Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: Panama-Pacific Exposition

from "Cool Gray City of Love" by Gary Kamiya (pages 53-55): The beauty of the Palace of Fine Arts is inseparable from its strangeness. A vast, purposeless rotunda supported by mighty Corinthian columns and surrounded by a mysterious, vaguely ruinlike colonnade, it looms above its tranquil lagoon like one of those illogical, pseudo-classical structures that appear in the backgrounds of baroque paintings. The Palace is so familiar that it is easy to forget that it is a folly. And like the other members of that peculiar architectural genre, it is a mood enhancer, as much a drug as it is a building. The Palace of Fine Arts is the only on-site survivor of one of the most delirious miniature cities ever created, the joyously ephemeral Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 that announced the rebirth of San Francisco from the 1906 catastrophe. Magnificent courts – the Court of the Universe, the Court of Abundance, and the Court of Four Seasons – adjoined a pleasure strip called "The Zone," which featured enormous models of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and, in a more modest vein, the Creation. The crown jewel – literally – of the fair was the Tower of Jewels, a 435-foot structure decorated with 102,000 cut-glass "novagems" that at night turned into a vast, glittering diadem. Not until Burning Man – which started on Baker Beach, just around the seafront corner from the fair’s site – would the world see another fake city so dazzlingly psychedelic. The Palace was so beloved that a movement to preserve it started while the Exposition was still going on. It was saved, but it had not been built to last, and in 1965 it was completely rebuilt. It is appropriate that the Palace is the last building on the site of the last of the great world expositions. For it is a shrine to absence, a tribute to a vanished world, a concrete manifestation of things unseen. The Palace’s architect, Bernard Maybeck, was charged with creating a building that would serve as a kind of decompression chamber for fairgoers, a mind-calming passageway between the crowded and chaotic fairgrounds and the paintings and sculpture housed in a hall behind the Palace. Maybeck drew his inspiration from the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi’s atmospheric etchings of Rome, in particular his etching of the collapsing, overgrown ruin of the Temple of Minerva Medica. He was also deeply influenced by Isle of the Dead, the eerily evocative painting of a surreal funerary island by the 19th-century Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin. Both works captured the emotion that Maybeck was searching for, a feeling he called "modified melancholy" or "a sentiment in a minor key." But as Maybeck noted in the fascinating little book he published about creating the Palace, Böcklin’s painting was too sad to serve as an "art gallery frontispiece," just as a Greek temple set on a wild island surrounded by stormy seas and mighty cliffs would be too terrifying and uncanny. Maybeck’s solution was to place his Greek temple (the Greeks did not have domes, but for the visionary Maybeck that fact was irrelevant) on "the face of a placid lake, surrounded by high trees and lit up by a glorious full moon." This temple, he wrote, "would recall the days when your mother pressed you to her bosom and your final sob was hushed by a protecting spirit hovering over you, warm and large." It would achieve a "transition from sadness to content." As they wander about the Palace and its lagoon – for its magnificent setting are an inseparable part of it – some may feel the sense of a protecting maternal spirit. … Maybeck achieved his goal. He created a building so mysteriously evocative, so perfectly balanced between nature and artifice, reflection and joy, sadness and content, that it is like a giant mood ring. Its appearance depends not only on what time of day you see it but on what emotions you bring to it. The associations it evokes are infinite: a granite peninsula in a High Sierra lake; the endless vegetation-tangled ruins in Termessos, Turkey; the altar of a kindly god, who left it as a gift after a brief visit here. Who are those mysterious downward-looking women atop the colonnade, their faces turned away? Are they symbols of mourning? Or symbols of searching? Do they sum up the entire building, an impossible, Orpheus-like attempt to bring back the dead? Are they embodiments of time itself, which disappears even as we try to seize it? Maybeck never explained. But in a way, perhaps he did. After noting that "the artist began his work a long time ago in a nebulous haze of whys," Maybeck wrote that he must work for a long time before he realizes that he is not aiming at an object, but at "a portrayal of the life that is behind the visible." The life that is behind the visible. Maybeck’s words recall those of another great Romantic, a young poet who in the face of his own impending death used an ancient urn to celebrate the eternal spirit of art: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on … Like Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts is an elegy so profound that it takes its own place in the pantheon it extols. Like the urn, and the poem about the urn, it says to all those who stand before it: Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

These very large "flower boxes" (to quote the official guidebook to the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition) once bore masses of luxuriant California shrubs. They are located in the Peristyle Walk in the Fine Arts Colonnade of the Palace of Fine Arts. The friezes are by Ulric H. Ellerhusen, who made also the Weeping Figures and the heroic "Guardians of Arts" already described. The guidebook continues: "It is interesting to note that the precision of handling has given this design, in spite of its size, an exquisite delicacy. Standing at charmingly balanced intervals, a circle of maidens bear a heavy rope-garland. This rope makes a gratifying line that has given pleasure to connoisseurs. The frieze is so successful largely because, though frankly decorative as suits its purpose, its personality and charm distinguish it from the pattern-like or conventional. The landscape planting in the boxes, in the flower beds and above, is one of the enduring attractions of this colonnade and walk. The green is architecturally massed and the relief of flowers bright and delicate, never intrusive."

From the official guidebook of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition: "High on the decorative columns that mark the great arches within the beautiful Rotunda of Fine Arts, stand, repeated, the peaceful, dignified and serene ‘Priestess of Culture,’ by Herbert Adams. These are angelic figures, modeled with the control and calm that fittingly express the mission of culture upon the earth. Indeed the work of Mr. Adams may be said generally to be characterized by that probity and intellectual beauty ministering to the purposes of culture. These figures are harmonious ornaments to the richly decorated ceiling which they touch and to which they give a certain tranquillity. The slope of their wings connects gracefully with that of the arches; this, with the quiet beauty of the drapery and its accord with the line of the cornucopia, creates a restful architectural effect."

After the devastation of the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was anxious to show the world that it had risen from the ashes. So in 1910, business and civic leaders gathered to discuss making San Francisco the site of the century’s first great world’s fair. Built on 635 acres reclaimed from San Francisco Bay, the exposition featured 11 great exhibit palaces showcasing objects from every corner of the globe, more than 1,500 sculptures commissioned from artists all over the world, 65 acres of amusement concessions, an d an aviation field. Twenty-one countries, 48 U.S. states, and 50 California counties mounted displays in the exhibition’s grand pavilions. When creating the Palace of Fine Arts, architect Bernard Maybeck believed it would be "the water and the trees" that people would come to see. Today, Australian eucalyptus trees fringe the eastern shore of the lagoon. The natural scenery was integral to his design, and swans were part of his original drawings for the Palace. There’s nothing more relaxing than sitting by the Palace of Fine Arts on a sunny day and watching the swans gracefully floating by on the lagoon. Long a symbol of the Palace, the whooper swans draw nature lovers, birdwatchers and shutterbugs alike. A vibrant part of the Palace’s romantic setting, the swans and the lagoon are captured year round in photos of family outings, engagements, and weddings. But the swans aren’t the only wildlife that the lagoon supports. A remnant of an ancient tidal wetland, the lagoon is an important environmental resource in the midst of a dense urban setting. As the closest freshwater habitat to the San Francisco Bay, the lagoon offers food and shelter to birds migrating the Pacific Flyway. Its little island provides a safe place for black-crowned night herons, ducks, and songbirds that breed and rest on its protected shores. Sea gulls fly over from the bay’s nearby shoreline to look for tasty tidbits. Many other forms of wildlife have made their home here including turtles, frogs, and raccoons. And of course, it wouldn’t be a city park without pigeons!

While most of the exposition was demolished when the exposition ended, the Palace was so beloved that a Palace Preservation League, founded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, was founded while the fair was still in progress. While the Palace had been saved from demolition, its structure was not stable. Originally intended to only stand for the duration of the Exhibition, the colonnade and rotunda were not built of durable materials, and thus framed in wood and then covered with staff, a mixture of plaster and burlap-type fiber. As a result of the construction and vandalism, by the 1950s the simulated ruin was in fact a crumbling ruin. In 1964, the original Palace was completely demolished, with only the steel structure of the exhibit hall left standing. The buildings were then reconstructed in permanent, light-weight, poured-in-place concrete, and steel I-beams were hoisted into place for the dome of the rotunda. All the decorations and sculpture were constructed anew. The only changes were the absence of the murals in the dome, two end pylons of the colonnade, and the original ornamentation of the exhibit hall. In 2003, the City of San Francisco along with the Maybeck Foundation created a public-private partnership to restore the Palace and by 2010 work was done to further restore and seismically retrofit the dome, rotunda, colonnades and lagoon.

Around the entablature of the Palace’s octagonal rotunda are three allegorical panels in low relief made by the sculptor Bruno Louis Zimm. Together they represent the "The Struggle for the Beautiful" and each of them is once repeated along the entire circumference of the rotunda’s dome. Two of these panels appear in this photograph. The panel on the left-hand side depicts "The Triumph of Apollo." It shows the fiery god of Inspiration, Music and the Sun in a procession of his devotees bearing garlands. Apollo’s flaming wings are the rays of the sun. The panel on the right-hand side of the photograph depicts the unending struggle with the gross and stupid, both objective and subjective, that confronts the champion of the beautiful. Art, depicted as a beautiful woman, stands tands serene, aloof, unassailable in the center of the fray. To either side of her the idealists struggle to hold back the materialists, here conceived as centaurs, who would trample upon art. Between the panels are repeated alternately male and female figures, symbolizing those who battle for the arts.

Built around a small artificial lagoon, the Palace of Fine Arts is composed of a wide, 1,100 ft (340 m) colonnade around a central domed rotunda situated by the water. The rotunda is 135 feet high. The lagoon was intended to echo those found in classical settings in Europe, where the expanse of water provides a mirror surface to reflect the grand buildings and an undisturbed vista to appreciate them from a distance.

The Palace of Fine Arts was designed by Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck. Maybeck chose the theme of a Roman ruin in the mood of a Piranese engraving along with Greek elements and a reflecting lagoon reminiscent of similar settings in Europe. He said that the Palace of Fine Arts was designed to show "the mortality of grandeur and the vanity of human wishes." Ornamentation includes Ulric Ellerhusen’s unusual inward-looking sculptures of weeping women atop the colonnade of the Palace. They symbolize the sadness and melancholy of life without art. While most of the exposition was demolished when the exposition ended, the Palace was so beloved that a Palace Preservation League, founded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, was founded while the fair was still in progress.

The Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina District of San Francisco, California, is a monumental structure originally constructed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in order to exhibit works of art presented there. One of only a few surviving structures from the Exposition, it is the only one still situated on its original site.