Found Remnants / Architecture

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While its interior has twice seen major renovations, Exposition Auditorium’s external appearance has remained essentially unchanged for more than 85 years while the Palace of Fine Arts required a major replication in 1968 just to survive. The original peristyle and rotunda of the Fine Arts Palace, which hid the pedestrian architecture of the actual building, had to be raised to the ground, and the exterior cladding of the exhibit hall was stripped away leaving only the steel girders of its framework. When rebuilt, a theatre was installed in one end of the structure which had once held more than 11,000 pieces of art. The remainder of the space was eventually occupied by the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum. The peristyle — minus the north and south end pylons — and the rotunda — minus its ceiling murals — were reproduced in steel and concrete, but the reproductions fail to capture the texturing and elaborate coloration of the originals. While what remains is still a treasure, it pales by comparison with its precursor, and even the copy is beginning to deteriorate with large pieces of the rotunda’s ceiling having only recently fallen to the ground.

Bernard Maybeck, architect and designer of the Palace of Fine Arts, would never have garnered the fame which was heaped upon him for designing this building had it not been for the almost unbelievable selflessness of Willis Polk, a former student of Maybeck’s. Maybeck, always an innovator, though not the most adept businessman, was working as a “details” draftsman in the office of his former pupil when the design of the Palace of Fine Arts was given to Polk by the PPIE Architectural Committee. Considering the amount of the commission involved, Polk could have been expected to keep this plum for himself. Instead, he devised an office competition which allowed his employees to submit their own design concepts for consideration. When the assembled contestants saw Maybeck’s charcoal and wash drawing, they unanimously hailed it as the winner of the contest.

Polk agreed and submitted Maybeck’s drawing to the Architectural Committee who were overcome by the audacity of its plan, the originality of the elements, and the bitter sweet sense of melancholy which it evoked. When they began to applaud his efforts, Polk showed his true measure by announcing that it was Maybeck’s scheme and recommended Maybeck be given the commission to create it. Would the principal of any contemporary architectural firm have the character to promote the talents of a lowly employee knowing that his own reputation would fail to garner any laurels, and that he would lose a sizeable commission in the bargain? But, this was 1913 when it wasn’t considered the height of folly for an honorable man to act with unselfish integrity.

The Exploratorium’s website at http://www.exploratorium.edu/Palace_History/ contains a very informative sketch of the Palace of Fine Art’s history since the close of the Exposition. Bernard Maybeck’s concept sketch is on display in Scholar Room 636D of the San Francisco History Center located on the 6th floor of the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library.