The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition - Louis Christian Mullgardt (best beach reads TXT) 📗

The repeated Corinthian columns lining the curve are of Sienna marble. The doorways between them, with the Moorish grill above the doors, are in green, while back of the lattice work is set stained glass in deep amber.

 

Administration Avenue The Fine Arts Laguna

The Baker Street Entrance to the Exposition leads directly into Administration Avenue. The Horticultural Gardens first attract attention by their kaleidoscopic patches of blooming flowers. Then the eye travels on past the Palace of Horticulture to the massive bulwark of the Palaces of Education and Food Products in the walls of which two great half-domed portals form the principal points of interest. Across the way lies the Laguna with its reflected image of the Palace of Fine Arts, perhaps the loveliest spot in the Exposition grounds. Plants grow in the pool and the shores are lined with iris, primroses, periwinkles, pampas grass and, overtopping these, weeping willows mingled with other lovely trees and shrubs.

Towards the end of the Avenue is the small but attractive Hawaiian pavilion. The tower of the California building is silhouetted against the background of the Marin hills. Administration Avenue receives its name from the fact that it leads directly to the administrative headquarters of the Exposition, located in the California building.

 

Palace of Fine Arts The Rotunda and Laguna

The Palace of Fine Arts has the finest natural setting on the Exposition grounds. Consummate skill in planning the entire architectural ensemble gave it a commanding position, at the extreme west of the group of exhibit palaces. The architect, Bernard. R. Maybeck of San Francisco, found as an asset on beginning his work, a small natural lake and a fine group of Monterey cypress. With this foundation he has created a temple of supreme loveliness, thoroughly original in conception, yet classic in its elemental simplicity and in its appeal to the highest and noblest traditions of beauty and art, revealing the imagination of a poet, the fine sense of color and harmony of an artist, and the sure hand of a master-architect in his confident control of architectural forms, of decorative detail and of the contributing landscape elements. The conception of the rotunda is said to have been suggested to the architect by Becklin’s painting “The Island of the Dead” and that of the peristyle by Gerome’s “Chariot Race.”

Across the Laguna from the Palace of Fine Arts runs Administration Avenue and the magnificent Roman wall which forms the western facade of the main group of palaces.

 

Palace of Fine Arts The Rotunda and Peristyle

The Palace of Fine Arts is, in reality, not one complete building, but four separate and distinct elements. The rotunda, an octagonal structure, forms the center of the composition. On either side is a detached peristyle which follows the curve of the gallery itself, as it describes an arc about the western shore of the Laguna, yet so successfully are they all bound together by the encircling green wall and by the other landscape elements, that an impression of satisfying unity results.

The architecture, as a whole, is early Roman, with traces of the finer Greek influences. In general treatment, there is a suggestion of the Temple of the Sun at Athens, while much of the detail was inspired by the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, also at Athens.

The rotunda is Roman in conception, Greek in decorative treatment. By its sheer nobility of form and of proportion, and by its enchantment of color and sculptured ornament, it dominates the entire landscape. The high spiritual quality of the architect’s conception culminates in the Shrine of Inspiration, directly in front of the rotunda, as seen from across the laguna, where kneels Ralph Stackpole’s lovely figure of “Art Tending the Fires of Inspiration,” exquisite in its simplicity and delicate charm.

 

Palace of Fine Arts The Peristyle and Laguna

On either side of the central rotunda the peristyle of the Palace of Fine Arts encircles the shore of the laguna in a long semi-circle, formed of a row of Corinthian columns their pale green simulating age-stained marble. At each extremity of the colonnade and at intervals throughout its length are groups of four larger columns, in ochre, each group surmounted by a great box, designed to hold flowers and vines. Panels simulating pale green, veined marble are inset in these receptacles and at their corners are drooping women’s figures by Ulric H. Ellerhusen representing Contemplation. Between the columns, at their bases, are also set receptacles for growing plants.

In its pervading dignity, in the strength of the columns, in the rich beauty of the capitals and in the chaste refinement of the cornice, the colonnade is essentially Greek.

 

Palace of Fine Arts In the Peristyle Walk

Between the Palace of Fine Arts itself and its bordering colonnade of massive Corinthian columns runs a broad promenade which, while binding the two together, receives a sense of freedom and serenity from the open sky above.

The wall of the gallery is interrupted only by the simple entrances at intervals. It is low and intimate in comparison with the great proportions of the other exhibit palaces and its height is further broken by a terrace midway, set with growing plants and shrubs. The whole effect desired by the architect is of an ancient ruin, overgrown through the centuries with vegetation. Along the edge of the roof runs a latticed Pompeiian pergola, hung with trailing vines, and the wall of the building is colored a deep pompeiian red.

The immense flower urns, banded with classic figures in deep relief, bearing heavy swinging garlands, are by Ulric H. Ellerhusen. Alternating with the massed green of shrubs and plants against the wall are niches holding sculptured groups. The Roman urns which crown the square pillars marking the doors and which, in varying size, are repeated here and there about the building, are by William G. Merchant.

 

Palace of Fine Arts The Rotunda from the Peristyle

From any point in the peristyle of the Palace of Fine Arts and under any atmospheric conditions, either by day or by night; the vistas are peculiarly satisfying and charming. About the columns of the stately colonnade are blooming plants in simple, natural groups. And at intervals between the columns under the rotunda or along either end of the laguna, the outdoor gallery of sculpture finds a sympathetic background and setting.

The great dome of the rotunda which crowns so many of the vistas, is stained a velvety burnt orange, with a turquoise blue-green border. Beneath, are eight panels in low relief by Bruno L. Zimm, symbolizing Greek culture and its desire for poetic and artistic expression, conceived in a deeply classic vein and executed with spirit and grace. Below the panels is an attic of pale-green marble.

Flanking each pier of the rotunda are two Corinthian columns in Sienna marble, within the arches are corresponding Corinthian pilasters, and within the dome against each pier is another massive Corinthian column in marble, each one crowned with the serene and noble “Priestess of Culture” by Herbert Adams of New York.

 

Palace of Fine Arts The Peristyle Walk by Night

Of all the wonderful night effects of the Exposition grounds none are so full of haunting beauty as the vistas afforded by the Palace of Fine Arts and its surroundings. By the indirect system of illumination, an effect as of strong moonlight is produced and from concealed sources, under cornices or behind columns, a soft reflected radiance pervades peristyle and rotunda. The trees, shrubs and columns cast long, intense shadows. Through the columns may be seen the long line of the Roman wall across the laguna, its great, half-domes suffused with a mellow, golden light and in the everchanging waters between, it gleams again.

From the other side of the laguna, the rotunda and the long crescent of the colonnade are seen reflected as in a mirror, and when flooded with the white radiance of the searchlights, their majestic beauty is indescribable.

 

Palace of Fine Arts A Fountain in the Laguna

Beautiful as the Palace of Fine Arts is from any viewpoint, its simplicity and noble strength are at their best when seen with a foreground of trees and water. The landscape, in its simple naturalness, is in feeling an intimate part of the building itself and so perfectly do they blend that they seem to have grown together through quiet, serene centuries.

Between the columns and along the wall of the building are blooming plants and shrubs, groups of Monterey cypress and eucalyptus trees. The shores of the laguna are banked with shrubs, loosely massed, and groups of evergreens and weeping willows bend over the lake. Outlining its irregular border, broken by small promontories and inlets, thousands of blooming plants creep down to the water’s edge and venture out into its placid depths—periwinkles, primroses, daffodils, heliotrope, pampas grass, white and yellow callas, Spanish and Japanese iris and myriads of others whose names and gay, nodding blossoms are more or less familiar. Fountains play in the edge of the lake, the charming spirited group here illustrated being “Wind and Spray” by Anna Coleman Ladd.

 

Palace of Fine Arts A Picturesque Garden Fountain

The graceful garden fountain shown is the work of Anna Coleman Ladd. It is located toward the north end of the building near the entrance to the peristyle. Of the general effect of the Palace of Fine Arts and of its deeper meaning, the architect, Bernard R. Maybeck, says:

“There is a succession of impressions produced as one walks through the different parts of the grounds that play on the feeling and the mind, each part having its own peculiar influence on the sentiment. Along the main axis, for example, the Machinery Hall and neighborhood suggest a mixture of the classic and romantic, as you understand the terms in literature.”

“The Court of Ages 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 the grace, the beauty and the peace in the land where the souls of philosophers and poets dwell.”

“The Fine Arts Palace suggests the romantic of the period after the classic Renaissance, and the keynote is one of sadness modified by the feeling that beauty has a soothing influence.”

 

Palace of Fine Arts The Garden and Fountain of Time

In the foreground of this poetic garden scene is the foremost figure of Lorado Taft’s “Fountain of Time.” In sympathy with the atmospheric influence of such a vista, Bernard R. Maybeck, the architect, continues the thought of the preceding page:

“To make a Fine Arts composition that will fit this modified melancholy, we must use those forms in architecture and gardening that will affect the emotions in such a way as to produce on the individual the same modified sadness as the galleries do. 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, surrounded by high trees and lit up by a glorious full moon, 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 to the total impression that galleries have and that the Fine Arts Palace and Lake are supposed to have.”

 

California Building Bell Tower and Forbidden Garden

The California Building is the result of perhaps the most interesting combination of requirements that could be imagined—to provide a