sand roasted in a furnace. Guérin also directed the mural painters, who worked from five or six colors he gave them so that their canvases would sit in the walls. Some critics, Barry reported, thought the coloring "too pronounced. It reminded them of the theater."

Instant gardens

John McLaren, superintendent of Golden Gate Park, became the Exposition's landscape engineer in February 1912. He planted about seventy-four acres, much of it on ground that had been under water two years earlier. Visitors could not believe that the full-grown trees had been moved there, and Todd says they had to be told "gently and firmly." About 700 tall cypresses and eucalyptus were brought from Golden Gate Park and the Presidio in 1913. Each was root-boxed for four to six months before it was lifted, so that it could grow new roots in the box. About 350 palms came from Niles in 1914, and a hundred living orange trees came from Cloverdale for the Court of Abundance. The South Gardens alone took 600,000 bulbs. The Exposition's nursery was in Tennessee Hollow in the Presidio, and the grounds needed 55,000 cubic yards of loam and 30,000 of fertilizer.

McLaren's best-known trick was a living wall. Along the south front, from the Fillmore gate past the Scott Street entrance, he built a hedge about 20 feet high and more than 1,150 feet long. It was made of 8,700 shallow boxes of mesembryanthemum (ice plant) spiked vertically onto a timber frame, with sprinkler pipes along the top. The sources disagree on who thought of it. Barry says Faville proposed a wall of ivy in boxes and McLaren substituted the ice plant, and Condensed Facts calls it a Bliss & Faville design carried out by McLaren. Todd puts the total cost of the landscaping at $620,784 in one place and $597,535 in another.

Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts

The Palace of Fine Arts was first assigned to Willis Polk. At the August 1912 conference Polk showed the Commission charcoal sketches of a domed rotunda rising from a lake in front of a curving colonnade. Then he told them the sketches were by Bernard R. Maybeck. The Commission adopted the design unanimously, and Polk handed the building to Maybeck.

It was a different kind of building from anything else at the fair. A curving gallery, about 950 feet along its arc by Todd's measure (the Official Guide and Condensed Facts say 1,100 feet), held the art exhibition. It was framed in steel, unlike the wooden palaces. In front of it, across a lagoon, stood an open colonnade and a great domed rotunda, which served as a sculpture loggia. On top of the colonnade stood rows of tall boxes. At their corners were Ulric Ellerhusen's women, who faced inward so that visitors saw only their backs.

"These were certain tall chests, or coffers, paneled with colored staff, with women standing at the corners, looking in and possibly weeping, though you could not be sure, for their faces were averted and you saw but their backs."

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

Maybeck explained himself in a small book published in 1915. He said the right feeling for an art museum was melancholy, and he cited the engravings of Piranesi for "the sad, minor note of old Roman ruins."

"Summing up my general impression, I find that the keynote of a Fine Arts Palace should be that of sadness modified by the feeling that beauty has a soothing influence."

Bernard R. Maybeck, Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon (1915)

The sources disagree about Arnold Böcklin's painting Isle of the Dead. Barry reports that Maybeck said the painting started his thinking, and Mullgardt repeats it as hearsay. In his own booklet, however, Maybeck mentions the picture mostly to say that it was "overdone in sadness for an art gallery frontispiece."

That the palace survived when everything else came down was partly luck and partly construction. In August 1915 a preservation committee concluded that nothing in the main group could be saved. The Fine Arts Palace was different, Todd explains, because it was built partly of steel and cement and stood on government land. Its admirers kept it open after closing day, and the San Francisco Art Association took it over in 1916. The exhibition it housed is covered in The Art Exhibition, and its later rebuilding in What Survived.

What the critics said

The architecture was widely admired in 1915, though not without reservations. S. S. McClure said the Exposition seemed to "belong to its locality." A Columbia professor thought the Palace of Fine Arts "would have graced the age of Pericles." John D. Barry's City of Domes is written as a walk with an unnamed architect, and that architect spoke freely. He called the Tower of Jewels "barbaric and crude" and said it encouraged "a liking for what I call messy art." He also thought the green marbling on the Fine Arts columns looked like linoleum. Todd, loyal as he was, conceded that "logical criticism might peck at" Maybeck's palace "and find faults of irrelevance and superfluity." Almost everyone agreed with his main point: the court plan made the Exposition, as he put it, look "like a picture in three dimensions."

Sources

• Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (1921): vol. 1, chs. XXXII–XXXIII (setting; block plan), LVII–LXIII (the Commission; the building plans; gardens), LXIX, LXXI ("Coloring a City," including Denivelle and Guérin); vol. 2, chs. I (areas and costs), V (special structural features), L–LVIII (the courts, Tower and architecture); vol. 5, ch. XXIII (preservation).
• Official Guide of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), sections on architecture and the color scheme.
• Condensed Facts Concerning the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (c. 1914–15).
• John D. Barry, The City of Domes (San Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1915).
• Louis Christian Mullgardt, The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1915).
• Bernard R. Maybeck, Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1915).
• Eugen Neuhaus, The Art of the Exposition (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1915).