The Palace of Fine Arts. Look at it. A Roman rotunda, Corinthian columns, weeping women perched on top of the colonnade. It looks ancient. It looks like something Rome left behind.
A man named Bernard Maybeck built this in nineteen fifteen. He was five feet tall, wore bib overalls every day of his life, and had a beard that made him look like one of the Seven Dwarfs — though nobody could agree on which one. He designed this building out of plaster and burlap, and he designed it to die.
That was the point. San Francisco was hosting a world's fair — the Panama-Pacific Exposition — and the entire reason for the fair was to prove the city was back. The nineteen oh six earthquake had leveled it. Most of the buildings, gone. Thousands dead. And San Francisco's response was to throw a party. Nineteen million people came.
The centerpiece was something called the Tower of Jewels — covered in over a hundred thousand pieces of cut glass that swayed in the wind and caught the light. Everything
at the fair was temporary. Every building designed to be torn down when it was over. And Maybeck was fine with that. He actually wrote — and I love this — he wanted his palace to, quote, die behind those great trees of its own accord, and become its own cemetery.
That is a man who understood the assignment.
Now look up at the colonnade — those women on top. They were modeled after a nineteen-yea
