• First Church of Christ, Scientist, Church building
• Charles C. Boynton house
• Elsa Jockers house
• Isaac Flagg (Ransome) house (#2)
• S. C. Irving house
• Steps and Walk, (Wm. Underhill)
• John A. Britton house
• E. C. Young house
• Parsons Memorial Lodge, Sierra Club
• Palace of Fine Arts
• Abbreviations

One of the Bay Area's greatest architectural monuments, this church is Maybeck's masterpiece, showing his ability to combine such unrelated styles as Gothic and Oriental with an admixture of Romanesque and Craftsman. The interior illustrates his genius for fusing structure and ornament. All this with an imaginative use of such new materials as concrete, cement asbestos board, and industrial sash. Those interested in seeing the interior should call the church office for the hours of public tours (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 275).

Maybeck's masterwork and one of this country's most remarkable buildings. An amalgam of styles but a copy of none, the design demonstrates his genius for fusing structure with ornament as well as for making the most of a restricted piece of property. The church is open to the public after services on Wednesday night and Sunday morning. The interior is as magical at night as by daylight (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 213).

Maybeck, in KPFA tape, reel 3, described his composing ("modeling") the design for the First Church of Christ Scientist in Berkeley (1910), "just as if I was an old Greek," no doubt referring to Viollet's portrayal of how ancient Greek temples were formed (Longstreth 1998: 397).

According to Maybeck himself, KPFA tape, reel 3, large charcoal studies were made for the First Church of Christ Scientist. While documentation has yet to be found, it is likely that Maybeck used this method earlier as well. When working in the office, Edward Hussey saved a number of these studies, which were normally discarded as a project was further developed, and they are now in College of Environmental Design (CED) Docs. The importance Maybeck placed on the conceptual process is noted in Arnold, "Maybeck," p.7 (Longstreth 1998: 399 n. 37).

Jordy, American Buildings, p. 302, notes the similarity between such drawings by Viollet and the free standing brackets that front the south elevation of Maybeck's First Church of Christ Scientist, but does not suggest the irony implicit in the treatment. Viollet's method of depicting structural assemblies was widely used during the second half of the nineteenth century, so that if it was a source of inspiration for Maybeck, he may not have been thinking of Viollet alone. Additional material on the building is contained in Cardwell, Maybeck, pp. 62-64 (Longstreth 1998: 399 n. 44).

In 1910, when Maybeck was almost 50, five women of the congregation of the First Church of Christ, Scientist came one day to talk to him. They wanted, he recalled, "a church that would look like a church" and built of materials "that are what they claim to be, not imitations." Maybeck, whose religious feeling embraced everything, asked about their religion. The sincerity with which they spoke reminded him of the faith of the men who had built the early Romanesque churches in the south of France.

Maybeck began to wonder how he could "put himself in the boots of a fellow in the twelfth century," as he described it. He was certain of one thing: the man of the Middle Ages would use "the most modern materials he could lay his hands on," and would combine them in such a way as to express the spirit of his faith.

After Maybeck had found what he wanted to say, he looked among the common materials--the natural ones and the fabricated ones. From industry he took asbestos panels and factory sash; cement and local redwood completed his list for the structure. He cast concrete in hexagonal columns for the loggia to the left of the portico; against these he played rough redwood columns. To the right was a row of free standing square fluted columns also of cast concrete; on top of each was a single complex trellis structure, which brought wisteria vines into the architectural composition. The Romanesque capitals were in the spirit of those in Ste. Madeleine's at Vezelay. Many castings were made before Maybeck was satisfied. "he had great knowledge of what he wanted," according to Anthony Tovani, who made the castings. The capitals were one of the loveliest passages in Maybeck's work--the figures of carollers in high relief set a joyous theme which ruled the spirit of the entire church.

Asbestos panels formed a surfacing material for exterior walls; they were fastened to the frame in a rhythm of diamond-shaped pieces of red asbestos. Maybeck redivided the vertical divisions of the factory sash to give them the character of a Japanese screen, and inserted handmade glass of warm flesh tones.

Without towers or spires, he led the eye up, from the gently pitched roof covering the portico, from one hovering roof to a higher one, and finally to a modest cupola. It was a broad and friendly exterior, whose only thin verticals were the cast concrete tracery of the two great windows, and the delicate lines of the factory sash.

The directness with which Maybeck spanned the Greek cross plan was unexpected for one who loved height. Hinged trusses cut diagonally across the nave; the springings were four decorated concrete columns. The vertical members between the upper and lower chord were pierced with Gothic tracery outlined in gold.

Byzantine-inspired ornament on the capitals was picked out in gold, blue and red; designs were stencilled on rough-sawn redwood brackets in colors so subdued that color and texture were fused. There were endless lovely small details--the floral designs inscribed in the two cast concrete readers' stands; the hanging steel lights bowls--pierced with a pattern of quatrefoils--above the pews; the cross-form lights of 4 by 4-inch redwood in the Fireplace Room; the multiplication of members in the open truss of the Fireplace Room, originally the Sunday School.

Maybeck moved with confidence from Renaissance plan to flamboyant Gothic tracery, from Romanesque columns to Japanese timber work, to Byzantine decoration. No one has ever carried the burden of the past more weightlessly (McCoy 1975: 24).

Stenciling in red, green, blue, and gold unites unfinished concrete with rough wood and metal ties, while identifying the architect by an emblematic "A."

It is possible that if the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Berkeley, had been destroyed by fire, as so many of Maybeck's works have been, he never would have received the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. No other building demonstrates so completely his imaginative architectural genius. His contributions to domestic design are outstanding and his efforts in architectural education noteworthy; but it is the Christian Science church, with its masterly handling of space, structure, color and light, that wins immediate admiration from lay and professional viewers. The church, design in 1910 when Maybeck was forty-eight years old, is the visible statement of his design philosophy at its most fruitful stage.(Cardwell 1977: 118-19)

Maybeck's own story of how he was selected as the architect for the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley, reveals many aspects of his attitude as a designer. He related that one day a group of women called on him in his office in San Francisco and stated that they would like to have him design their church. They were familiar with his houses in Berkeley and had decided that he could design the church they were hoping to build. They wanted a simple building, one in keeping with their faith. Maybeck said that he could design such a building and that it would be "the same on the inside as the outside, without sham or hypocrisy," but that he thought they would not like it. (Note 6:B.R.Maybeck MSS, "Correspondence," C.E.D. Docs.) The ladies protested saying that was just the kind of building they wanted. But Maybeck put them off. Perhaps his experiences with the earlier Hamilton Church and the Unitarian Church had not been to his liking in either design or client relationship. He told them that he would want to use rough materials and concrete as it came from the forms and that they should reconsider.

Two weeks later the same ladies again called on Maybeck. They stated flatly that they had selected him as their architect. (Note 7: Conversations between the author and Maybeck. The "History of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley, California" (May 1933), states: "The Plans Committee, after consulting twelve architects, unanimously recommended architect and engineer, Mr. Bernard Maybeck of the firm Maybeck and White. The Board approved their action and authorized the procuring of sketches September 27, 1909.") They had even sought spiritual guidance, they added, and were now firmly convinced that he was the only designer they wanted. Maybeck was surprised that they had returned after he had discouraged them, but he was impressed by the sincerity of their feeling and consequently consented to take their commission. He said he felt that he had been hired by a group of people as sincere as he believed people were in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He therefore tried to imagine himself as a twelfth century designer, imbued with this same sincerity, and he set to work designing as such an individual would but with machine-made two-by-fours and modern technology. It was this quality that Frank Morton Todd was referring to when he said of Maybeck: "In feeling and understanding he steps back twenty centuries as easily as you or I would cross a room." (Note 8: Bernard R. Maybeck, The Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon, p. vii. Introduction by Frank Morton Todd.)

The church Board of Directors had obtained a corner lot south of the University campus in the heart of an established residential section of the city. It had a slight slope on the hundred foot frontage on Dwight Way, but the site was level in the hundred and fifty foot depth along Bowditch Street. The program called for a church building that could seat seven hundred people, a Sunday school that could be used in conjunction with the church proper, and various service elements. To meet these requirements, Maybeck developed a plan that covered most of the restricted area on which he had to build. He located the Sunday school unit to the front of the property and kept the building as close to the street lot lines as feasible in order to gain some isolation from neighboring properties.

A delightful cross-play of axially-centered entrances, a short, major one from Dwight Way to the church and a long, minor one from Bowditch Street to the Sunday school, foreshadows the intricate volume organization within the building. The church is entered from the street through a high-gabled portico. A pair of plain doors opens into a skylighted and low-ceilinged narthex which serves both the church and Sunday school. Double doors lead to the body of the church proper. The floor plan of the room is square, based on a module of ten feet ten inches in each direction. The roof plan is a Greek cross in form with low-pitched gable roofs inscribed in the square of the plan. An intermediate clerestory level lies between the square and the Greek cross. Its walls form bracing panels for the pairs of diagonally-placed Pratt trusses over the central crossing which is forty feet square. A hollow reinforced concrete pier at each corner of the crossing supports the trusses and serves as ductwork for the heating and ventilating system. Forced warm air rising in the piers is distributed by draft diverters through the trusswork of the ceiling. Foul air is taken in at the base of the piers and exhausted through the roof. The six-foot deep panel trusses are built from two-by-six and two-by-twelve stock lumber. Maybeck was aided in their design by his old friend Herman Kower, who had worked with him on the Hearst buildings. Each pair of trusses follows the slope of the valleys of the crossed gable roof until they intersect their transverse number at the center and continue on down to the pier opposite. The entire roof framing is exposed, including the beams, purlins, and sheathing, and rich patterns of structural members thus decorate the ceiling. The walls of the clerestory are of ten-inch board-on-board finish, and the lower exterior walls are a post and beam system framing a glass wall of steel sash.

In 1921, writing of the church, Maybeck said, "Physically the [building] committee wanted color, garden, etc., and they wanted nothing sham. We sensed a need for permanence in religious monument rather as a symbol; therefore, the floor was concrete and on the ground, and the walls are concrete to the seat of the trusses." (Note 9: B.R.Maybeck MSS, "First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley," C.E.D. Docs.)

Skylights, translucent windows, and reflections on glass modulate the light in the entrance passageway. The use of industrial steel sash reveals Maybeck's genius and willingness to use modern materials even going contrary to the manufacturer's own opinion of the suitability of the material.

There is much symbolism in all of Maybeck's work. From the obvious device of the dragon mark of his father's craft to the choice of materials, symbolism of some form exists in most of his work. (Note 10: The dragon device was used in Wyntoon, the Faculty Club, Outdoor Art Club, Flagg studio, Owens house, Tufts house (San Rafael), Kennedy studio, and the Chamberlain studio among others.) In the Christian Science church there is a symbolic coordination of ornament and structure. The tracery in the roof truss panels follows the direction of the diagonal tension rods. Metal tie plates are accented with stenciled designs, and hidden structural elements are indicated by ornament on the surface. The gilt of the truss tracery and small accents of primary reds and blues are conscious attempts to suggest the inheritance of early Christian architecture.

The exterior of the church is surfaced with the most common materials. Sheets of cement asbestos board of a light gray color are applied to most of the upper exterior walls. They are fastened with screws placed in small diamond-shaped pieces of the same material, in brick red. The factory steel sash that forms most of the lower wall has been enriched by hammered glass set with leadings bisecting vertically each unit of the standard light. The cast concrete elements are molded in forms derived from, but not copies of, Romanesque details. The roof, now partially covered with Spanish tiles, was originally a standing seam roof of tin clad sheet iron. Trim, trellises, and corbels are of natural redwood darkened with age, and the structural frame and interior boards are rough-sawn Douglas fir. The materials testify to Maybeck's adaptability to the conditions of building in an industrialized economy.

Only the genius and perseverance of the architect made the materials usually associated with factories and utilitarian building appropriate and in harmony with the edifice. In reply to Maybeck's first inquiry as to the cost of providing stock steel factory sash for the church windows, the company's representative wrote that he did not think the product was appropriate for church construction. Maybeck insisted that he knew what he was doing and reiterated his request for a quotation. The bid was finally received and, to Maybeck's great pleasure, was considerably lower than that for any alternative units he might have chosen. The supplier, however, was still dubious and indicated this on the bid form by putting the word "church" in quotation marks. (Note 11: B.R.Maybeck MSS, "First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley," C.E.D. Docs.

Maybeck had similar difficulties with the manufacturers of the asbestos panels used to clad the exterior. They were normally applied to roofs or used for insulation and industrial packing, and the company had difficulty in quoting a correct figure until the architect pointed out to them a number of omissions and supplied a detailed list of every piece of asbestos board to be used on the buildings. Such trials, of course, were only the beginning of difficulties to be overcome when he selected materials or methods of construction which differed from traditional practices. Both workmen and clients (represented by a consulting engineer of the Church Board) had to be educated, convinced, or cajoled into accepting his unorthodox treatments.

All fittings, exterior and interior, were executed to designs done by Maybeck. They vary from strap iron exterior lanterns and handsome steeled brass interior luminaires to awkward chandeliers of redwood stick and bare bulbs used in the Sunday school. The pews of fumed, waxed oak and the red plush cushions and screens used behind the Reader stands are of Maybeck's design and selection. These lecterns of cast concrete typified Maybeck's ability to make a creative design out of an adverse circumstance. It was cast in a mold lined with paper to assure smoothness. The paper wrinkled in the process of pouring, and Maybeck utilized the creases formed in the resulting block as the basis of floral pattern. His designing did not stop with the furnishings of the church. He also provided a landscape plan. Some of the wisteria vines now on the church are from the original planting. However, the carmine bouganvillea, pink geranium, blue hydrangea, and lavendar verbena indicated on his drawings are no longer in evidence. (Note 12: The furnishings and garden were finished in 1912. After completion, the Board of Directors always sought Maybeck's approval of any change proposed for the church or gardens.)

Much has been made of Maybeck's use in the church of sliding doors to accommodate overflow crowds, of the industrial steel sash in the exterior curtain walls, and of its asbestos siding. But these features are not the true measure of his architectural accomplishment. It was his mastery of the architectural elements of light, space, proportion, and scale that created a building of lasting significance. His church makes man its measure and reflects the humanistic qualities of the religion it shelters. Maybeck felt that members of the congregation "were in direct touch with an omniscient power in everything they did"--perhaps through a kind of partnership. He said:

We tried to fit the clothes to the man. The form of the building was such that the seating was arranged so that everyone, as far as possible, could see the one who rises to give his experience, which seems to us a vital part of their church work...Summing it up, to build a church edifice can be done by being strictly honest, i.e., make no forms other than those needed for the construction and furnishings, make no ornaments and no color, except those needed and of the form suggested by the need. Avoid all hiding of unpleasant forms. Do not borrow from history, but use form and color as you do words and music. (Note 13: B. R. Maybeck MSS, "Correspondence," C.E.D. Docs.)

Maybeck's color scheme for the church has been well preserved. Starting with the natural wood brown of the truss members and tin gray of the natural concrete piers, the gray, pink, and blue of the roof sheathing boards and walls are accented by gilt on the tracery and by rich red, blue, black, and green in the depths of modeled ornament and flat stencil work. At one time the organ loft was screened by a blue net fabric on which the women of the congregation fashioned gilt stars. Maybeck planned this activity to make them feel that they had actively contributed to the building of the church. The organ loft and its curtain of stars were lit by clerestory windows glazed with art glass.

Maybeck also employed both natural and artificial light to enrich the structure. Windows in front of the organ screen were to be glazed with yellow, amber, and red and those behind with green, purple, and ultramarine blue. Maybeck simplified his original color scheme and used warm pinks in the glass in front and blues in the window at the rear of the screen. Great care went into the selection of the glass to be used in the sash which forms a continuous glazed wall around the perimeter of the church room. His choice was a glass imported from Belgium that had a shimmering, translucent quality. For artificial lighting he chose prismatic glass reflector units and designed housings to enclose them. In addition to the down lights for the pews and the general illumination of the large hanging fixtures which cast their glow towards the ceilings, concealed lights of red and blue accent various portions of the structure.

Throughout the construction phase of his designs, Maybeck was always at work selecting the proper material at hand. His activity has led to stories that each of his designs was handmade, created on the site in a sort of medieval masterbuilder tradition. Nothing could be further from the truth. His presence on the site was to assure the most effective use of the material on hand. Conceptually his designs were complete before any work was undertaken. Each board and its size, each material and its finish, and even the color of all or part of each is shown on the drawings.

During the busiest years of his practice Maybeck employed the device of letting bids for construction by segregated contracts. He thus became acquainted with a number of specialty contractors who knew the kind of work he expected. Many of those who participated in the building of the Christian Science church were men with whom Maybeck had had repeated building experience, so he was confident of their abilities. William Boldt was the general carpentry contractor, Christian Schneckenburger the painting contractor, and Hoff and Hoff of San Francisco the architectural modelers. (Note 14: B.R.Maybeck MSS, "First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley," C.E.D. Docs.) Maybeck's function as a semi-general contractor gave him a direct control which he used to full advantage. His unbelievable energy and enthusiasm turned the tide against all obstacles. His lack of preconceived architectural solutions to the problems he faced coupled with his complete domination of every detail of the basic structure, mechanical systems, and furnishings of the church helped create a building noteworthy in the history of American architecture (Cardwell 1977: 122-30).

The Christian Science church brought no immediate fame to Maybeck. Indeed, its exterior appearance, following all the changes of its interior form, plus the strange "wellheads" set diagonally over the exposed portions of the roof trusses and foul-air vents, produced a less ordered and familiar profile than the community expected in ecclesiastical architecture. It took the aging of several years and the maturing of the heavy planting of wisteria along the trellises before the building fit comfortably into the Berkeley landscape (Cardwell 1977: 132).

His preference for the simple life had kept him from pressing the advantages of publicity he had gained while at the University. And when the work slowed in his office upon completion of the drawings of the Christian Science Church, he tried once again to expand his practice by entering competitions (Cardwell 1977: 135).

The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Berkeley, constructed in 1910, and the Palace of Fine Arts, designed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, are the conerstones of Maybeck's fame, praised in every book that mentions his architecture. The latter work had great public exposure and was an immediate popular success; the former had limited exposure and only gradually became known to the national and international architectural audience. By now it is acknowledged as Maybeck's masterpiece.

Even more complex in its imagery than Maybeck's other works, the First Church of Christ, Scientist (plate 73), beggars description and must be seen to be comprehended. Although it was not Maybeck's first church commission, his two earlier designs (one of which went no further than sketches) were for smaller buildings, and they gave no inkling of what he would do here. At first he resisted the commission, doing his best to put the members of the church's building committee on their guard by implying that they would not like the building he had in mind. He told them, for example, that he would use unfinished concrete and would make the building "the same on the inside as the outside, without sham or hypocrisy."¹ His warnings seemed only to confirm the committee members in their resolve. Finally convinced of their faith and sincerity, Maybeck sought to invigorate the design process with the spirit of twelfth century.

A letter of instruction from the committee to Maybeck expresses concerns that matched his own; the letter was no doubt an attempt to summarize what both sides had already agreed to. The church, it stated, should manifest "unity, harmony, beauty, light and peace."² It was to be a progressive structure designed to express the special character of the congregation and to match its surroundings. "Homelikeness, exemplified in a surrounding garden," was called for. "It should express reverence ... sincerity and honesty exemplified in the use of genuine construction and materials which are what they claim to be and are not imitations. It should express welcome to all exemplified in its entrance ... comfort, quietness, and peace ... in the plan of seating and the kind of seats." In practical terms, the program called for a church that could seat seven hundred people, a Sunday school that could also be used for church social functions, and service spaces.

The structure that resulted was like no church ever built in the Bay Area, or in the state, or even in the nation. Nor did it look like the twelfth-century churches Maybeck so revered, or like H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston, which he said was his favorite church in America. Instead it fused Gothic elements with Byzantine massing and Mediterranean pergolas to produce a building so frankly eclectic that only a wizard like Maybeck could have kept it from being visually chaotic.

The site slopes gently toward the corner on the entrance side, where a pergola stretches from a portico that shelters the two entrances, one to the Sunday school and the other to the church (plate 76). The portico roof is lifted up so that light enters obliquely, illuminating the name of the church in raised blue letters on a tablet set into a richly ornamented corner niche (plate 78). In his design of the columns for the portico and the pergola one senses that Maybeck was stepping into the boots of the twelfth-century man. The square, fluted columns have capitals derived from French Romanesque churches (plate 77). Cast in concrete, they are soft and blurred, as if filtered through the lens of time. The trellis they support gives the church a gracious presence on the street and heightens the ceremonial quality of the recessed entrance. Once more, Maybeck has orchestrated the path to the entrance to give the impression of entering right into the building's heart.

The west elevation of the building is symmetrical and no more churchlike than the entrance side. A planting bed steps out from the building on the west side, giving it a natural green base. The fragmented exterior culminates in a central, cross-gabled roof, but the roof does not soar up to the heavens. Instead, its force is directed down by secondary gable roofs. Planters on the low flat roofs and a trellis for wisteria attached to the great west-facing window tie the building to the earth. Originally, there were even planters, later removed, on top of the ventilators--one of which can be seen, trailing vines, in a photograph taken about 1912 (plate 75).

Inside, a generous hallway (plate 81) stretches nearly the length of the building, dividing the Sunday school meeting room from the church proper. The Sunday school room (plate 80) has a simple but massive board-formed-concrete mantelpiece and, like the rest of the building, is well lit by windows with panes of translucent Belgian glass, which has a hammered surface that makes the windows shimmer. The panes are set in industrial steel sash, which Maybeck had difficulty persuading the manufacturers to make for him because they questioned its appropriateness for a church. He altered the sash from the factory stock by adding a metal mullion, which bisected the individual panes and created a more delicate linear pattern. Here and in the auditorium of the church the large windows (which alternate with the posts that support the beams capping the walls) give the effect of walls hung with glass curtains.

The repetitive rhythm of the windows in the auditorium creates the feeling of light and peace called for in the committee's letter. During late spring, purple blossoms on the wisteria outside the windows tint them and the light inside. Unity is expressed by the cruciform structure of the four great trusses, supported on concrete piers, that intersect in the center of the space and form a flattened dome (plate 73). Panels of gilded Gothic tracery lighten the effect of the trusses, and the direction of the tracery echoes the direction of the diagonal tension rods within the trusses (plates 82, 84). Other hidden elements of the structural system are represented in ornamental form, stenciled on the surfaces of the corbels above the pier caps and on the sections of walls that connect the piers to the structural frame of the building. Throughout the interior, tracery is used to dematerialize walls and surfaces so that instead of being ponderous, the mighty hood of the room is so activated by linear rhythms that it seems almost to be in motion. One has the feeling of sitting beneath a great tree whose limbs and foliage respond to spiritual forces.

The floor slopes very gradually toward the Reader's desk, which occupies the central place that an altar would have in a church of another sect. Behind it is the organ balcony screened with Gothic tracery. Maybeck designed all of the interior furnishings of the church, including the pews of fumed, waxed oak and the red plush cushions. Accents of red, blue, and gold enrich the warm, woodsy tone of the interior. Suspended from the ceiling are bowl-shaped metal reflectors to direct light upward and small lights in metal cones to light the pews; both have trefoil cutout (plate 83). The magical effect of the nighttime illumination is intensified by the highlighted curves of the tracery. Here Maybeck marshalled effects perfected by his years of practice and observation as an architect and as a stage-set designer.

For the building's exterior Maybeck used cement-asbestos panels called Transite, an industrial material that, like the steel sash, had no previous history of use in churches or even, for that matter, on walls. Since it was normally used on roofs and for insulation, the suppliers had such difficulty estimating its cost for the church building that Maybeck finally had to provide them with a list of every piece of paneling that he intended to use. Had he not been constantly on the site seeing to it that such materials were used as specified in the drawings, the effectiveness of his innovations would doubtless have suffered.

Although the church was published soon after it was built and received high praise from many who saw it, it was too unconventional to be immediately popular with the congregation and the community. When Maybeck responded to those who asked about the style of the building that it was "Modern," they were even more confused and put off. What he doubtless intended to convey by this cryptic answer was that he had designed the building by thinking things through from first principles and by using the most appropriate vocabulary of forms for the materials; style was incidental (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 88, 89-98, 230).

In spite of Maybeck's general success with limited budget construction, there were projects like the C. C. Boynton house (1911) which rushed headlong into financial disaster, propelled by the enthusiasm of both the client and the architect. A revealing story of its design and of the nature of the hillside community is told by Florence Treadwell Boynton who first met the Mayebecks through her lectures on open-air schools and the dance and music of Isadora Duncan. In a paper written in 1958 to memorialize the work of Maybeck, she tells of forming a number of study circles at the urging of the individualists of the north Berkeley hillside; one on architecture, led by Mr. Maybeck; one on posture, poise, motion, grace, and dance; one on garments suitable for the same; one on simple and uncooked foods; and one on the garden. Through these activities she became interested in living in Berkeley, purchased a portion of the Maybeck land on Buena Vista Way, and, with her husband and six children, began an experiment in living close to nature. "Mr. Maybeck" she writes:

built us a model camp above the present homesite, consisting of two pergolas, one for living and sleeping,...having a canvas roof which rolled back...to allow us to sleep under the stars...The second pergola, a little farther to the north...consisted of a dining room and kitchen...This pergola was surrounded by glass windows, screened...The kitchen had a cook stove and sink without running water. The water flowed down from a spring up the hill to the back door. The garbage was buried; the toilet was beyond the eucalyptus trees. These pergolas were nestled into the hill in the typical Maybeck fashion in seclusion from any others. (Note 7: B. R. Maybeck MSS, "F. T. Boynton," C.E.D. Docs.)

The Boyntons lived in the temporary camp dwelling that Maybeck designed while he and Mrs. Boynton developed the preliminary drawings of the ideal home in which to raise the family steeped in the culture of Greek art, dance, and philosophy. The house was to be open to the breezes with only its most private compartments contained by conventional walls. It took the form of an exedra of Corinthian columns set on a radiantly-heated concrete platform constructed over hollow tiles carrying hot air, permitting family members, clad in stola and pallium, to recline comfortably on cushions placed on its stepped recesses or to dance freely on the broad expanse between the columns that overlooked the city and the Golden Gate. In her story, Mrs. Boynton reveals that when she first told Maybeck that she wanted "an atrium in the center of the house from which all the activities of the home would radiate" he explained that "the atrium would not have to be enclosed on all four sides, but that one side could remain open and the atrium would be without draft or breeze. It would be a "pocket of air" into which no more air could enter. The open side would preferably be to the southwest in order to be benefitted by all possible sunshine. (Note 8: Ibid.)

Unfortunately Maybeck did not have the opportunity to execute the design. His enthusiasm for Mrs. Boynton's ideas outran her husband's unstated budget. Other disagreements arose between Mr. Boynton, a lawyer, and Annie Maybeck, the shrewd developer of the Buena Vista properties. Conflict over the terms of the sale, dedicated rights of way, and public access to other Maybeck parcels ground all action to a halt, and Maybeck's design passed to A. Randolph Monro, a young draftsman in John Galen Howard's office. He completed the project as an independent commission. (Note 9: Interview by the author with Mrs. R. Monro.)

When Monro took over the project, thirty classic columns had already been erected, and he designed the open pavilion and compartments which Berkeley residents have long known as the "Temple of the Wings." The name, Mrs. Boynton relates, was derived from the roof which took the shape of a "pair of wings sheltering our nest." (Note 10:B. R. Maybeck MSS, "F. T. Boynton," C.E.D. Docs.) Without trying to assay the proportionate contribution of architect, owner, and draftsman to the design of the Boynton residence, it reveals the extremes of architectural expression which Maybeck believed could exist in a community development harmonized by judicious sitting within the landscape. Contrasting in color and form with the Boyntons' Grecian temple, Maybeck's own brown shingled house with projecting eaves and recessed porches and Lawson's concrete one with ornamental tiles and sgraffito were only a few hundred feet away. Maybeck reasoned that if each house was individually beautiful in the landscape, then collectively their diversity enriched the community (Cardwell 1977: 163).

The Highland Place houses looked so odd that curiosity-seekers came to the northside area just to see them. If they happened by at the right time, the antics of the residents might have struck them as even stranger. Arrayed in flowing robes and garlands of flowers, the Keelers and their friends staged pageants on the grassy slopes (plate 18). A genteel counterculture à la grecque developed in Berkeley, where it seemed that nearly everyone wrote poetry and attended readings, open-air pageants, and musical evenings. One guiding spirit of this bohemian Hellenism was Isadora Duncan, who at the age of ten began teaching her interpretive style of free dance in San Francisco before moving to New York and eventually to Athens.

Among Duncan's devoted followers in Berkeley were the Boyntons, who bought property from the Maybecks not far from the houses on Highland Place and later had a romantic dwelling built on it called the Temple of the Wings (plates 19-22). Maybeck had made a preliminary design for the temple that featured two elliptical wings roofed with shallow domes; one wing was for dancing, the other for living. The walls were open colonnades that could be closed by letting down canvas awnings. However, before the design for the house was finished, the Maybecks and the Boyntons became embroiled in a legal dispute over the Boyntons' property boundary and another architect, A. Randolph Monro, finished the plans.

When completed in 1912, the Temple of the Wings was a model of planning for the simple life. Although open to the elements, it boasted such amenities for cold weather as a floor heated by hot water passed through pipes laid beneath the flagstones and a central concrete chimney with four hearths. Built-in cabinets for books and tables served as beds at night. Curtained dressing rooms opened onto a balcony at the back of the house that bridged the space between the two wings; bathrooms and lavatories occupied spaces beneath it. There was no kitchen because, as Charles Boynton explained in an interview for an article in the December 1918 issue of Early Sunset magazine, they cooked only one food and that was peanuts, which they roasted for fifteen minutes every day. In her part of the interview Mrs. Boynton declared that she had been inspired to build an outdoor house so that the family could live the simple life in dress and diet and not worry about the usual housekeeping chores.² She and her seven children wore sandals and one-piece flowing robes buttoned at the shoulders. Charles Boynton commuted to his San Francisco law office in a business suit, but he too donned robes at home.

The house burned in the 1923 fire and was rebuilt using the original concrete columns, cast according to Maybeck's design, which survived the fire (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 32-37, 231).

The dull surfaces of plastered walls had never appealed to him and when he used stucco for reasons of economy he always attempted to enrich it by some means. The Jockers house (1911) had rough cast and contrasting troweled surfaces; the Kennedy studio used variously colored plasters without restraint. Most late houses, like the McMurray and the Staniford, had stucco exterors modeled in several colors of plaster applied in successive dash coats. But the hand-controlled application was not economical for use on large structures (Cardwell 1977: 223).

These three houses [Flagg houses 1-3] are variations on the Swiss Chalet theme. 1200 is perhaps the most interesting for its combination of board-and-batten with shingle siding and elegant eave brackets. 1208 was originally a one-story library-study, and 1210, built for a daughter, is a variation with a pronounced vertical emphasis (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 253).

In 1912 Maybeck built a third structure on the Flagg property in Berkeley. He used stock doors and windows and the post and beam framing found in the early Hall and Boke houses in a method which was his solution to the problems of modular and exposed structural design. The house, the last all-wood residence that Maybeck designed, was constructed for about two dollars a square foot. Redwood shortly became too expensive to use for general construction and he began to restrict its use to interior finishes for the principal living areas. The design, the ultimate development of Maybeck's Gothic house, provides cross ventilation for every room, a flue for individual heaters in each habitable space, and a concealed system of wiring for lighting fixtures and switches in a frame in which all studs, joists, and rafters are exposed. It is a disciplined achievement, a remarkable architectural solution.

Although the house was built for a newly wedded daughter of Professor Flagg, it was sold in a few years to A. W. Ransome whose family occupied it for a generation. The house, vertical in character, is built on a high basement in order to give the first floor a view--the principal visual axis of the living rooms, if extended, would pass through the center of the Golden Gate of San Francisco Bay. Its almost three-story height is softened only by the rake of the eaves and the flare of the walls over the foundation as they near the grade. Balconies, carried on beams or joists which are extensions of the interior framing, and wide eaves enliven the profile of the building.

The plan of the Ransome house, as it is known locally, is freely organized, centering around the stairway to the second-floor rooms. (Note 6: Although little is known about Maybeck's library due to the destruction caused by three major fires, an interesting comparison can be made between the Ransome house and "Rural Home No. 4" in John Bullock, The American Cottage Builder (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1854), p. 223.) Strong, oblique axes organize the interior spaces and add a subdued note of contrast to the strong rectilinear framing patterns. The various rooms make an irregular plan form as they thrust from the central area and, in contrast with the earlier Gothic houses which had articulated pavilions with individual roofs, the entire house is covered by a large gable. The second-floor study has a low plate line as a result of the simplified framing; but its restricted volume is made both usable and intriguing by the introduction of a large dormer opening onto a balcony through paired French doors.

The module Maybeck employed for design and construction derives from the combined widths of one ten-inch and two twelve-inch boards. These are applied vertically as sheathing to the exterior of four-by-four studs. The assembly gives an equal exposure of the boards on the interior. The module selected also works well with stock dimensioned doors and windows which close, without frames, against the exposed studs. The exterior is covered with redwood shingles applied over a layer of stripping and insulation. Except for the metal flashing of the heavy redwood sills which dado into the structural frame, the shingle skin forms the weather seal around the openings. The studs, plates, blocking, posts, and sheathing boards, all of redwood, are worked as a pattern in the design of the interior finish. Even the heading of the second-floor joists is treated as an overmantle for the fireplace. Although the timbering may be heavy for contemporary tastes, the design of the house has a consistently small scale and it demonstrates a wide diversity of forms, and variations in patterns, within the limits of a strictly modular system (Cardwell 1977: 161-62).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 243).

Location and condition unknown (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 231).

North Berkeley's perfectly planned environment compressed into one block. Maybeck designed the walk with its concrete retaining walls in 1913, and it was built with neighborhood contributions. Somewhat later it was acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gray who, after the 1923 fire, hired Henry Gutterson to design one and two family houses on its north side. These were designed in consultation with Maybeck and are ingeniously sited to provide private spaces and a general air of gracious living on a small scale. The south side houses came later; the final house at the LeRoy Ave end was finished in 1936.

Despite the 1923 fire which swept over the ridge, claiming most of the area's houses, the north-of-campus-neighborhood remains one of the city's richest architectural provinces. It was the home of architects such as Bernard Maybeck, Ernest Coxhead, and John Galen Howard, members of a small but special group whose buildings, constructed for the most part during the first 30 years of the 20th century, have achieved lasting fame for their freshness of planning and use of natural materials. These men were also active in the Hillside Club whose members, given to aesthetic and literary as well as social pursuits, were so keenly aware of its culture-defining role that they offered design counsel to the neighborhood for house and garden, encouraging a simplicity of decor and a preference for the William Morris tradition of handcrafted art. This concern extended to a concept of neighborhood planning which insisted on streets following the contours of the hills and supported the landscaping of public and private property.

A walk following the dotted line on the map should give the visitor a composite picture of pre- and post-fire Berkeley (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 257).

A perfectly planned residential development compressed into one block. Maybeck designed the walk and the concrete retaining walls and light standards. After the 1923 fire, owner Frank Gray hired Henry Gutterson, Maybeck's protege, to design houses on the north side. The single and double houses were ingeniously sited to provide privacy and gracious living on a small scale (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 211).

Although he had little influence on the physical outcome of the [University of California] campus, Maybeck's activities with the Hillside Club were effective in the development of the north campus community. Other members of the club were also strong spokesmen for neighborhood planning, but Maybeck gave practical demonstrations through his buildings. In addition, the small pamphlet given to prospective residents of the area, which was reprinted in the 1906-07 Club Bulletin, appears to have been prepared by Maybeck. Its eight pages, unsigned, are illustrated with a dozen of his sketches, the text even repeating the phrasing of his writing:

With neighborhood cooperation the roadside banks, terraces, etc., can be planted systematically in blocks instead of lots,--not fifty feet of pink geraniums, twenty-five of nasturtiums, fifty of purple verbena, but long restful lines, big, quiet masses,--here a roadside of grey olive topped with purple plum, there a line of willows dipped in flame of ivy covered walls,--long avenues of trees with houses back from roads, hidden behind foregrounds of shrubbery...Grass on a hillside looks bare; the same strength and water put on trees and bushes will be more effective. (Note 2: Hillside Club pamphlet. Original copies bear no title, date nor publisher's imprint. They are bound with hand sewing and were most likely produced by members of the club as a project.)

The message of the pamphlet was simple--it urged residents motivated to leave the city to work instead for its maintenance and enhancement. It recommended contour planning of roads and lot subdivisions, coordinated planting of trees and street embankments, and houses shaped and pigmented to blend with the natural landscape. Maybeck's drawings of an ideal neighborhood show watercourses turned into public parks; streets ascend the hills with gentle curves and gradients, forming observation terraces at their switchbacks; houses, paralleling the contours of the land and varying in set-back lines, are surrounded by informal gardens. In the manner prescribed by the Hillside Club Bulletin, Maybeck designed Rose Walk as a public thoroughfare in a 1912 development of the property of W. W. Underhill. Rose Walk connects a portion of the hillside area with a street which is serviced with public transportation; private walks to residences blend with the public way "in an immense garden with nothing to show that it is not all one owned by each." (Note 3: Ibid.)(Cardwell 1977: 189-90).

One of the most charming of Bernard Maybeck's designs, the wood and shingle home at 650 Edgewood Road, was built for John A. Britton in 1912. The low lines and simplicity of this summer home foretell something of those modern ranch style houses so common today in suburban developments; but the grand sweep of the place with its deep, wide porch and second-story dormer give it a character all its own.

This magnificent Redwood City summer home (above) at 650 Edgewood Road was designed in 1912 by architect Bernard Maybeck and shows the type of house from which the low-lying ranch style house of today got its inspiration (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 169, 170).

An intriguing play on the half-timber, with some features (the pulpit-like corner balcony with quatrefoils and the half-timber supergraphics) that are architectural puns (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 173).

The first new construction with the full resumption of his practice in 1919 was a clubhouse built for the Forest Hills Association. The commission came through a former client and Bohemian Club friend, E. C. Young. In 1911 Maybeck had made preliminary drawings of a townhouse for Young, similar in detail to the Goslinsky residence, but it was never constructed. In 1913 he made a new design for a magnificient site in the newly opened Forest Hill district of San Francisco. The house commands a superb view of the Golden Gate to the north and the city to the east. It is an open-planned house with all of the charm and intriguing interior spatial effects of Maybeck's best work. However, the exterior treatment in shingles, half timbers, and aberrant Gothic details place it among those designs in which Maybeck seems not to have made all of the final decisions (Cardwell 1977: 181).

In 1913 E. C. Young, a Bohemian Club member who owned a choice hilltop site in Forest Hill with a breathtaking view, asked Maybeck to design a house on it for him. Maybeck made a long rectangular plan that set a two-story living room at the front of the lot and raised it above the street to allow for a garage on one side (plate 138). Steps curve up from the sidewalk to a terrace atop the garage. The terrace extends along the south side of the house to a shallow court formed by one end of the living room to the east and a study wing to the west. Set in one corner of a trellised court, the entrance door is flanked on either side by double glass doors (plate 137). One set of doors opens into the dining room, and when they are open, the terrace becomes an extension of the room.

Making the main entrance door so much a part of the private side of the house seems surprising, but the siting of the house suggests an explanation. Maybeck's plan provides a southern exposure for the important living areas inside and out, and captures the splendid views north to the Golden Gate Bridge and east to the city. Also, interrupting the living room with a street entrance would have destroyed the dramatic effect gained by approaching the room indirectly. The plan provides clearly separated public and private sides and an uninterrupted flow of space from the entrance hall through the important rooms. The entry and the stair hall are also well situated for circulation to the upstairs rooms and to the kitchen at the back of the house. Tucked away in the northeastern corner and barely detectable from the inside or the outside is a simple, narrow door opening onto a small balcony that takes in the sweep of the view to the north. Maybeck directed more attention to the balcony on the outside by giving it a boldly scaled railing with Gothic quatrefoils and a sculptural pedestal (plate 139).

The outside of the Young house seems almost a parody of the English half-timber style; by 1913 that style had become so common that parody probably seemed appropriate to Maybeck. Just as the plan divides the house into a front and a back section, so the exterior has two different claddings: a half-timbered front and a shingled back (like the 1907 Senger house). At first glance, the half-timbering seems perfunctory; it turns the corner in a slapdash way and stops abruptly. Yet the absence of a graceful transition can be read as Maybeck's declaration that such half-timbering was purely and arbitrarily decorative.

The interior of the Young house is more frankly rustic than the outside would suggest. The dining-room ceiling has the exposed floor joists of the upper floor; the high-peaked living-room ceiling is braced with heavy beams and lined with rough-sawn boards laid diagonally (plate 140). The large windows on two sides of the living room provide ample daylight and give the room an openness that is countered on its north side by the tall concrete fireplace, which has its chimney exposed all the way to the ceiling (plate 141). The rudeness of the exposed framing of the ceiling is somewhat countered by the richness of the fireplace mantel. The room makes a strong impression largely because of the elemental forms and expressiveness of the materials. Against its solid strength Maybeck played off the delicacy of one of his most enchanting lighting fixtures, an arrangement of miniature lamps in black iron suspended at different levels--not exactly the Roos house lighting gone rustic but with a similar effect. Just as the eighteen-by-twenty-two-foot living room gives the impression of being larger than it really is because of the drama of its upper area, so the high ceiling of the square master bedroom, ninteen by nineteen feet, makes it appear larger (plate 142). Here the exposed framing on the ceiling is refined into elegant molded-wood members that give the room a grand feeling (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 146-50, 232).

South and west of Twin Peaks lie three additional Maybeck structures, all built in the wild area of Forest Hill between 1913 and 1919. Maybeck designed a number of buildings for friends and for organizations of particular interest to him. A case in point is his residence for Edwin C. Young, whom Maybeck knew through the Bohemian Club. Begun late in 1913, the home at 51 Sotelo Avenue was completed in 1914 and is considered the first Maybeck building in the Forest Hill Tract.

Because the house is built into the side of a hill, its dimensions, particularly in depth, are especially impressive. Some Maybeck students feel the exterior of this house represents the beginning of his movement toward fanciful rather than essential forms and patterns, as the ornamentation here seems applied rather than integral to the structure. If this is true (and the projecting beams which form a lattice across the front seem to suggest it) his style had certainly lost none of its strength. Nor are his hallmarks missing: the balconies, a necessity in Europe where he studied, are perhaps more notable here than in any of the other residences discussed--they not only ring the living room on the second-story level just under the cathedral ceiling, but are also used outside (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 130-31).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 243).

Sierra Club, client; location and condition unknown (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 232).

In 1915 Louis C. Mullgardt, who designed the other showpiece of the PPIE, the Tower of Jewels, described the Palace's design as "a free interpretation of Roman forms and purely romantic conception, entirely free from obedience to scholastic precedent. Its greatest charm has been established through successful composition; the architectural elements have been arranged into a colossal theme...into which the interwoven planting and the mirror lake have been incorporated in a masterful way." Until 1962 the crumbling stucco original of this beloved relic of the Exposition survived in the melancholy state Maybeck said was the right mood for the fine arts. Then, thanks largely to the generosity and persistence of Walter Johnson, who matched the funds raised by the city, it was restored in concrete. The exhibition building behind the rotunda was given a new life as a home for the Exploratorium, an auditorium, and other cultural activities (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 94).

In 1912 when the plans for the Panama Pacific International Exposition were being discussed, Maybeck was not invited to participate. He was automatically excluded because he had executed no large buildings. When he recalled the incident in 1950 he said, "I hadn't even done a warehouse. However, Mrs. Maybeck ripped the boys up and down the back with letters." Her message was: give Ben a job.

The head of the architectural committee was Willis Polk, one of Maybeck's former students who in 1918 designed the famous glass curtain Hallidie Building in San Francisco. He hired Maybeck as a draftsman on an hourly basis to coordinate work in the Joy Zone. The Palace of Fine Arts had been assigned to Polk but since he was busy, he asked the draftsmen in the Exposition office to put their minds to work on a scheme.

Maybeck knew the grounds well from frequent inspections in the Joy Zone. He remembered a depression in the land in which water had collected and went to investigate. He thought of dredging out a lagoon at this spot, and making it a part of the architectural scheme of the Palace of Fine Arts. His idea was a structure that would be as beautiful reflected in the water as it was against the sky.

With his usual loose and atmospheric approach to preliminary design, he sketched a gallery, an elliptical colonnade and rotunda in charcoal. At the back of his mind was the memory of Piranesi engravings; it was this melancholy note in architecture and gardening that he strove to attain. In an introduction to Maybeck's booklet, The Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon, Panama Pacific Exposition, 1915, Frank Morton Todd wrote that Maybeck's theme was a building of vanquished grandeur, in which "willows and acacias choked its portals, grasses dug into its urns and ivy overran its cornices and dimmed its lines."

The sketch was passed along by Polk to other members of the Architectural Commission; the person most impressed by the sketch was Henry Bacon of New York, designer of the Lincoln Memorial. "You will hear of this some day," he promised Maybeck.

Because of Bacon's interest in the design, Maybeck's scheme for the Palace of Fine Arts was adopted. Willis Polk, unwilling to be the author of something that was not his, stepped aside and generously gave Maybeck full charge of the work. However, Maybeck continued to be paid his draftsman's wage. "I didn't get rich on that job," he said.

All the buildings at the Exposition were designed in the neo-classical style made famous by the Columbian Exposition. In his booklet Maybeck wrote that he had arrived at his forms and details as one "matches the color of a ribbon with a sample in his hand...You do the same with architecture. You examine an historic form and you see whether the effect it produces in your mind matches the feeling you are trying to portray."

The orange octagonal rotunda was set at the center of the composition; on either side were two detached peristyles made of an imitation travertine marble, which had been developed for repair work on the Pennsylvania Station in New York. The peristyle repeated the curve of the art gallery and followed the shore line of the lagoon. The rotunda dominated the entire landscape.

The guidebook The architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition, stated "Of all the wonderful effects of the Exposition grounds none is so full of haunting beauty as the vistas afforded by the Palace of Fine Arts...By the indirect system of illumination, an effect as of strong moonlight is produced and from concealed sources under cornices and behind columns, a soft reflected radiance pervades peristyle and rotunda."

In an introduction to the exposition guide, Louis Christian Mullgardt, another pioneer of western modern architecture, and a member of the Architectural Commission, also commented on the Palace of Fine Arts, "The entire composition bespeaks the mind of a romanticist whose productions are swayed more by nature's glories than by scholastic tradition."(McCoy 1975: 37-40).

At the end of the first World War, Willis Polk--in accepting a post with the city's Memorial and Monument Committee--suggested that the Palace of Fine Arts be rebuilt of permanent materials as a war memorial. Polk said that the buildings "seem to me always holding out mythical hands in a pitiful appeal for restoration, perpetuation." Nothing came of Polk's proposal.

As the years passed and time and weather continued their destructive work, the colonnade and rotunda grew dearer to the hearts of San Franciscans. But in 1958 a bond issue to rebuild was voted down, and it seemed destined for destruction. However, in 1959 Walter Johnson, a San Francisco resident, gave $2 million to save the structures; with $2 million more added by the state of California, the Palace of Fine Arts will be rebuilt from original plans on file in the University of California architectural library (McCoy 1975: 43).

By the beginning of 1912 the architects for the full commission [of the Panama Pacific International Exhibit] had been named: Thomas Hastings, Henry Bacon, and the firm of McKim, Mead and White, all of New York; George W. Kelham, Louis C. Mullgardt, Arthur Brown, Jr., of San Francisco; and Robert D. Farquhar of Los Angeles. Now the Architectural Commission had as its members not only Willis Polk and Thomas Hastings, who were friends of Maybeck, but also Edward Bennett and Arthur Brown, Jr., his former students. Maybeck's records do not indicate exactly when he gained employment on Polk's staff, but he was instrumental in keeping part of the site--water covered one-third of it--from being filled, thus forming the lagoon which became a significant part of the Fair's plan. While Edward Bennett is credited with the creative concept that called for courts rather than buildings to be designed by the architects, it seems likely that Maybeck had some influence on his former student in this decision. His own fascination with negative spaces would support such a speculation. In any case it was a scheme that he later was able to exploit and dramatize.

Polk, as Chairman of the Commission, had been given the most important and expensive building to be constructed on the site. Unlike the other structures which were to be built of wood, the Palace of Fine Arts was to be constructed in steel to provide fire protection for its valuable contents. For the second meeting of the Architectural Commission in August of 1912, each architect had been asked to present preliminary sketches. Polk had decided to have an office competition to select the design for the Fine Arts building. When all drawings were done, a unanimous decision of his office staff led to the selection of Maybeck's charcoal sketch as the preliminary design to be presented to the Commission. Henry Bacon, in particular, was enormously impressed by the sketch. (Note 6: B. R. Maybeck, KPFA Tape 1953, C.E.D Docs.) When he and others began congratulating Polk on his brilliant composition, Polk revealed the author of the design and, in a magnanimous gesture, proposed Maybeck in place of himself as architect for the structure. In one stroke Maybeck's status was changed from that of a minor draftsman working on Fair buildings to the architect of the principal structure (Cardwell 1977: 141).

Walter Steilberg, Julia Morgan's engineer, told the following story about the commission for the Palace of Fine arts:

I've never forgotton, though, Willis Polk's fine gesture at the time of the Palace of Fine Arts. Here was this self-centered little S.O.B., as many people called him, with the job himself of designing the Palace of Fine Arts. He showed his friend Maybeck--Mr. Maybeck was always trying to reform Mr. Polk in an entirely friendly way--these sketches (Chesley Bonestell told me this story; he was there at the time.) Maybeck says, "No, I don't think that's a good solution, Willis. Let me have the facts in the case--the whole plan, not before you fill in this mud hole, as you call it, but the entire plan, and the number of galleries, and so on. Let me see what I can do with it; I'd much rather make a positive criticism than a negative one."

So Maybeck worked on it over the weekend and he came in on Monday, and, Bonestell said, he just rolled his drawings out and said to Polk, "Now, listen, this thing that you call a mudhole, that's your opportunity: you can make a reflecting mirror of that. And it'll serve another purpose: when the crowds come down this great esplanade from among the other buildings, they won't rush right into the presence of art; they'll slow down a little bit and go around that. Make a reflecting pool of it, and then put the colonnades in here so they come around into the presence of art slowly.

And then you'll put this big dome in this place; that's not housing anything in particular, so it might be well to just make something very small so that people will see how enormous the architecture is, and they'll be slowed up a little bit. They'll go into the galleries tamed down a bit. Then when they're in there they won't go 'squads right' and 'squads left;' they'll go around and see sculpture in different lights. It'll make a pleasanter building, I think." Polk said to Mr. Maybeck, "Maybeck, the job's yours. Go ahead and do it." (Regional Oral History Office 1976: Vol. 1, pp.144-45).

The Fine Arts Palace is the best known, most photographed, and most well documented of Maybeck's buildings. In The Story of the Exposition, Frank Morton Todd gives complete technical and physical descriptions of the structure, but when attempting to describe the character of the building in his volumes, he hesitantly states:

Nowhere in America had such a thing been built before, nothing in American architecture had ever approached it. These are strong statements. We base them not merely on our own appraisal but on the way it affected qualified art critics, and visitors in general...

The theme itself we might attempt to state as the mortality of grandeur and to describe as having some affinity with our eternal sorrows over the vanity of human wishes...

Some such feeling as this, though vague, must have come to every responsive intelligence that looked across the Fine Arts Lagoon and the Palace itself. It represented the beauty and grandeur of the past. A cloister enclosing nothing, a colonnade without a roof, stairs that ended nowhere, a fane with a lonely votary kneeling at a dying flame, fluted shafts that rose, half hid in vines, from the lush growth of an old swamp, ...all these things were in the picture. (Note 7: Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1921), pp. 315-17.)

It was evident that Maybeck had succeeded in setting a mood. It was also evident that he had achieved his goal of creating a beautiful building. But all the words and the praise heaped on the building fail to explain what it was about the architectural forms that contributed to its universal appeal. Even when Maybeck wrote about the Palace, not one word refers to the building itself, or even to any of its parts. All of his explanation is devoted to the mood appropriate for an art gallery--which was "a sad and serious matter"--and this is done through repeated allusions to the haunting character of remnants of past civilizations and natural landscape forms. In his small booklet, The Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon, he writes:

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...

You examine a historic form and see whether the effect it produced on your mind matches the feeling you are trying to portray--a modified sadness or a sentiment in a minor key.

An old Roman ruin, away from civilization, which two thousand years before was the center of action and full of life, and now is partly overgrown with bushes and trees--such ruins give the mind a sense of sadness...Great examples of melancholy in architecture and gardening may be seen in the engravings of Piranesi, who lived a century ago, and whose remarkable work conveys the sad, minor note of old Roman ruins covered with bushes and trees. There seems to be no other works of the builder, neither Gothic, nor Moorish, nor Egyptian, that give us just this note of vanished grandeur .... similar to the sentiment expressed in the statue of the muse finding the head of Orpheus--its beauty tempers the sadness of it. (Note 8: Maybeck 1915: 9-11.)

On the corona of the peristyle and on the architrave supporting the planting boxes Maybeck's signatory "A" is used as ornamentation (Cardwell 1977: 144).

Maybeck's design corrections for visual distortion may be seen in the receding planes of the coffers of the ceiling (Cardwell 1977: 147).

Perhaps the popular acceptance of the Palace of Fine Arts can partially be attributed to the temper of the times. The Exposition opened at a time when the nations of Europe were at war. The transition from a state of peace to war had been abrupt. Daily reports of devastation, slaughter, and suffering dampened the spirits of even the most optimistic. Instead of celebrating the achievement of man by an international exhibition, it seemed a time to mourn the turning of productive agencies into forces of destruction and degradation of human life. The mood almost caused the failure of the amusement zone of the Fair, where frivolous games of darts and pitch-penny drew few takers; but it insured the success of the Palace of Fine Arts. The note of melancholoy, akin to sorrow, which Maybeck attributed to great art, matched the spirit of the times while also soothing it:

You 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. You have there the point of transition from sadness to content, which comes pretty near the total impression of the Fine Arts Palace and lake. (Note 9:Ibid. p. 12)

No matter what subjective evaluation is made of Maybeck's design, objective measurement of its strong composition of negative space is of great significance. Maybeck had consciously manipulated the spaces for scenic and dramatic effects. One writer noted that no matter where you stood around the structure, each position gave a different grouping of columns, dome and wall, a different setting of trees and water. (Note 10: Ben Macomber, The Jewel City (San Francisco: John H. Williams, 1915), p. 104.) The every-changing vistas seen by delighted visitors verified the previous reports of unparalleled beauty.

The visitor would arrive at the end of the main axis of the Fair and step into a space dominated by the great rotunda and its reflection in the quiet lagoon. To gain a closer view he was forced to turn and proceed around the lake to one of the two entrance pavilions. Following an elliptical path, he arrived at a rectangular grouping of paired Corinthian columns through which the great dome was seen off-axis, suggesting the route to be taken. The way led between the semi-circular peristyle and the curving wall of the gallery. The colonnade and its architrave swept in a strong line under and apparently through groups of four stately columns supporting nothing more than what many writers have described as caskets or great boxes. As the visitor neared his goal, the peristyle suddenly terminated, revealing views into and through the rotunda to the great palaces he had left a thousand steps ago. The experience of moving within and seeing through the spaces of the Palace of Fine Arts enthralled the visitor, whether or not its architectural details delighted him.

If The Fine Arts Palace had a wide popular appeal, the admiration of architects was far less universal. It is well summed up in John D. Berry's criticism of the Fair buildings, published in the Transactions of the Commonwealth Club of August, 1915:

It was good planning that placed the Palace of Fine Arts at one end of what the architects called the main axis of the Exposition. And Bernard R. Maybeck, the San Francisco architect who made the design, had a happy inspiration when he lifted it up from the surrounding flatness and made it seem to stand on an eminence where it would dominate.

The Rotunda is a free use of the Roman classic style and remotely resembles the Pantheon in Rome. The colonnade behind is Roman, too. But the treatment with its refinement of detail is Greek. The architects say that Maybeck has broken all the rules: but they acknowledge that he is justified by his success. He has done something unique, of astonishing beauty. In his use of the lagoon he has been very successful and in the planting he has had fine cooperation from McLaren (Note 11: Commonwealth Club, Transactions, 10 (August, 1915), p. 386).

Behind these words lies the implied criticism of many architects that Maybeck did not know his architectural orders. He used Corinthian columns only eight diameters high, and they knew from Vignola that ten diameters was the correct proportion. His frieze, adapted from the Temple of the Sun, varied greatly from d'Espouy (Note 12: Hector d'Espouy, Fragments d'Architecture (Paris: 1905). Moreover, he used cornice molds of a Greek proportion on the otherwise Roman entablature. From the uppermost cornice, which Maybeck decorated with the motif of his flowing "A" and anthemions, to the insubstantial bases of the great columns, there were many details the academic architect could criticize. Perhaps even some pique was felt at the fact that Maybeck had connived with his friend McLaren to drop several truckloads of large trees destined for other areas into the muck surrounding the lagoon, much to the consternation of the supervisor of construction. (Note 13: H. D. H. Connick was Director of Works, and J. McLaren was Landscape Engineer of the Exposition.) When he came to have them removed to their assigned destinations, the trees had sunk far enough into the mire to make it impossible (Cardwell 1977: 149).

In his own essay, "The Architecture of the Palace of Fine Arts of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition," Maybeck referred to the rotonda as a "...sympathetic setting for the muse "Priestess of Culture" surmounting column. The serenity and intellectual beauty of this controlled angelic figure well express the mission of culture upon the earth. The elevation was designed to harmonize with a cornice belonging to a Temple of the Sun published in the restoration of Rome by Despuoy. I chose the cornice composed by this man, who died about 2000 years ago, because it is the one cornice that had the simplicity of the Greeks ... the general feeling of the Fine Arts Palace is Greek."

Maybeck noted that two styles of columns were used, Corinthian and Ionic, and that in the former case instead of the usual eleven to one ratio, he had used an eight to one ratio "to suggest a heavy Doric."

In regard to the boxes on the groups of four columns and the female figures adorning the corners of the boxes, Maybeck wrote: "...the Greek...would have put human figures on the corners....The difference between the Greek method of composing and mine is that the figure turned its back to the audience (Fig. 9). This was done for sentimental reasons and to strike the minor key of sadness (Porter et. al. 1916: 161-63).

Maybeck is rightfully remembered as a mild mannered, modest man; but when it came to a design problem he was determined and resolute in seeing that his ideas prevailed. Contractors and craftsmen who worked with him attest to this fact. (Note 14: In spite of the comment, contractors N. Boldt, A. H. Broad, and others did much work for Maybeck.) He demanded perfection and, at the same time, admitted that it was impossible to achieve. In the Palace of Fine Arts he corrected for optical distortion by skewing each receding plane of the coffers of the rotunda dome to give them equal visual exposures. His ideal shape for the gallery plan was made of elliptical curves, but he modified it to arcs of a circle to make its construction more rational and economical for building with repetitive, radially placed, steel bents. The compromises demanded by architecture inevitably meant a failure to attain the perfection he sought. But he cherished the seeking as a reward of being human.

While Maybeeck believed in absolute design values, he never thought mechanical ordering of shapes could create beauty. The basis for his dislike of Renaissance design lay in its dependence upon the diameter of a column as the module to generate acceptable proportions. He felt that each civilization reflected its own spirit in the harmony of lines and the correspondence of forms in its buildings. He believed firmly that the history of architecture could teach him principles of design. His view included vernacular building as well as formal structures. He developed an understanding of architecture as an expression of the human spirit, and he was uninterested in the study of archeological detail or the development of proper "good taste" in historic styles. History was alive for him, and in his studies he had deduced that new materials or architectural shapes, no matter how revolutionary, evoked responses growing out of man's common psychological reactions to color and form, modified by the particular values of a national culture.

The Palace of Fine Arts was as much a landscape composition as it was an architectural one. The great trees, the clipped and flowering shrubs, the high boxes of the colonnade intended to be planted with trailing vines, even the reflections in the lagoon, were calculated to soften the outlines of sharp architectural edges. So too, the great curving wall of the gallery had its crowning cornice stippled by the shadows from a feathery trellis and its surface modulated by the shrubs growing in its high planting ledge. What Maybeck sought was a flawless balance of line, form, light, and color which only time can create--a perfect harmony between nature and architecture (Cardwell 1977: 150).

The Palace of Fine Arts established Maybeck's ability as a designer to the San Francisco populace. To an eye not prejudiced by Vignola or d'Espouy, it seemed not much different in detail from the buildings of McKim, Mead and White; Carrère and Hastings; or Henry Bacon, the well-known New York architects. Yet the Palace was more appealing than their work. Even before the closing day of the exposition, a plan to save the Palace of Fine Arts and the Marina took shape. October 16, 1915 was designated as Preservation Day, and excess gate receipts, amounting to $18,000, were collected to form a preservation league. A prime thorn in the side of the preservationists was the question posed by "practical men" who wanted to know what end the use of the structure would serve. John Bakewell answered this question as well as anyone:

Whether there is any practical use to which the Fine Arts Palace, as at present arranged, could be put is outside the question. The portions of the building which most strike the imagination are the central rotunda and the flanking colonnade, or the very parts which even now have no very practical use, but which with the lagoon and landscape about them have an added touch of romance that we had thought only time and nature could bring. The building itself, that is the roofed portion of the building, can be rearranged or even rebuilt to suit the purpose for which it may be found advisable to use it. (Note 15: John Bakewell, Commonwealth Club, Transactions, 10, (August, 1915), p. 375.)

The committee formed to preserve the buildings of the Fair failed in its efforts. It was the commercial interest in the residential development of the fairgrounds that prevailed. But, by mere chance, the Palace of Fine Arts, located on ground leased from the U.S. Military Reservation of the San Franciisco Presidio, survived long after the destruction of the palaces around it. For more than two generations its plaster ornament and landscaped grounds enchanted viewers as they did during the Fair. After almost forty-five years of disintegration and decay, a sense of civic pride, the ingrained nostalgia of San Franciscans, and an increased recognition of Maybeck as an imaginative practitioner of architecture renewed efforts for its conservation. Many architects had doubts about rebuilding in permanent materials a structure of lath and plaster that was designed for an instant in time, a consciously created fantasy that was part of the illusionary architecture of a world's fair (Cardwell 1977: 151).

But the work of concerned preservationists raised enough money from private and government sources to assure its reconstruction. (Note 16: Kenneth H. Cardwell, "Bernard Maybeck: San Francisco Genius," Northern California Chapter, A.I.A. Bulletin, 22 (April, 1960), pp. 22-25.) And, beginning in 1962, over six million dollars was expended to build in steel and concrete a modified version of Maybeck's ephemeral creation.

During the period when funds were being gathered for restoration, Maybeck had his own ideas concerning the fate of the Palace of Fine Arts. They ranged from demolishing it in order to create an active community center, to heavily planting its site with redwoods in order that children of the future might find bits of ornament and sculpture of a wondours ruin of a previous generation among the trees. (Note 17: Conversations between Maybeck and the author. In addition to the two proposals related, he urged friends to investigate the possibility of preservation by "industrial cocooning," a process used to preserve surplus ships from World War II.)(Cardwell 1977: 152).

The popular favorite of all the [Panama-Pacific International Exposition] ... buildings, according to newspaper accounts, was the Palace of Fine Arts, which housed exhibitions of paintings and sculpture from the countries participating in the fair. The palace did not start out to be Maybeck's commission. It originally belonged to Maybeck's old friend Willis Polk, chairman of the exposition's Executive Council for Architecture. Polk appointed himself and two other architects, William Faville and Clarence Ward, as a special committee to choose the architects for the exposition buildings. In 1912 Polk's committee named an advisory architectural commission for the exposition; its members, who also designed buildings for the fair, were Thomas Hastings, Henry Bacon, and the firm of McKim, Mead and White, all from New York; George W. Kelham, Mullgardt, and Arthur Brown, Jr., from San Francisco; and Robert D. Farquhar from Los Angeles. Maybeck was not asked to be on the commission because he had a very small office and had not done the kind of large-scale office or commercial buildings that were deemed a prerequisite for designing the huge warehouse-type buildings needed for the fair's exhibitions.

Polk himself had a commission for one of the fair buildings, the Palace of Fine Arts, but he was very glum about the site he was assigned, which he said was the worst one on the exposition grounds. True, it was a water-filled bog, but Maybeck--who was working for Polk at the time--tried to get Polk to see this as an opportunity and apparently prevented him from draining the site. Polk remained unconvinced, but before departing for a short stay at Bohemian Grove, he directed his staff to hold a competition within the office for the building design. When he returned, he found that his staff had voted for Maybeck's proposal, executed in an atmospheric charcoal sketch. When the sketch was presented to the advisory architectural commission, it was much admired. Saying that he did not wish to execute another man's design, Polk acknowledged that the proposal was Maybeck's and magnanimously gave him the commission.

When Maybeck wrote about architecture ... [he] preferred telling fables about his work ... if read carefully and with sympathy ... are wonderfully revealing of his thought process. His essay published as a booklet titled Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon (1915) is key to an understanding both of that most famous ensemble and of his work in general ... :

It is necessary to assume that the hearers admit there are mental processes not to be expressed in language.... Music and architecture are vehicles of expression for phases of our human experience.

Omitting construction, we will discuss only the architecture as a conveyor of ideas and sentiments. The combinations and arrangements of the buildings and gardens at the Fair were planned according to ... the fundamental idea ... that the picture presented by the ground plan of a group of buildings and their surroundings should be agreeable to the eye, and therefore in the development of the plan it is treated as though it were an ornament, without regard to the fact that it represents buildings. If the plan of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition group of main buildings [plate 88] were reduced in scale to the size of a golden brooch and the courts and buildings were made in Venetian cloisonné jewlery, that brooch thus made would pass as ... jewelry without causing a suspicion that it represented a plan for a World's Fair.

Having made the plan comprehensible for the reader by miniaturizing it, Maybeck introduced the story of the palace with ... summaries of the impressions inspired by a walk through the fairgrounds:

The Court of Abundance ... suggests the medieval with all its rising power of idealism in conflict with the physical. The Court of the Universe suggests Rome inhabited by some unknown placid people. The Court of the Four Seasons suggests grace, beauty and peace in the land where the souls of philosophers and poets dwell in continued satisfaction. The Fine Arts Palace suggests the romantic of the period after the classic Renaissance. Someone familiar with the philosophy of art will no doubt wish to challenge this classification of the various courts, but I believe it will be admitted that some such classification can be made for one class of mind, and other classifications for other minds. These terms, "romantic," "classic," etc., are usually covered by the word "atmosphere"--physical forms reflect a mental condition.

Moving on to discuss the program for the building, Maybeck ... continues:

Let us analyze the Fine Arts Palace and lake and discuss the various elements which influenced the composition of the architecture and landscape. The first question to settle is, what character should an exhibition building of paintings have; the second question is, by what process may we find the elements of architectural forms that give the feeling that corresponds to that of the exhibition of paintings.

At this point ... Maybeck described ... a fictional "Palatial Picture Palace"--"an art gallery composed of five-dollar Broadway paintings, the gold frames of which cost more than the labor of painting the picture." The appropriate character for such a building would be "an overdone ice-cream parlor or candy store, with many steam orchestrions playing various tunes just far enough apart so that they audibly compete with each other. The magnificent gardens should be all hand-made artificial plants and artificial waterfalls. Such an art palace might be deemed to have a Broadway atmosphere and ... a harmony of discords." Next we read that Maybeck's ... palace will be far from such gaudy commercialism because the paintings therein will come from the wellspring of the artist's being ...:

The artist began his work a long time ago in a nebulous haze of whys, and it is usually a long experience before his paintings are nearly as good as a photograph, and oftener a great deal of hard work and disappointment must have come before he suspects that it is not the object nor the likeness to the object that he is working for, but a portrayal of the life that is behind the visible.

Here he comes face to face with the real things of this life; no assistance can be given him; he cannot hire a boy in gold buttons fashionably to open the door to the Muse, nor a clerk nor an accountant to do the drudgery. He is alone before his problem and drifts away from superficial portrayals.

Following this parenthetical account of the artist's lonely vocation, Maybeck resumed his discussion of an appropriate character for the palace, given that people would be going there to see art. Presumably he was drawing once more on his personal experience with art. He recalled the utter weariness experienced at the end of a trek through the art gallery in Munich--probably a memory from his and Annie's tour through Europe at the time of the Hearst competition. "We dragged ourselves along," he explained and noted some of the works they looked at, including Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead. Before leaving the gallery, they rested by a sculpture of a cheery little boy and observed how the spirits of other weary tourists were raised by this note of happiness. "We realized right there," wrote Maybeck, "that an art gallery was a sad and serious business."

One more personal anecdote follows to introduce Maybeck's concept for the palace. This one relates that an artist's illustrations--Maybeck calls them a "frontispiece"--for the opening of each chapter of a story he had come across were so successful that he could perfectly anticipate its contents. He then moved directly to the point: "Now what Mr. Trask wanted was a frontispiece to his art collection, which would anticipate the general impression of the whole.... 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."

Why Maybeck felt it necessary to tell two rather disconnected anecdotes to bolster his scheme remains a puzzle. The most revealing statement, almost hidden in the account, is that he had seen Böcklin's Isle of the Dead--one of the most famous and popular paintings of its day, which many people made a special trip to see. Near the end of his essay Maybeck returned to the painting, which he called "overdone in sadness." He then described it as "a dark picture of an island of tall black trees enclosing a white marble columbarium; in the foreground a boat carrying the dead across. The islands of Clear Lakes, California," he continued, "where the trees and bushes seem to rise out of the water, make the same impression of sadness as Böcklin's picture, but in a lesser degree." And circling around the issue of caractère once more, he wrote: "As an example of what is meant by matching impressions: suppose you were to put a Greek temple in the middle of a small mountain lake surrounded by dark, deep, rocky cliffs, with the white foam dashing over the marble temple floor--you would have a sense of mysterious fear and even terror, as of something uncanny. If the same temple, pure and beautiful in lines and color, were placed on the face of a placid lake," a mood of sadness modified by the soothing effect of beauty would be achieved.

Although Maybeck had veiled his objectives up to this point in his essay, he divulged at last his recipe for finding the right forms to achieve the desired effect. "The process," he wrote, "is similar to that of matching the color of ribbons. You pick up a blue ribbon, hold it alongside the sample in your hand, and at a glance you know it matches or it does not. You do the same with architecture; you examine a historic form and see whether the effect it produced on your mind matches the feeling you are trying to portray." Maybeck never indicated how many forms he tried out, but the right form for the Palace of Fine Arts is finally revealed as "an old Roman ruin, away from civilization, which two thousand years before was the center of action and full of life, and now is partly overgrown with bushes and trees--such ruins give the mind a sense of sadness." The details of his vision are vague, but "great examples of melancholy in architecture and gardening may be seen in the engravings of Piranesi,...whose remarkable work conveys the sad, minor note of old Roman ruins covered with bushes and trees." The note of vanished grandeur has rarely if ever been achieved more effectively than in Maybeck's fairground ensemble of a rotunda and colonnade set on what appears to be an island in the still waters of a lagoon (plate 90).

...

Maybeck's typescript provides another clue to his sources for the design of the rotunda: "The elevation was designed to harmonize with a cornice belonging to a Temple of the Sun published in the restoration of Rome by d'Espouy. I chose the cornice of this man who died about 2000 years ago because it is the one cornice that had the simplicity of the Greeks." The typescript also reveals that he changed the height of the Corinthian columns in the colonnade from the traditional eleven diameters to eight, inviting criticism from those who felt that the proportions of the orders were inviolable. Maybeck's idiosyncratic use of the term "Greek" to describe the character of the rotunda must have either perplexed or infuriated those--and they would have been the majority of trained architects--who had even a rudimentary knowledge of ancient Greek architecture, which had no domed structures. Maybeck said that the base line from which the rotunda's arches sprang was not accentuated because it would have spoiled the proportion of the central arch seen from the opposite side of the lagoon. The other arches had to reach to the ground and therefore pilasters and entablatures accentuated the spring line.

Although Maybeck's rotunda is not ruinlike, the colonnade with its fragmented attic story hints at ruins. The huge containers atop the entablature are supported on Corinthian columns raised to the level of the cornice as if to emphasize the weight above (plate 93). Indeed, the coffers would have been even heavier if they had been filled with earth and planted, as Maybeck wished them to be. The species he intended is not known, but one can imagine the theatrical effect of having the figures gradually entwined with vines. Still, common sense argued against any planting for which no maintenance was possible. Although Maybeck must have been asked many times about the meaning of his brooding ladies, his answers have not come down to us. His typescript refers to the planters as "boxes" and notes that after the Renaissance, the practice was to break up such forms with shields and garlands. "But," he noted, "a Greek did not decorate that way. He would have put human figures on the corners."

This statement suggests that the primary role of the figures was formal. However, the stance of the draped figures peering over the tops of the tomblike planters and the funerary urns stationed around the rotunda do suggest a state of mourning. Why all this funerary paraphernalia? One plausible explanation is that by the time of the exposition, the war-torn present loomed over the vanished past. Maybeck may have intended some reference to the tragic events that surrounded the escapist world of the exposition, but history's political aspects seem never to have engaged his mind, and no evidence exists that the design of the palace was in any way his response to the calamitous times.

Finally, Maybeck's typescript is helpful in explaining the landscaping for the palace complex. His description is once again pictorial:

Usually in good planning, when the plan of the walls of the building are blacked in on paper the picture thus made is agreeable to the eye....To get this result in the Fine Arts plan, the shrubs were used to fill the vacancies that usually are filled out with walls, which are called 'points de Pocher.' I do not mention the above in light of an apology, but rather wish to show that those who plan in snow countries have a different problem from our Californian architects.

We can infer from this cryptic statement that the mild winter climate--the exposition opened in February--permitted a generous use of vegetation in place of structure, a cost savings as well as an attractive idea for Maybeck, who always stressed the combination of nature and structure. "It was intended," he stated in closing,

that the foliage should be high and romantic avoiding all stiff lines, but the scale being so large it was impossible to plant things large enough, and [because of] restricted means and time to realize the intention. If it were a permanent building the planting could be arranged to have the proper mass in ten to 20 years or more. On the whole the lagoon is the crux of the whole composition and fortunately no bridge had to be put across it as was at first demanded. We must be thankful to the chief of construction that it was omitted.

Maybeck also had reason to thank John McLaren, his friend and the director of landscaping for the fair, for procuring the mature trees--Monterey cypress and other species--that contributed so much to the effect of the palace. It seems that the trees had been promised to George Kelham for his building, but McLaren--probably with Maybeck's knowledge--had them trucked to the palace lagoon, where they were quickly embedded in the mud and could not be removed when the irritated Kelham arrived to claim them. McLaren also created two "living walls" of mesembryanthemum (ice plant), which projected from either side of the rotunda's central arch and curved around to form a gateway that replaced the arch of Constantine originally intended for that spot.

An enormous popular success, the palace was the only exposition building not demolished after the exposition closed. Eventually, though, its stucco-over-wire-lath exterior all but crumbled, and in the early 1960s it had to be reconstructed in concrete. Maybeck had been ambivalent about its preservation. When first interviewed about it, he said: "I think the main building should be torn down and redwoods planted around--completely around--the rotunda....As they grow, the columns would slowly crumble at the same speed. Then I would like to design an altar, with the figure of a maiden praying, to install in the grove of redwoods....I should like my palace to die behind those great trees of its own accord, and become its own cemetery."⁶ Later, when a fund-raising campaign was initiated for the preservation of the building, Maybeck said that he would be happy to see it restored.⁷ Its reconstruction was completed in 1967, ten years after his death (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 101-111, 232).

The Palace of Fine Arts (on Baker Street, between Bay Street and Marina Boulevard) was the thematic focus of the Exposition. A great rotunda of a Roman Classical character, with Corinthian columns and carefully-detailed cornices, was placed at the center of two out-curving colonnades of similar design. Behind it, a curved shed provided a setting for the fair's fine arts exhibits. The whole ensemble was given Baroque grandeur by its scale and focused organization; an artificial lake added atmosphere and foreground reflections.

The Palace met with such success that after the Fair was over, nobody had the heart to destroy it. Maybeck thought its "staff" sheathing, cornices, and figures might last indefinitely in the mild San Francisco climate. But by the 1940's chunks were beginning to fall from the structure like leaves from autumn elms.

Because the Palace of Fine Arts had dominated the city's northwestern skyline for so long, and because of its sentimental associations for so many, a number of proposals to restore Maybeck's triumph were advanced. The State of California offered two million dollars for restoration if the city would match the sum, but San Francisco voters refused. Then Walter Johnson, a nostalgic San Francisco financier, offered the city two and a quarter million dollars, if other sources would match his gift. This time the money was raised.

Now the Palace has been reconstructed in pre-cast concrete, with special attention to tone and texture, in an attempt to duplicate Maybeck's masterpiece. While no ultimate use for the complex has yet been determined, it is hoped that it will eventually house one or more of the city's cultural organizations (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 14-15).

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