Fabricated Ruins: 
The Palace of Fine Arts and the Californian Dream




“No more land! We can't go any further 
‘cause there ain't no more land!”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road

	I am writing to determine what it is about the Palace of Fine Arts which led Reyner Banham to remark: “I went to see it more or less on a ‘duty’ list of San Francisco monuments and was staggered by an impact, comparable to that of the Basilica of Maxentius.” Bernard Maybeck begins his pamphlet, Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon (1915): “In discussing a subject such as that of making plans for a World's Fair, it is necessary to assume that the hearers admit there are mental processes not to be expressed in language.”1 He omits the Palace’s construction, referring only to its effects upon the mind. Stone and wood relate to architecture as keys and strings to music. What compels an architect to say this? What crumbling testament to Californian endurance could he build, which led us for a century to preserve it?

	Maybeck spent his earliest years as a furniture-maker’s apprentice in Greenwich Village, then to the École des Beaux-Arts at nineteen. He went by Ben. There, in the atelier of Louis-Jules André, he learned the heft of form. He made a neat drawing on clean Whatman paper. “Beautiful,” André said; “Now study it.” Maybeck wondered what he meant. André worked over the lines with a soft pencil until the paper was black.3 T-squares, rulers and calipers practically disappear from Maybeck’s work thereafter. He planned according to a French principle: if the form “were reduced in scale to the size of a golden brooch…in Venetian cloisonné jewelry, that brooch thus made would pass as the regular thing in jewelry without causing the suspicion that it represented a plan for a World’s Fair.” It is a temple borne of space and mass rubbed, erased, and molded, a hand-hewn stage set in classical balance. Frank Morton Todd deemed this costume-jeweled manse “the most divinely beautiful building ever reared in America.”4 How could a vainer aim yield a nobler form?

	Predictably, Maybeck was excluded from the planning board and rejected from all competitions. He’d never so much as built a warehouse. He was fifty and destitute. At the pleading of his wife, his former student Willis Polk hired him as a draftsman. Polk chaired the board. Displeased with his design, he held an in-house competition for the most important building of the fair. He awarded Maybeck the job on the basis of a single charcoal drawing. His wife held, more realistically, that Polk was too busy to do the job himself. He set to cast Piranesi’s etchings of Roman ruin. From every angle men wither, worlds molder, outlines marred by sure hands. Beauty alone endures, time-stripped of its maker. He set the Palace behind a bog which Polk had planned to cover, and carved from the bog a lagoon. It gathers and reflects a light—at plum dusk and red dawn, in clearness and in haze—which moves “sadness to content.”5 It was, after all, a fair. Gloom would not serve its goers. Funds denied a bridge; you take an oblique and winding way around the shore, between hot columns and under cool trees. In his later years Maybeck would cite the absence of a straight path to the Palace as the reason for its success.

	It is among the last buildings erected for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and the only one which survives. The fair celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal and the city’s recovery from the earthquake and fire nine years prior. It saw 19,000,000 people in ten months, among them Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Charlie Chaplin and the Liberty Bell. Funds comprised six million dollars in donations, five million in state bonds, and five million in city taxes. Engineers lay a 635-acre site from bay mud flats where the posh Marina now stands; if not for the fair, the district would not exist. The Palace was a transient space of transient stuff, plaster and burlap on a frame of laths intended as respite from the strain of galleries and popcorn barkers. Upon seeing it, Thomas Edison declared that “The man that designed that building is a genius.”6 It is as popular now as it then was: it is always a strenuous and usually an impossible task to contemplate the most divinely beautiful building ever reared in America without appearing in the background of a wedding or family photo. People walk through this staid suspension of boom and waste as they have done for a century, wondering at the folly of men and the brevity of life with ice cream in hand.

	It is a Greek temple in the Roman style: a 100-foot rotunda (never mind that the Greeks did not have domes) held by eight Corinthian columns and framed by colonnades arcing toward a 1100-foot pergola. Planter boxes mount them. Weeping women mount each corner. Maybeck wanted vines watered by their tears and ringed by redwoods; funds allowed for neither. At each corner of the attic stands a large and largely nude woman peering inward with arms akimbo and offering a sotto in sù of her buttocks. Broken pediments cap the niches, with clay urns above and behind. Beneath and around the dome, battle friezes in Greek relief by Bruno Zimm. Behind it a crescent-shaped gallery of 114 concrete rooms, from Renaissance to (to public horror) Futurist. The trash cans and fire alarms were painted ochre.

	Cypress, acacia, and willow line and shroud the temple. It is a dignity overgrown and gone in the teeth, a Versailles half-marble and half-shrub. A brief bright smell of lilies and a mute play of swans about the lagoon strays the senses from children and cars. Plaster allowed for any finish, hewn stucco or smooth marble, but doomed the whole to rot. Signatures were gathered (33,000) and money solicited ($350,000) to preserve it before the Exposition closed in December. The original demand was its duplication in Golden Gate Park. Phoebe Hearst—William’s mother—led the effort. When the fair cleared, the Palace alone was spared. A visitor remarked that it was impossible not to see it aright:7 even as it cracks, placid blues above and wavering shades about relieve the form from its tautness. The city sent armed guards to prevent demolition. Maybeck insisted that it was the most he could have done to build something that wouldn’t get in the way of the water and trees; all else “the public was bribed to like.”8 Once, in Paris, mounting a white sheet, André stopped his pen: “You will never do better.”9

	Professional criticism was as unanimous as public support. Architects used a two-slide technique to expose the influence of one building upon another. The whole begged the very origin of European architecture but reflected no particulars: the columns are squat and piers lanky, the proportions are nearly Greek and the forms nearly Roman, the radius is not the rotunda but the lagoon, so that the Palace seems to widen into water. The stage-set classicism was tawdry enough to belie Maybeck’s Beaux-Arts training and eclectic enough to resist recognition. However sound the Palace seemed “on the ground,” there was “nothing to show on the other screen.”12 Form did not follow form. Others, with better intention and worse consequence, argued that precisely because the form was meant to spoil, it should not be judged by permanent standards. But despite its brevity, the form is as sound as any classical or modern ideal: what led Banham to proclaim the Palace, on the basis of these corpulent ladies, crafted friezes and curving colonnades, “the truest ancestor on American soil of Mies van der Rohe's essential buildings of the 1950s”? Only “the discipline of their use and location”:10 as Mies structures form around its negative details, so Maybeck builds a ruin that he may center the land around.

	He wrote, in a 1957 telegram to Governor Knight, that “The Palace of Fine Arts is probably the last of the traditional pieces of architecture to survive the modern age.”11 He died that year. Public opinion held that the ruin should remain one permanently. Maybeck held that “the main building should be torn down and redwoods planted around—completely around—the rotunda. Redwoods grow fast, you know. And as they grow, the columns of the rotunda would slowly crumble, at approximately the same speed. Then I would like 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 behind those great trees of its own accord, and become its own cemetery.”12

The San Francisco Art Association maintained the Palace. It was a city park after World War One. It became a Park Department warehouse, then a phone book distribution center, then a flag and tent depot, then a fire station. Statues fell and murals faded; the W.P.A. commissioned artists to repair it. Vines grew to cover the planters left bare. The weeping women were meant to represent the subjection of Art to materialism. Vandals beheaded them. The gallery held eighteen lighted tennis courts from 1934 to 1942. The Army used it as a motor pool during World War Two. It crumbled. The city fenced it off as a public hazard. In 1959, the state offered $2 million for restoration if San Francisco would match it. The city faltered. A philanthropist, Walter Johnson, donated and did not stop donating until his death in 1978. He wed his wife Mabel the year before the exposition; the Palace was their favorite spot. The contract was signed in 1964. 

	Molds were made of every detail, concrete casts of every form. Steel l-beams held the Palace. It cost ten times the original. It opened with several days of “concerts, folk dances, organ recitals, films, lectures, and sound-and-light shows” in 1967,13 ten years after Maybeck’s death. A theatre was built behind it, an echo of the gallery. It has hosted everyone from Timothy Leary to Henry Kissinger and Akira Kurosawa to the Clancy Brothers, everything from the 1976 Presidential Debate to the Cerebral Palsy Telethon. It was a slated homeless quarantine during the shelter-in-place orders of 2020; after a few too many press releases with thread-and-tape floor mats and nary a bathroom in sight, the city reneged. It is a monument to 107 years of industry misnamed, pragmatism misplaced, and fortune misspent.

	Maybeck concludes his pamphlet with his belief that the Palace expresses “the life of the people of California” and has California as “its geographic reason for being.” The form could not have held “in Boston or in India”14 because it echoes what holds it. But this seems odd. The prior twelve pages describe it as a sad lone ruin, deliberately excluding mention of place or time. Why the abrupt transition from ephemeral gloom to permanent glory? One has only to see the Palace to know that ruin is as much the limit of its survival as its condition. No wonder Maybeck wanted redwoods planted around the columns, which would grow at the same rate that they crumbled. The frontispiece is a marble Muse finding the head of Orpheus, who charmed stones with his music and coaxed cannibals to live on fruit. Art in its purest form was for him abstinence from murder. For all the dreams which Maybeck sets in stone, above the facts of life which help and hinder mere survival, this dream is survival. This is indeed a very a Californian belief: that survival lay in one’s doomed commitments, in one’s attempt, like Orpheus, to retrieve the dead, which slip inasmuch as we try to seize them. It is a wagon-trail pathos, with removal the only panacea one has to employ against time. A four-panel mural depicted the birth of Art on the dome’s underside. It begins with the four golds of California: wheat, citrus, poppies, and gold. Each has seen its crisis. The panels end with a Ming legend of earth wresting visions from air. The dream endures; the forms by which we hold it do not. 

	It is not these—not “the object or the likeness to the object” which Maybeck sought—but “a portrayal of the life that is behind the visible.”15 It is a specious stubbornness which takes as much stock in the dream as it denies the forms by which one holds it, a deliberate doggedness which sets its sights to the far and wide for fear that basements would burn and skyscrapers fall about one's ears. All cures and no disease to belie them. The colonnade bears nothing, the rotunda shelters no one. Todd could not see the Palace “without feeling an onrush, an assault, of ideas. And they were not orthodox ideas, no conventional, parlor ideas, but rough, brutal, Darwinian, evolutionary ones.”16 The men fight and muse, the women hold and mourn. It is a peculiarly Western incapability of sundering design from dream. In the rest of the country people know that if yours doesn’t grow where it’s planted, it begs a new frontier. Precisely because California is the culmination of that perpetual clean slate, people stay because nowhere else remains. When there is no more land to cross, you settle or go backward. 

Many a Californian has explained to me something about the will to move on and endure. I had always taken it as a will to flee and forgo, and still cannot distinguish between the two. Louis Mullgardt, a member of the planning commission, recalled as many San Franciscans who foresaw a renaissance of the city on the eve of its destruction as those who “hastily bade farewell to the still smoking ruins of the City That Was, firmly believing that it should remain forever buried in its own ashes.”17 It is a frontier ethic which resorts to optimism in the trails and cannibalism in the passes, bearing children and planting wheat in the troughs with no time and space apart for rest and remembrance. While one forgets the nearness of everyday things amid these urns and yews, they stand only that the everyday may hold.

	Maybeck knew that “the artist began his work a long time ago in a nebulous haze of whys”18 and he must work a long time before he realizes that he does not seize the object at all but the reason he wrought it. An architect finds beauty as readily in the face of wood as a painter does the face of man. He confessed that he had never been an architect, that he had only liked one line better than another. The Palace was borne of lines smudged, smeared, and sculpted; like the Basilica of Maxentius it betrays the clean of the chisel only from afar, and even then blurred in fog. Todd writes that if we could “stand there a hundred years while swamp growth swathed its piers and plinths, while willows and acacias choked its portals, grasses dug into its urns and ivy over-ran its cornices and dimmed its lines,” the beauty would hold “above all other physical possessions.”19 None would see it now and think him wrong. It bears the worlds of fact and dream alike, elevating brute survival above the forces which would threaten it. But it is as much a dream that one can endure only in decay as that one can endure apart from decay. It is by its ruin that this monument to Californian survival still stands. 

This is the reason for its hold, and is itself the dream, and as a dream an illusion. The real causes of Californian survival—eastern commerce, federal subsidies, native genocides—were clean absent from the Palace and subsequent accounts. Although it commanded the most support of the fair, no artwork garnered more applause than James Earle Fraser’s The End of the Trail. It depicts an Indian with endurance worn and bowed; he, on a horse as weary as he, searches in vain for a clear path. No wonder that a monument to Western self-reliance should evoke the ruins of Rome. Where else remains to go?


Endnotes

1 Reyner Banham, “The Plot against Bernard Maybeck,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 43, no. 1 (1984): 37.
2 Bernard Maybeck, Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon, introduction by Frank Morton Todd (San 
Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1915), 4.
3 Peterson, Charles E. “A Visit with Bernard Maybeck,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 11, no. 3 (1952): 31.
4 Maybeck, vii.
5 Sara Denise Shreve, “A History Worth Saving: The Palace of Fine Arts and the Interpretation of History on a Reconstructed Site,” MA diss. Cornell University, 2006, 7.
6 Keith L. Eggener, “Maybeck’s Melancholy: Architecture, Empathy, Empire and Mental Illness at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” Winterthur Portfolio 29, 4 (1994): 218.
7 Banham, 36.
8 Richard Reinhardt, “Bernard Maybeck,” American Heritage 32, no. 5 (1981).
9 Ben Macomber, “The Palace of Fine Arts and its Exhibit, with Awards” in The Jewel City, San Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1915.
10 Ibid., 37.
11 Shreve, 76.
12 Ibid., 75.
13 Reinhardt.
14 Maybeck, 13.
15 Eggener, 217.
16 Ibid., 221.
17 Alexander Ortenberg, “Joy in the Act of Drawing: Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 1 (2011): 42.
18 Maybeck, 6. 
19 Ortenberg, 40. 



Works Cited

Banham, Reyner. “The Plot against Bernard Maybeck.” Journal of the Society of Architectural 
Historians 43, no. 1 (1984): 33-37.

Eggener, Keith L. Maybeck’s Melancholy: Architecture, Empathy, Empire and Mental Illness at 
the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.” Winterthur Portfolio 29, 4 (1994): 
211-226.

Peterson, Charles E. “A Visit with Bernard Maybeck.” Journal of the Society of Architectural 
Historians 11, no. 3 (1952): 30-31.

Macomber, Ben. “The Palace of Fine Arts and its Exhibit, with Awards” in The Jewel City. San 
Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1915. http://www.books-about-california.com/Pages/
The_Jewel_City/The_Jewel_City_Chap_12.html.

Maybeck, Bernard. Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon, introduction by Frank Morton Todd. San 
Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1915.

Ortenberg, Alexander. “Joy in the Act of Drawing: Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts.” Journal of 
the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 1 (2011): 38-63.

Reinhardt, Richard. “Bernard Maybeck.” American Heritage 32, no. 5 (1981). 
https://www.americanheritage.com/bernard-maybeck.

Shreve, Sara Denise. “A History Worth Saving: The Palace of Fine Arts and the Interpretation of 
History on a Reconstructed Site.” MA diss. Cornell University, 2006.