Into the Void Pacific: Building the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair 9780520355873, 9780520282827

Citation preview

Into the Void Pacific

1

Andrew M. Shanken

Into the Void Pacific Building the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair

BERKELEY  /   D ESIGN  /   B OOKS #7

University of California Press

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Art Endowment Fund and the Richard and Harriet Gold Endownment Fund in Arts and Humanities of the University of California Press Foundation. Published in cooperation with the College of Environmental Design University of California, Berkeley Berkeley/Design/Books promote historical and critical scholarship on subjects drawn from the Environmental Design Archives at the University of California, Berkeley. One of the nation’s premier design archives, the collections hold graphic materials, written documents, and personal papers concerning American and foreign architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. Marc Treib, Series Editor Waverly Lowell, Archives Curator

Copyright © 2014 by Andrew M. Shanken Designed by Marc Treib

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California � ISBN 978-0-520-28282-7 Library of Congress Control Number 2014941493

Printed in China 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi / niso z39.48-1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

Book epigraph source: D. H. Lawrence to John Middleton Murry (24 September 1923), in James T. Boulton, E. Mansfield, and W. Roberts, eds., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 502.

California is a queer place—in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort. D. H. Lawrence, 1923

5

Introduction

Chapter 1:

10

Digging for Treasure Island

26 Chapter 2: Great Plots, Small Plans

40 Chapter 3: Regionalism Unbounded: The Courts and Palaces

70

6

Chapter 4:

Notes

The Federal Building

214

108

Works Cited

Chapter 5:

223

California and the Pacific

130 Chapter 6: The Pacific Area

148

Acknowledgments

228 Holdings Related to the Golden Gate International Exposition in the Environmental Design Archives,

Chapter 7:

University of California, Berkeley

A Room of Their Own:

230

The Yerba Buena Club

180

Index

236

Conclusion

202

7

8

9

Introduction

1. (preceding pages) Treasure Island and the new bridges, looking West. [Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room]

This book adopts D. H. Lawrence’s suggestive description of California (used as the book’s epigraph) as a way of thinking about the architecture of the Golden Gate International Exposition (ggie), San Francisco’s world’s fair of 1939 [figure 1]. In fact, Lawrence’s phrase “void Pacific” provides a salient metaphor for California’s coastal architecture in general. The phrase gets at California’s relationship to the ocean, with the special light, clement weather, and economic bounty it bestows. It calls forth the region’s relationship to Asia and Latin America, two totally different cultural geographies that nonetheless have left a profound mark on California’s culture, including its architecture. It gestures further to the isolation and novelty of California and its habit of looking West rather than back over its shoulder to the institutions of the East Coast and Europe. And it resonates with the American frontier myth: namely, the presumption, for good and ill, of continental emptiness, untapped resources, and rugged individualism if not Manifest Destiny— a purportedly moral, naturalized imperialism. David Gebhard and Harriette Von Breton called this the “conflict between California as an arcadia which could be realized and California as a commodity which was to be exploited to the fullest.”1 The

10

world’s fair embodies this conflict. Its organizers projected the mythical

arcadia across the Pacific; its architects attempted to embody it in built form. Both began by building an island in San Francisco Bay, on “worthless shoals,” a tabula rasa in waters that have habitually been treated like a void. It was to become an airport after the fair, for planes to shrink the void Pacific and make San Francisco the hub of what civic leaders imagined as an emerging Pacific civilization that would supplant the Atlantic world. In other words, the fair was born of a geographical imagination, one at odds with the temporal obsessions of the fairs of the 1930s, if not with the prevailing mood of the Great Depression, a moment when looking ahead provided escape, succor, or some measure of practical anticipation. By contrast, the Chicago and New York World’s Fairs of 1933–34 and 1939–40 advanced “worlds of tomorrow.” These fairs asked visitors to contemplate the houses and cities of the future. To do so, they dressed most of their buildings in the trappings of a forwardlooking architecture. The New York fair’s most popular exhibit was General Motors’ Futurama, which guided visitors in motorized chairs through a scale model of the city of 1964 before depositing them in a full-scale fragment of that city. The ggie, in contrast, deposited fairgoers into a fantasy of contemporary cultural miscegenation. 11

This book asks what the architecture, landscape, and planning of the ggie can tell us that cannot be found in the volumes of pamphlets, brochures, guidebooks, administrative records, and histories of the fair.2 It explores how buildings supported the cultural and political work of the fair and fashioned a second, parallel world in a moment of economic depression and international turmoil. It also looks closely at the buildings as buildings, analyzing them in light of local circumstances, regionalist sensibilities, and national and international movements. The ggie fits uneasily into the history of international expositions. World’s fairs have been seen as politics by other means, a way for nations to compete through culture, and as events through which host nations staked international claims in an era of colonial expansion. This political context can be mapped directly onto the economic realities of the century in which fairs flourished almost continuously. Empire “was a commodity, a thing more important but not dissimilar to shawls, ironwork, flax, or indeed, sculpture.”3 Of course, the very size, opulence, and organization of the events demonstrated this message. The international exhibitions, then, mirrored the course of empire and industrial capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alongside the display of empire’s material bounty, exhibitions had an interpretive mission in mass society. From the beginning, they were seen as vast publicity campaigns. “ ‘Publicity’ is their very life,” wrote a critic of the 1862 London exhibition, “and publicity and open discussion are in this our age assumed to be mainsprings of progression.”4 The industrial system, empire, and progress were thus linked with propaganda. Buildings were seen as potent symbols of this nexus. Architecture served as more than a frame for the display of products, industrial processes, and colonial people and possessions. Buildings were bearers of meaning. They were rhetorically charged and ideologically embedded. From 1851 to the most recent exposition, of 2010 in Shanghai, the buildings themselves have been the central objects on display, while their often dramatic settings have operated as vast outdoor museums— snapshots of the world as viewed through the lens of a particular nation or city. INTRODUCTION

Given this context, it is hardly surprising that Europe’s

12

capital cities, most prominently London and Paris, traded off hosting several of the most elaborate exhibitions of the nineteenth century. As the seat of their respective empires, London and Paris could play a game of pars pro toto. As capitals they simultaneously represented the nation, the empire, and the place of the empire in the world order. By contrast,

when American cities staged international expositions, as in Philadelphia in 1876 (the Centennial Exposition) or Chicago in 1893 (the World Columbian Exposition), they were more local affairs.5 Imperial rhetoric and imagery were ubiquitous, yet the ambitions of the city vis-à-vis the nation often upstaged the role of empire. The flurry of American fairs at the turn of the century may be seen as coming-out parties for boomtowns and burgeoning cities with regional orbits and national ambitions. Chicago provided the model for fairs in Atlanta (1895), Omaha (1898), Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), and elsewhere. The names of the fairs give away their political scope. All were international expositions, but Atlanta’s Cotton States Exhibition, Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi Exposition, and St. Louis’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition emphatically referred to the regional reach or aspirations of these young metropolises. Of these, only Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, which was planned in the wake of the Spanish-American War, referred explicitly to the emerging imperial intentions of the nation. But no amount of exposition bluster would have convinced fairgoers that Buffalo was at the epicenter of America’s overseas empire. By the time of San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, the United States was a full-fledged player in the game of empire building and on the verge of entering a war that would establish its place as an international power. Americans took a break from hosting international expositions in the 1920s.6 By the 1930s, when American cities again hosted what were by then commonly called world’s fairs, the terms had shifted. Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, San Diego, New York, and San Francisco all staged fairs in which urban boosterism, intercity competition, New Deal public works, and corporate propaganda (especially in Chicago and New York) played a larger role than international politics. These were expensive wagers placed by urban elites on their city’s future development. Business leaders, beset by the problems of the Great Depression, bet on expositions in a moment when New Deal funds for public projects were both a boon to exposition planners and a cause against which corporate exhibitors aimed their propaganda. Among these overtly commercial fairs, San Francisco’s stands apart. Unlike New York’s fair of the same year, where corporations sponsored the most magnificent and popular buildings, the corporate presence at the ggie was all but hidden within vast palaces whose exteriors revealed little about their contents.7 The architectural ramifications of this arrangement were immense. Where New York’s World of Tomorrow reads as a presentation by the most influential American corporations of how big business would lead the nation out of the Great Depression, San Francisco’s Golden

13

Gate International Exposition comes off as an extended allegory about the place of the city in Pacific civilization.8 Architecture’s burden was twofold. First, the official buildings of the fair—the palaces designed by the Architectural Commission—attempted to situate San Francisco—and more broadly, California—in a blithe fantasy of a melting pot of Pacific cultures. Second, given the need to erect the buildings before the nature of their contents was decided, the palaces had to be extroverted. The architects turned them outward and created one continuous, if varied, environment that formed its own context. The exhibits within were known only through signage and maps. This stark division between exterior and interior is distinct among world’s fairs of the period, and may be seen as a return to the earliest ones in which single buildings such as the Crystal Palace held the majority of the exhibits. The White City at the 1893 exposition in Chicago famously established the idea of the group plan in which building heights, massing, color palate, and the ornamental program were regularized in an effort to create a harmonious environment.9 Even here, however, individual buildings served discrete exhibits such as Transportation, Electricity, Manufactures, and so on, grouped around the Court of Honor, which brought them together as a cohesive environment. In Chicago the architects could think through what a Hall of Machines, for instance, should look like and distinguish it from the other palaces. Most American expositions followed suit, including San Francisco’s fair of 1915, where the architects packed the buildings closely together around smaller courts in order to stymie the winds of the San Francisco Bay [figure 2].10 While a similar taxonomy of exhibits existed inside the buildings at the ggie, and a system of courts tied them together, the exteriors of the vast sheds refused to acknowledge the internal classification. The division between interior and exterior in the palaces of the ggie may recall how Beaux-Arts buildings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries clothed all manner of institutions in classical garb that had nothing to do with the contents. But there is a more compelling reason for the disjunction. Aside from the practical need to block the wind and to finish the buildings on time, the virtually unbroken range of palaces allowed the architects to think of the exterior courts as coherent environINTRODUCTION

ments unto themselves. Two fairs evolved out of this decision, the one an

14

interior affair of artificially lit exhibits erected within “black boxes,” the other an exterior landscape of sculpted walls, trees, dramatic lighting, fountains, and freestanding sculpture: indoor buildings and outdoor rooms [figures 3, 4]. In other words, the architects gave the façades over to the courts that, like Hollywood sets, were designed as one harmonious

2. The condensed block plan of the PanamaPacific International Exposition, 1915. [from Art-Lover’s Guide to the Exposition, 1915]

15

3. Del Monte Foods exhibit. [Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley, hereafter EDA, UCB] 4. Pacifica presides over the Court of Pacifica. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

16

whole in a landscape equivalent to the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art. The architectural program, in turn, had ideological consequences. Historians have written about expositions as “mercenary and ideological, imposing on society a special image of the world.”11 Fair buildings have been seen as manifestations of imperial domination, claims to racial superiority, and vehicles for the self-regulation of class or gender discrimination.12 From this perspective, culture becomes a cipher for politics, race, nationalism, and so on. Put differently, much recent scholarship has interpreted these cultural events in terms of everything but culture.13 Readers will find in this book only minor disagreement with those characterizations. Culture does open up a view onto other realms, and fairs in particular have been staged to use culture for other means. But culture is also its own pursuit. Sometimes a fair is just a fair: the search for ulterior motives can distort what we see. One of the main reference points for the architects of the ggie was architecture itself. I’m thus sympathetic to historian Neil Harris, who looks beyond the conspiratorial tone of some of this scholarship to acknowledge the deeply ambivalent and contradictory nature of fairs. Fairs, he writes, have been a “repository of high idealism, money making, critical evaluation of the world, and message-sending.”14 They have been deeply ideological and replete with ethnic, racial, class, and gender stereotypes that have perpetuated harmful views of disenfranchised people. Yet they have also been sincerely naïve and optimistic, powerful engines of urban change and institution building, effective mediums for exchanging ideas, and magnificent visions of what life could be like. Fairs have contained “much that we would not be willing to tolerate today.”15 Yet to judge them by today’s standards risks anachronism. The scheme of the ggie made it all but impossible to plot out an ideological program through the buildings. It was not ideologically free, of course, but it was a jumble [figure 5]. The fair was composed of four distinct areas and a vast parking lot. The Architectural Commission created the overall plan and designed the official fair palaces and courts that constituted the plan’s two main axes. The commission also built the art-moderne Administration Building, the two airplane hangars that served as the Aviation and Fine Arts exhibits—the three permanent buildings—as well as the temporary Hall of Western States and Pacific House, the latter of which was the theme building for the fair. Beyond this L-shaped range of courts, a second fair took shape. There a separate commission appointed by the state and under the supervision of

17

5. Map of the major sites at the Golden Gate International Exposition discussed in this book. [Pablo Zunzunegui, 2012]

18

architect Timothy Pflueger built the California Building and Auditorium; the ten county pavilions; and smaller buildings for the press, the dairy industry, and the Coast Guard; as well as the Recreation Building, California Coliseum, Horticultural Hall, and livestock barns. Pflueger also won the commission for the Federal Building, a third area that he planned as a coherent group around the Lake of the Nations. To the north of the California and Federal Buildings, arranged almost at random around the picturesque lagoon, were the nations and colonies that bordered the Pacific. Here the Architectural Commission again created the site plan, but the buildings were out of its hands. The mish-mash of styles and approaches from around the world presented a totally different aesthetic from that of the other three areas. Yet another area, the Gayway, or amusement zone, sat to the north, excluded from the fair proper [figure 6]. And beyond the island itself, developers built some thirty speculative houses as part of a regional house tour that began with several model houses on the island itself, then scattered fairgoers (and their dollars) from Santa Cruz to the northern reaches of Marin County.16 The Model Homes Tour is another manifestation of regionalist thinking [figure 7]. Many of the houses were inspired by vernacular architecture, and just as importantly they induced visitors to explore the entire Bay Area.17 Overall, the plan produced pockets of coherence rather than the sort of overarching order that could drive a single ideological point home. The organization of this book takes its cue from this scheme, taking each of these areas (minus the Gayway and house tour) as distinct efforts to project California to the world in a moment of geopolitical upheaval. In spite of the ggie’s unusual theme and buildings, historians have lumped the fair together with the others of the period.18 It has been seen as “America’s version of the colonial expositions that swept Great Britain and Europe between the world wars.”19 According to this view, the subtext of the Pageant of the Pacific was “a community of interest with European imperial powers in the Pacific Basin.”20 If anything, the European exhibits at the New York World’s Fair were more overtly imperialist, as David E. Nye has shown.21 In San Francisco, European nations were virtually absent. Colonial possessions were minimally present and haphazardly arranged. Most important, in contrast to the colonial fairs, at the ggie the colonies designed their own buildings. If the Pacific had a subtext, it was as an antidote to the Atlantic world, rather than complicity with it. Likewise, the ggie has been mistaken as modernist and futurist. Neil Harris rightly called the “new fair style” of the 1930s

19

20

“ahistorical modernism.”22 The “fair’s surfaces,” he wrote, “were now unencumbered by the burden of historic references or association. . . . Their most powerful influences came from individual corporate structures, expressionistic in their pre–Las Vegas appeal. They outshone both national pavilions and most official buildings.”23 The fairs of the 1930s frankly embraced the machine and its culture. The shapes of the buildings, the symbols used for the fairs—abstract pylons or bridges in place of art palaces or giant statues—and, most of all, the lavish and startling exhibition halls put up by huge companies like Ford, General Motors, and General Electric, reflected a world in which the new was worshiped and the emphasis was on sensation and novel perceptions rather than the absorption of data.24 This rings true for Chicago and New York. San Francisco, however, was more ambivalent about modernism. In the “other fair” of 1939, fantasy bested the machine, allegory pushed aside abstract symbols, and palaces hid corporate exhibits.25 This has to do with the different rhetorical cast of the fair, including its architecture. Whereas in Chicago and New York the themes of progress or the future found architectural analogues in streamlining or the abstractions of the Modern Movement, the Pacific theme invited allegory and symbolic references. It mattered little that the Beaux-Arts tradition was on the wane, that the war would put an end to Art Deco, or that progressive architects were feeling their way toward a fertile 6. Slow night at the Gayway. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library] 7. Ranch house from Model House Tour. [American Home Magazine]

regional response to the Modern Movement. These different modes mingled on Treasure Island, even if the architectural collaboration was not always a happy one. Some San Franciscans balked at the architectural old guard taking over the fair. In a letter to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, architect William Wurster wrote:

In New York where they are to have an exposition you will see by the enclosed clipping how fairly they are going about choosing the Architectural participants. For our exposition there seems to have been no such just method evolved, which leaves every young architect in San Francisco with no chance to have a share in the 1939 San Francisco Exposition. Not only does this seem unfair to the individuals but it deprives the exposition of the enthusiasm of the younger group.26 Wurster added: “It might seem that those who had their opportunity in 1915 would be generous in evolving a method to allow a like chance to the ones who are now of the age and position they were at that time.” He then resigned from the Chamber in protest, calling on the businessmen of the city to “prevent just this type of mistake and have the leadership a generous disinterested one.”27 His protest had little effect.

21

In the Bay Area, the architects of the older generation, many of whom had planned earlier fairs, resumed leadership. The architects were members of a conventional old guard who, for their initial inspiration, turned back to their own work at the 1915 San Francisco exposition. Instead of “asymmetrical, stark, glass and metal buildings” creating “an atmosphere that was unsettling to traditional ceremonies and experiences,” the ggie created a spectacle perfectly suited to the sorts of ceremonies and processions that had been mainstays of expositions since their inception [figure 8].28 The great courts, monumental stairs, and the façades of buildings all conspired to a form of public culture that, Harris has shown, had been abandoned by New York and Chicago. Unlike those other fairs, San Francisco’s did not take aim at “the world of the Future seeking objectification.”29 It is true that the fairs of the 1930s “no longer reflected a single vision of what a Heavenly or Redeemed City should look like,” as the Progressive-era fairs had attempted to do.30 This is because expositions no longer had to respond to the city as a chaotic and monstrous creation of industrial capitalism. A host of other issues had come to the fore since the early expositions. The Depression-era fairs gave cities an opportunity to think about their relationship to region and nation, to their economic orbit, and to their place in the world. But just as often, with the exception perhaps of New York, they allowed cities to contemplate themselves in more provincial terms. At least since the White City at the 1893 Chicago Exposition, American expositions have been urban experiments that have operated at once practically and symbolically. They legitimized the ambitions of cities, reflected their ambition to the nation and world, and infused them with talent, capital, and infrastructure.31 The fairs themselves also reflected the state of the art in building cities. As model cities within cities, they were, aside from the crowds, the antithesis of the dirty, unruly, disorganized, virtually unplanned, and dysfunctional modern city. After all, each necessitated the sort of systematically planned infrastructure that cities were only improvising in an ad hoc manner. In short order, fairs had to coordinate “water supply, sewage treatment, electricity, steam INTRODUCTION

railroads, telephones, telegraphs, policing, fire-fighting, traffic control,”

22

and, perhaps just as important for the emerging metropolises of the period, sanitation, lighting, comfort stations, places for rest, and signage.32 This made them great utopian experiments in planning and social order, all of it packaged in a mock city that avoided the stunning contrasts of slum and boulevard that marked the real city in which it sat.33

8. Modern “ritual” at the Temple Compound. [Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley]

The zones that parceled out world’s fairs were another tactic of physical and social order that belied the urban realities of the time. They were the first places where an idealized order could be modeled, in full scale or nearly so. The zones exerted control, but they also spoke to this idealized landscape of urban order. In effect, expositions were traditionally divided into two worlds, one of them informal, lowbrow, and frankly commercial: a carnivalesque geography of consumption of food, booze, freaks, and women’s bodies. These amusement zones were little more than socially acceptable red-light districts minus the consummation. The Gayway and its ancestors turned the cultural conventions of polite society on their head, providing an antidote to the museological sobriety of the rest of the fair. With one zone there to entertain, the other world—in theory, the exposition proper—was free to instruct.34 This more formal world was usually more tautly arranged and didactic, organized with cultural and political meaning in mind. While its exhibits could range from the sublime works of industry to the anonymous work of folk culture, and even stray into the commercial, it tended nonetheless to celebrate cultural production or processes in the context either of nationalism or, especially in later fairs, of urban boosterism. The ggie followed this split, with the curious problem that motorists entered the fair from the parking lot through the Gayway.35 Entertainment zones like the Gayway might be understood as safety valves, providing a necessary adjunct to the fair where the masses could release energy in controlled explosions under the gaze of the elite (and often to their profit) and themselves.36 This now well-worn interpretation of museums and exhibitions is no less intriguing for being pat. Yet it comes off as forced or heavy-handed. Debauchery and cultural edification were staged as mutually reinforcing. Even for elites, fairs were grossly speculative events. Their gate receipts recouped only a fraction of their costs; most fairs, in fact, lost money. The entertainment zones were thus indispensable, and not only to give fairs a chance at solvency.37 They were culturally necessary as an inversion of the seriousness of the fair. This inversion, of course, put the cultural achievements into high relief, maintaining the distance between high and low, when in reality this disINTRODUCTION

tinction was increasingly fuzzy, and to elites, disturbingly so.38 This was

24

especially the case as the century aged, and it may account for the loss of vitality in American world’s fairs in the late twentieth century. As class and race divisions eroded and women’s place in the public sphere became routine, the fairs that had once helped reinforce these divisions became futile exercises. In fact, they became oxymoronic because they insisted on

some utopian future that lay just around the corner while they reinforced social realities of the increasingly distant past. Finally, one wonders how much the zoning of cities and the zoning of fairs coincided conceptually with the many attempts during the same era to parcel up the world. From the “Partition of Africa” to the race to establish colonies and protectorates in Asia, the world map was constantly redrawn in the high period of expositions that ended in 1939. New York was forced to confront the war while it attempted to “neutralize [its] disturbing implications” for the “World of Tomorrow.” At the same time, the Pageant of the Pacific could turn the darkening mood to its advantage.39 The war reinforced the ggie’s instinct to turn away from the East Coast and Atlantic civilization—part of a wider California tendency, as Lawrence keenly observed. At the same time, the fair imagined the alternative on its own terms. Treasure Island itself was part of the endless archipelagos of the Pacific, a symbolic place where the cultures surrounding the ocean could be brought together in peace. The landscape, in particular the plantings from around the Pacific Rim, can be seen as an encyclopedia of Pacific flora. The landscape architects and botanists saw their work as an exhibit unto itself. How better to reinforce the fantasy of a single Pacific culture than to transplant and synthesize it in one setting? In this vision, California becomes the melting pot of the Pacific. This observation leads back to a more subtle colonialist reading: San Francisco as the palm house where Pacific culture would be propagated. Just as English palm houses embodied the reach of the British Empire by forcing plants from the colonies that would ordinarily not grow in such northerly climes, so might the 1939 fair be seen as a symbolic landscape. The difference is that the climate allowed this to happen “naturally.” Of course, every visitor was well aware of the extraordinary artifice. To make it happen, the fair planners had to create an island and engage the ingenuity of soil and water engineers to import and desalinize millions of cubic tons of soil. And like the English gardens where palm houses were built, the fair was a playground for testing the sober ideologies of an alternative world order, one in which buildings and landscape rather than troops and bombs do the work. The fair, for all of its inconsistency, offered up a vision of what could fill the void Pacific.

25

1:

Digging for Treasure Island

From its birth in the minds of its San Francisco promoters, the exposition was audacious. As early as 1933, city leaders floated the idea of building an artificial island on the shoals of Yerba Buena Island, a minor prominence that rises from the San Francisco Bay. At four hundred acres, it would be no ordinary island, but rather the largest man-made island in the world. Adding to the fantastic nature of the project, at fair’s end the grounds would become the city’s airport.1 Even by the standards of the Bay Area, where thousands of acres of coastline have been reclaimed from the water, this was an exceptional project. The island rivaled some of the most ambitious public works projects in the world. In the mid-1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge (1933–1937) and the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge (sfobb, 1933–1936) brought Marin County and the East Bay within a mere commute to the city by automobile. The first was the longest suspension bridge of its time, the second the longest span of any kind. They joined the San Francisco Bay Toll-Bridge (now the San Mateo Bridge), which had been the world’s longest bridge when it was completed in 1929. The tens of thousands of boats that crossed the bay each day were gradually replaced by hundreds of thousands of cars and, to a lesser extent, trains running on rail lines on 26

the lower deck of the sfobb. The Caldecott Tunnel (1937), which led to

Contra Costa County, extended the reach of commerce and commuters, allowing traffic to bypass the inner East Bay for the towns and more spacious suburbs east of the hills. These bridges and Treasure Island, as it soon would be called, reflect the last gasp of early-twentieth-century urban competition, or what historian Roger Lotchin called “the tournament of cities,” a competition that, by the early 1930s, San Francisco appeared destined to lose.2 Between 1900 and 1940, the population of greater Los Angeles had grown almost sixteen-fold to 2,700,000 people, while San Francisco’s population, 670,000 in 1940, had not even doubled. The city no longer had the raw population necessary to compete with its southern rival. “San Franciscans simply could neither understand how the ‘Southland’ had overtaken them nor accept their own decline. Los Angeles provided the most maddening irritant to community; and during the 1920s and 1930s, San Francisco struggled to catch up.”3 The fair and the airport were hatched in this climate of decline and aggressive overcompensation. At the same time, they joined a visionary tradition in a city whose physical realities often called for outsized or pie-in-the-sky proposals.4

27

A GOLDEN GATE AIR TERMINAL Even among such grandiose schemes, Treasure Island was a different animal. Where the bridges attempted to overcome San Francisco’s geographical limitations, the airport was a more desperate gambit to secure West Coast dominance of commerce in the Pacific. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, farsighted business leaders anticipated that air commerce would displace shipping. While blessed with a large deepwater port, San Francisco lacked suitable sites for airports.5 In this moment of explosive growth in air travel, while dozens of airports were being built across California, San Francisco muddled about. Intrabay competition made matters worse. By 1932, all commercial carriers in the Bay Area used East Bay airports. The issue became so pressing that some authorities backed building great platforms over piers and train sheds to serve as airstrips.6 By the time San Francisco became serious about planning a fair in the mid-1930s, the idea of building an airport on the Yerba Buena Shoals already had powerful sponsors that included Mayor Angelo Rossi.7 The new airport, to be part of a regional system of airports, would join the Marina, Mills Field, and a few smaller airports to serve the growing metropolis.8 From a practical standpoint, the island airport was not nearly as preposterous as it would now seem. The Bay Bridge, which crosses Yerba Buena Island, made the idea of a midbay “Golden Gate Air Terminal” possible. With a causeway, the island could be stitched directly into the emerging regional highway system. The location, moreover, was closer to downtown San Francisco than any other proposed site, and it overcame competition between Bay Area cities by providing ample access to East Bay cities. The key municipal players quickly fell into line. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission roughed out a plan in late 1932 that anticipated the basic shape of and dimensions of the island [figure 9]. As the Bay Bridge project moved forward, the supervisors

DIGGING FOR TREASURE ISLAND

requested engineering and traffic studies from the bridge’s engineer,

28

Charles H. Purcell.9 A host of civic groups threw their weight behind the idea, and Rossi soon prevailed upon the state to cede the land to the city and county of San Francisco.10

FROM AIRPORT TO FAIR With the political will in place, the fair became the pretext and the impetus to build the island quickly. Airport and fair converged. Weeks after the governor granted the shoals to the city, the idea for hosting an exposition as a bridge celebration on the shoals site had

9. Proposed airport site map. [Special Collections Research Center, California State University, Fresno]

29

10. Harmon S. Butler promoting his model for an island exposition. [San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library]

been proposed and published in the newspapers.11 Harmon S. Butler, a local publicist, built a model and promoted the idea widely [figure 10]. Local interests would vie for other sites, but the airport and exposition had been linked in the popular imagination: an island on the Yerba Buena shoals was a foregone conclusion.12 Political theater followed. The Advisory Planning Committee for the Bridge Celebration formed in early 1934 and almost immediately came out in favor of the shoals. The committee justified its choice on political and practical grounds. The site minimized the “risk of sectional antagonism . . . [and] community jealousies” in the Bay Area.13 DIGGING FOR TREASURE ISLAND

Moreover, it had “the advantage of being directly connected with the bridges whose completion the celebration will commemorate, for in addition to

30

project how the fair might look. In addition to being the superintendent

utilizing the facilities of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge directly, it will afford an unobstructed view of the Golden Gate Bridge, which in turn [will] just be used by those residents of North Bay counties coming to the exposition.”14 One month later, Mayor Rossi authorized architects W. P. Day and George Kelham to study potential sites for the fair. Day was uniquely qualified. As a seasoned establishment architect and engineer, he had the technical skill to test the site himself and the design background to

of building permits in San Francisco, he had designed several of the landmark buildings in the city and state, including the Mark Hopkins and Sir Francis Drake hotels, the Chronicle Building, and the Cathedral. He was equally well connected at the state level, having built the state library and

11. Day and Kelham. Proposed plan for fair. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

courts building in Sacramento. Kelham was a versatile traditionalist who could move freely between Beaux-Arts classicism and the Art Deco and moderne modes then in vogue. He had designed the San Francisco Public Library and the Federal Reserve Bank in the Civic Center, and was the supervising architect for the 1915 exposition as well as for the University of California, Berkeley, campus. Day and Kelham were among the elite and enterprising architects who had rebuilt San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906. The core of the architectural cadre that would design the fair was thus in place from its inception. Day and Kelham, if conventional, were competent and politically savvy. They quickly published a proposal for the fair on the shoals in the San Francisco Chronicle [figure 11]. It shows the characteristic rectangular island with its corners lopped off and the outlines of the Beaux-Arts palaces and courts sheltering the fair against westerly winds—the fair in embryo.15 In their subsequent official report, they argued compellingly for the artificial island.16 In

31

contrast to the sites favored by various local groups—Golden Gate Park, China Basin, South Basin, Candle Stick Point, the Presidio, and Lake Merced—the shoals was an “unusual and unique” site, less prone to fog, and accessible by automobile, ferry, boat, and plane, which made it an ideal location for the celebration of the bridges.17 Its eventual use as an airport made it an obvious asset. The fair had been the pretext for building the airport; now the airport would justify the fair. Day and Kelham bolstered their preference with extensive research on dredging and filling, fog calculations, potable water, and other technical details.18 Local groups and California legislators wrangled for months, but the outcome was never in doubt. Arthur Brown, Jr., acting in his role as city supervisor, motioned to appoint the Exposition Company, the nonprofit body that already employed him as an architect, to plan and conduct the fair on the shoals.19 Day was immediately appointed director of the works, and soon after Kelham became chief of architecture, until his death in October 1936, when Brown took his place. The first dated sketch of the fair was made on July 8, 1935, days before the Exposition Company’s appointment was made official. Brown acted as the éminence grise and, in the following months, helped work out the basic form of the fair. By the end of 1935, with the shoals still submerged, publicity broadly based on Brown’s sketches began.

ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS How did a group of essentially conventional architects and civic leaders come to support and even obsess over a visionary plan to build an island in the bay for an exposition and airport? In fact, the project reflected a common way of thinking about land, airports, and municipal infrastructure. Much of the coastline of the San Francisco Bay had been reshaped using the same methods, including entire neighborhoods such as the Marina, which was built on the tidal flats, marshes, and dunes that were “improved” for the 1915 exposition. Given that a number of DIGGING FOR TREASURE ISLAND

veterans from the earlier fair, both architects and civic leaders, were in charge of the ggie, it is not surprising that civic improvement and rec-

32

models—took place on Northerly Island, an artificial island built between

lamation would again be linked to the exposition. With the great bridge projects under way, dredging and filling were already a part of everyday life in the Bay Area. Many cities, moreover, had used fairs as a way of improving land, adding infrastructure, and generating tourist dollars and as a form of civic improvement or beautification. Most recently, the 1933–34 Century of Progress Fair in Chicago—one of San Francisco’s

1922 and 1925 that realized part of architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Chicago Plan. Even before the island was finished, Chicago’s business community and Mayor William Hale Thompson approved a plan to locate the city’s airport there.20 Nor was an island airport an unusual proposal. In the late 1920s San Diego and Portland both built airports on sites reclaimed from water.21 The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce knew Portland’s project well.22 Other cities had used reclaimed or improved islands for airports, as well. In Los Angeles, San Francisco’s main competition for control of air-based commerce on the West Coast, Allen Field began operating as a civilian airport in 1927 on Terminal Island, an artificially enlarged island that had originally hosted the Los Angeles Terminal Railway. Creating land was one of the few ways that cities could find sites near commercial centers while avoiding the use of eminent domain. Given the economic motives and eventual theme of the fair—the Pageant of the Pacific—the island site also had symbolic value. At the fair, San Francisco would articulate its vision of becoming the center of Pacific culture and commerce. In turn, the airport, the planners hoped, would help make that vision a reality. Given the limited range of airplanes in the mid-1930s, the only way to make the airplane viable for Pacific trade was to build a succession of floating airports across the Pacific. A plan for floating airports, or “seadromes,” came surprisingly close to reality in the 1930s. Engineer Edward Robert Armstrong widely published his ideas for a seadrome akin to an oil platform that could be placed in deep water, allowing aircraft to island-hop their way across the oceans [figure 12].23 The Depression tempered some of the enthusiasm for the work, as did the increasing size of airplanes, but the idea of island airports continued to be widely disseminated, from magazines like Popular

Mechanics, to science and architecture journals, to news magazines.24 In these early years of aviation and city planning, the real often blended with the visionary. The proposed airport on the Yerba Buena Shoals was very much part of this moment of overheated speculation and rapid change, putting the airport project in dialogue with national issues of aviation and land use, as well as international issues of commerce and culture. A trail of small floating airports spanning the Pacific would have been a powerful vision to the San Francisco business elite who wished to tap into the commercial potential of Pacific markets. They imagined their artificial island as the West Coast terminus of a great system spanning the Pacific. In other words, the idea for a regional system of airports grew quickly into a vision for a network that would span the globe.

33

The symbolism of an island airport, moreover, would have been accessible to San Francisco’s businessmen, many of whom were also cultural leaders with a keen interest in Pacific culture. The Chamber of Commerce, in fact, strongly linked its mission to the work of a quasi-scholarly group called the Institute of Pacific Relations (ipr), and did so explicitly in terms of aviation. The ipr, with chapters throughout the Pacific, sponsored conferences and publications on the economy and culture of the Pacific Rim. The local chapter, which was deeply intertwined with the city’s business community, would be decisive in formulating the fair’s theme and agenda. The institute sought a stable, DIGGING FOR TREASURE ISLAND

peaceful Pacific theater for larger, idealistic reasons, while the businessmen sought the same for more commercial reasons and justified their

34

age when there will not be time to get ready for the inevitable.”25

views through the institute’s agenda. The airplane was central to their thinking. As one Chamber of Commerce member, Robert Newton Lynch, wrote: “When two intrepid flyers crashed into Molokai, having made the trip from San Francisco to the Hawaiian Islands in a single day . . . [they] annihilated the element of time in transportation across the Pacific. Heretofore the element of time has been the determining factor in solving and adjusting the relationship of nations. . . . We have now come into an

12. Armstrong Seadrome. [Courtesy of Time, Inc.]

Fourteen years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, San Francisco already anticipated the darker side of air travel. Preoccupied with the related prospects of aviation and the Pacific, its leading citizens were willing to go to great lengths to defend the city’s economic interests

13. Dredging. 8 May 1936. [National Archives and Records Administration, San Francisco]

from competition and war. This dynamic between flight, Pacific commerce, the community of nations, culture, and soon the rising specter of war gave the fair its meaning. The same dynamic also built Treasure Island. Its name famously invoked the gold dust that once floated down the Sacramento River into the Bay in the nineteenth century, but it just as easily could have referred to the untapped commercial riches that lay west of the Golden Gate—a modern gold rush waiting to be mined by intrepid aviators. But first San Francisco would need to build a new Pacific island.26

BUILDING THE ISLAND As Arthur Brown, Jr., and the others fiddled with their preliminary designs, bids went out in August 1935 for the dredging. The work proceeded at a blistering pace. The city procured funding from the Works Progress Administration, but it hinged on making land available for the first buildings no later than July 1936.27 Contracts were advertised only in February of that year, the same month that the overmatched wpa

35

handed the work over to the Army Corps of Engineers. Dry land had to rise in mere months. The plan involved building a seawall to provide shelter for the dredges and allow the fill to be placed in still water rather than in currents. The construction of the perimeter would act like an enclosure dike and resist the lateral movement of the fill.28 The workers would then fill in the area roughly from south to north [figures 13–15].

A PACIFIC ISLAND Intense labor agitation formed the backdrop to this massive public works project. As the fair was being proposed, the Depression DIGGING FOR TREASURE ISLAND

nearly reached its nadir, and the violent Waterfront Strike of 1934 paralyzed

36

San Francisco. The threat of further violence and Communist agitation, let alone a work stoppage, could have undone the fair. From the fair organizers point of view, labor had to be held in check.29 The stakes were thus immense. As much as labor tension pressured the city and the fair, so did the larger economic realities of the moment. As bold as the bridges, exposition, and airport appear, they were born of insecurity. Before World War II the intense competition between western cities for resources created a system of metropolitanism. Cities essentially operated as city-states waging commercial wars for

14. Panorama of the new island taking shape, 18 August 1936. [National Archives and Records Administration, San Francisco]

regional dominance—and this in a moment of diminishing resources. The western economy stumbled in the 1920s, “pushing the West toward hard times about a decade before the rest of the nation experienced a severe downturn,” historian John M. Findlay has observed.30 By the 1930s, “the atmosphere of opportunity that had long pervaded the West had vanished.”31 Growth became the central mechanism through which a city could make vast claims on its own citizens and appeals to the federal government for funding.32 This was not just a matter of elites and boosters having their way. As Lotchin has convincingly shown, ordinary citizens elected booster mayors and ratified public works projects. This is particularly important for understanding the morass surrounding the San Francisco airport, which, as infrastructure, was as essential as the bridges were to the growth of the city and its competition with its rivals. The same citizens who supported two of the most dramatic bridge projects in the world balked at turning Mills Field into a major airport. Simultaneously, they backed building an artificial island for the fair and airport. In other words, San Franciscans sometimes rejected pragmatic local projects in favor of risky, visionary, and symbolic projects. 37

15. Buildings rise out of the mud (far left), 17 February 1937. [National Archives and Records Administration, San Francisco]

38

The ebb of San Francisco’s power in the “tournament of cities” helped create a particular self-sustaining dynamic: “As the size of government grew in response to San Francisco’s relative economic decline, more power over the creation and implementation of policy fell into bureaucratic and supposedly expert hands, like those of the chief engineer, the airport manager, and the head of the Public Utilities Commission. This windfall gave the bureaucrats an incentive to favor still more urban competition, thereby placing further power within their spheres.”33 Arthur Brown, Jr., demonstrates this crossover from professional expertise to bureaucratic power, as does W. P. Day, with his wealth of managerial expertise. Day was placed in the pivotal technical role, which in the end was also a matter of public persuasion. Brown, Kelham, and Day were servants of the larger phenomenon of urban competition. Lotchin aptly calls this dynamic a “defense mechanism” in a moment of “urban status anxiety.” One of the outcomes of these urban battles in the early twentieth century was a remarkable string of public works, many of which brought employment to the Bay Area during the Depression.34 As is well known, after the fair the navy took over Treasure Island, which was almost immediately rendered unusable as an airport with the advent of the larger and faster planes developed to fight the war.35 There would be no Golden Gate Air Terminal. This apparent failure, however, is largely overlooked, partly, one suspects, because the city put almost no money into it in the first place. From a fiscal point of view, it was as dispensable as the fair. As infrastructure it became redundant, as well. Mills Field, which was expanded with wpa funds at the same time that Treasure Island was built, became viable and has served continuously as San Francisco’s airport since the war. Interurban competition manifested itself most often in San Francisco’s attempts to overcome its geographical limitations. It built bridges, highways, and tunnels and filled in the bay to acquire more land. Even the control of water and electricity “would be the ultimate weapon to force the suburbs into a ‘Greater San Francisco.’ ”36 Air travel, of course, became indispensable for transcending the city’s physical boundaries and overcoming its isolation. A great airport linked to the bay’s advantages would draw commerce regardless of the city’s size. This explains why the tone of the Chamber of Commerce was so urgent in the early 1930s, and why otherwise prudent city supervisors, businessmen, and architects put an airport in the middle of the bay. And, finally, interurban competition explains the compelling necessity of an exposition to celebrate the bridges, as well as the maturation of the city and its infrastructure in a reinvigorated metropolis that could sustain future growth. The world was invited to Treasure Island not just for a visit but also to contemplate western migration and the emergence of a new Pacific civilization. How the fair articulated this vision is the subject of the following chapters.

39

2:

Great Plots, Small Plans

As the island rose in the bay, the Architectural Commission labored over the plan. Under the crush of the schedule, the buildings and much of the site plan had to be conceived as one. This was especially the case for the palaces and courts, whose long footprints formed the major cross-axis. As with many expositions, the plan was simultaneously functional, experiential, and symbolic. It had to offer a lucid route to visitors, provide transcendent settings for fair pageantry, and express diagrammatically the trope of a unified Pacific civilization with greater San Francisco at the center. The plan did not come easily. From the beginning, the architectural commission was haunted by ghosts. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition (ppie) of 1915 had been a triumph. The “phantom kingdom,” as architect Louis Mullgardt called it, endowed San Francisco with the mighty Palace of Fine Arts and left the Marina as a substantial new area for development after the fair. The ggie’s architects looked to the court system of this earlier fair, but they also turned to Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition of 1933–34, where Arthur Brown, Jr., had served on the architectural commission. In Chicago, however, where the architects also began with the tabula rasa of reclaimed land—including 40

an island that many hoped would become an airport—the architects

departed from traditional Beaux-Arts planning. The ggie’s architects, in returning to the symmetries and axial logic of the Progressive-era fairs, created a setting appropriate to the more conventional buildings they sought. Compared to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago and the early publicity of New York’s World of Tomorrow, images of the ggie invited easy criticism. The architecture appeared overly conventional and out-of-date. The Architectural Commission squabbled internally. The lone progressive architect, Timothy Pflueger, openly feuded with the first chairman, George Kelham. In the end, they adopted a much revised version of Arthur Brown, Jr.’s early sketches, one that would express both consciously and unconsciously San Francisco’s ambivalent relationship to the West, the nation, the Pacific, and itself as a city.

A HEAVENLY CITY George Kelham’s commission had to reconcile its work with the living memory of the 1915 fair. Kelham had planned the earlier fair, and his first instinct was to follow its unusual plan and to emulate the fair’s image as a symbolic city. He laid out the grounds of the ppie in typical Beaux-Arts fashion around a succession of great courts and palaces [see figure 2]. In their names, the 1915 fair’s palaces of Education,

41

Agriculture, Manufactures, and Transportation and the Machinery Hall were typical of the expositions that straddled the turn of the century, as were the Court of Palms and the more abstract Courts of the Universe and the Ages that sat between the palaces. And the overall scheme derived from the sort of “group plan” established in Chicago in 1893, with monumental and highly individual buildings commanding the open spaces. But Kelham modified the group plan to suit San Francisco’s climatic conditions, generating a composition that architectural historian Robert J. Clark considered the ppie’s “most striking innovation.”1 “Attempting to shield visitors from the prevailing trade winds and fog,” Clark wrote, “the architects of the Panama-Pacific contrived a complex of eight domed exhibition halls which were so compactly ordered that they read in perspective as one continuous structure.”2 By eating away the corners of the buildings at the intersections of the avenues, Kelham formed a series of connected outdoor courts. The courts thus emerged through the reduction method rather than as assertive parts of the plan itself. In effect, he inverted the typical formula of world’s fairs: although the buildings were still highly individualized and assertive, the courts took on a powerful presence, serving as outdoor rooms that were destinations themselves.3 The ggie began much the same way. The earliest published illustrations of the fair show tightly packed, domed palaces sheltering large courts, with an array of towers and domes that relieved the tedium of the regular plan and created a skyline—the ppie in new clothes. There were practical reasons to look backward. The swirling winds in the middle of the bay were as formidable as those of the Marina on the north coast of the peninsula. A wind study by engineer Charles H. Lee showed how intensely the Pacific winds would buffet the 1939 fair [figure 16]. The ppie thus remained a relevant model.4 The planners began with the premise of a high western wall. Palace façades that stretched almost nine hundred feet would shelter the crowds [figure 17]. As the official history of the fair noted: “It was almost impossible to segregate the twelve principal exhibit palaces into individual units. Unbroken walls and parapets extended GREAT PLOTS, SMALL PLANS

in two directions . . . in an area more than half a mile long by a third of a mile wide.”5 Once the architects opted for such a condensed plan, completing

42

just coming into broader use in city planning: the first zoning laws were

it was just a matter of how to compose the courts on the island. The ppie would be an important model in other ways, as well. Like all of these early fairs, the 1915 exposition was highly zoned. In particular, didactic exhibition palaces and courts were separated from tawdry entertainments. In fact, the amusement area was called “The Zone.” Among the various ways this word might have resonated, “zoning” was

16. Charles Lee. Wind direction diagram for the San Francisco Bay. [Water Resources Collections and Archives, University of California, Riverside, Libraries]

17. Aerial view from the south. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

43

18. Roadside pop architecture comes to rest at the fair: the Elephant Towers. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

44

45

enacted in New York City in 1916, but the term’s first use in American planning dates to 1909, just before planning for the fair began.6 The fair resonated with the language of city planning because it was, in essence, an experiment in city planning.7 Fairs often reflected the state of the art in building cities. In fact, they were among the first places where an idealized order could be modeled, in sharp contrast to the harsh urban conditions beyond the fairgrounds. Neil Harris has called this “purified reflection” of the nineteenth-century city the “exposition as Heavenly City.”8 Chicago’s White City at the 1893 exposition inaugurated the theme, and Progressive-era American expositions elaborated it.9 The ppie, the last of the era, offered an image of the city perfected in the

aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire. Kelham fashioned the ggie after his own Heavenly City of 1915.10 In doing so, he was out of step with the times. When Americans returned to staging fairs after the hiatus of the 1920s, the Heavenly City was replaced by a different metaphor, one more consistent with the ideological moment of the Great Depression.11 By the time of the Depression-era fairs, “mass communications and entertainments had caught up with earlier promises. Radio, talking pictures, and television had begun to change the experience of average fair-goers; the automobile and airplane were transforming travel patterns as well. Visitors no longer depended on expositions for firsthand experiences with art and exotic culture. They had grown more cosmopolitan.”12 And so had their cities. The idealism of the earlier fairs, moreover, had begun to shift away from cities to suburbs, and fairs began to trade not on an urban ideal, but “on a magic future rather than a purified present.”13 The three great urban schemes that visitors could study at the New York World’s Fair—Democracity, General Motors Futurama, and Lewis Mumford’s film The City—all imagined a decentralized utopia of the future. San Francisco bucked the trend. Even as the city’s bridges connected the peninsula with its suburban hinterlands, the ggie reprised the theme of the Heavenly City and turned to the past: the fair hovered like a mirage in the bay, “an ancient walled city” that transported visitors away from the urban disorder, dilapidated GREAT PLOTS, SMALL PLANS

buildings, and labor strife of San Francisco [figure 18].14

46

A PURGATORY OF PLANS Between 1935 and early 1937, the Architectural Commission worked through variations on the dense walled city, updating the image, content, and meaning of the courtyard theme. The changes reflected the new cast of characters with whom Kelham was now working.15 Only he and Arthur Brown, Jr., were left from the ppie [figure 19]. They led an inbred group [figure 20]. William Merchant had worked in Kelham’s

19. Arthur Brown, Jr. [Architectural Record] 20. Clockwise from top right: Ernest Weihe, Louis Hobart, William Merchant, and Timothy Pflueger. [Architectural Record]

47

office, and Ernest Weihe with Bakewell & Brown. Brown and Louis Hobart had trained at Berkeley with Bernard Maybeck, Merchant’s partner, and both had long associations with Kelham that dated back to the rebuilding of the city after the earthquake and fire of 1906. Hobart, Brown, and Kelham shared formative experience at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Timothy Pflueger was the lone rogue.16 An artist-turned-architect with an independent streak, what he lacked in Beaux-Arts bona fides he made up for in pure talent and vast experience. Aside from him, this seasoned group of like-minded traditionalists turned to the predictable formulas of classicism as it merged with Art Deco in the period. In spite of the group’s homogeneity, the Architectural Commission fell into discord. At one of the early meetings in 1935, each of the architects presented a scheme for the fair. While the differences were minimal—a matter of orientation or where to place the primary axis—the variations nearly paralyzed the commission. Both Merchant’s and Brown’s schemes survive. Merchant, working with Maybeck, clustered palaces around a cross-axis and strung three courts at the end of a diagonal spur to the northeast [figure 21]. To the east, he used the grid to discipline a meandering lagoon. A great tower, possibly with a cascade of water, culminated the east-west axis and anchored the lagoon area.17 A recreation area—of special interest to Merchant as the architect for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department—wandered off to the southeast. Parking took up a full third of the ground, as it would in the final plan. Brown’s scheme used the island in a similar way, but he ran the primary north-south axis through an immense square court, alee to the wind, that opened onto the primary western entrance to the fair [figure 22]. From the main court, a great cascade of water sealed off the eastern axis. To the north, Brown strung a necklace of smaller courts through the core of the palaces, almost identical in pattern to the courts at the 1915 fair. Canals, in white, ran through the entire fair, like Venice with its canals pulled taut. The lacework of water and bridges would have been an important motif, lightening the heavy masses of the GREAT PLOTS, SMALL PLANS

palaces with a more delicate horizontal pattern. The familiar L-shape of the final plan is already evident. This was the fair in embryo.

48

in the effects of water lapping at the shores of both islands and tinted the

It is not hard to imagine the commission consolidating the canals into a lagoon east of the palaces, pushing the fountain to its eastern edge, and handing off the design of the lagoon to Maybeck and Merchant. With minor modifications, the plan was settled. The commission moved the tower to the primary cross-axis, where Brown would design his Tower of the Sun. This was more than a sketch. Brown lovingly painted

21. Bernard Maybeck and William Merchant. Early scheme for the exposition. [EDA, UCB]

49

50

22. Arthur Brown, Jr. Proposed plan for the fair, 8 July 1935. [Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley]

foliage and buildings with a delicate palette of muted purples, blues, and greens. It was a drawing intended to make its case. And it did. Brown carefully departed from the 1915 plan, citing a number of precedents the Architectural Commission would have known well. The courts looked, for example, to the plan of Savannah, Georgia. In this eighteenth-century colonial capital, streets run through squares in a flexible modular pattern, and penetrate the open spaces on all sides. Savannah’s plan allowed Brown to elaborate the figure-ground relationship established at the ppie. It provided an extensible gridiron of open and enclosed spaces, a plan adaptable to other Beaux-Arts strategies; it flexes easily, for instance, to accommodate the enlarged axes and the canals. For the northern part of the island, or the vast parking area, Brown adapted the plan of Philadelphia, with its five great squares carved from a relentless rectangular grid. He repeated the motif for the landscape plan on the southern edge of the island. With the idea of creating a Pacific Architecture not yet decided upon, Savannah and “Penn’s Greene Towne” would have been indigenous models for architects looking to distance themselves from the usual European-inspired architecture of American expositions. Instead of looking to France or Italy, as the American Renaissance so often did, Brown was looking homeward. He adjusted the plan obsessively throughout the summer of 1935. In another sketch of 22 July, Brown all but dropped Philadelphia, but carried references to Savannah a bit further [figure 23]. Instead of breaking the plan with the great court, he simply stitched it into a larger axis of court and corridor. Using this classic Beaux-Arts strategy, he integrated two scales, a major and a minor, to make the plan more legible and clearly reveal its hierarchies. He carried over the great, cascading fountain, the network of canals, and the more picturesque area to the east, but reoriented the marina. This plan and others from the same weeks show Brown working out how to relax the grid of the exposition palaces as they gave way to other areas of the fair, particularly by making use of the water elements. The sketch also suggests that Brown may have now been looking at Washington, D.C., as well. From the late 1920s through the mid-1930s, he had been involved in arguably the highest-profile work of his career: the design of the Federal Triangle. There he designed the Department of Labor and the Interstate Commerce Commission buildings and worked on the larger plan of the triangle itself.18 While this project itself offered little to the ggie, Pierre L’Enfant’s city plan of 1791 provided a model. In D.C., broad diagonals and the monumental L-shaped axes that connect the Capitol and the White House interrupt the grid.19 In

51

52

23. Arthur Brown, Jr. Proposed plan for the fair, 22 July 1935. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley]

place of the symbolic link between the legislative and executive branches of the government in D.C., Brown’s “L” would have connected views of the Oakland–San Francisco Bay Bridge to what we may surmise to be the Pacific theme developing at the eastern edge of the plan—or, in allegorical terms, progress and the Pacific.

NOT CHICAGO The other initial studies are now lost, but Brown’s plan, which Kelham adopted, struck a nerve with the other architects. Kelham dismissed Pflueger’s, Hobart’s, and Weihe’s schemes and tried to “railroad through his plan.” Pflueger argued strenuously against it, privately calling it a “ridiculous proposition.” Weihe brazenly called Kelham’s a “stupid plan.”20 Kelham stalled. He lectured his way through meetings, “practically conducting a one-man filibuster.”21 With Brown about to leave for an extended trip to Europe, the savvy chairman moved to force a vote, but others objected. Weihe blurted out: “To hell with Brown, let him go. That’s not our worry. If he wants to run out on the thing, why should we be forced to do [sic] an action.”22 The fractures in the group tell us something about the tensions within architectural practice in the mid-1930s. Under pressure from the influx of modern modes of design and planning, the Beaux-Arts was losing its authority and confidence. In an apparent attempt to isolate the more progressive Pflueger, Kelham had the rest of the commission arrive early to the next meeting. He came prepared with a diagram and doled out the areas that each architect would design. Brown was assigned the Court of Honor, as well as the tower that would anchor its middle. This gave him the all-important entrance court, the fair’s axial pivot and its most prominent vertical element. It was a great opportunity to create a counterpoint to Coit Tower, which he had finished just two years earlier. To Hobart went the two courts that linked the Court of Honor to the

24. overleaf Edward Frick (attributed). Early “Key Plan” for the fair. [Courtesy of Moulin Studios]

lagoon—the east-west axis of palaces. Merchant took over the lagoon itself and the façades along its western length, while Weihe was charged with designing the great wall and the entrance towers. Kelham took the entire north-south axis for himself: the Court of the Seven Seas and the Court of the Moon, interrupted only by Brown’s Court of Honor. He also designed the Administration Building, which would become the airport terminal, and with W. P. Day, the two hangars. Pflueger was left with the northernmost court, which would become the Court of Pacifica. At this early stage, however, it was the most marginal area in the still-abstract plan. By fiat, then, the chairman had settled on the plan and divided up the fair. Pflueger later learned from Weihe what had happened. Kelham had isolated him “over in a corner” because Pflueger was “an

53

55

individualist. Evidently figuring that if I didn’t do the type of stuff they could do there would be less clash by my being in the corner.”23 For his part, Pflueger thought little of Kelham or his plan: “To leave a thought, however valuable, in [Kelham’s] hands is like throwing it into the bay.” Kelham returned the sentiment. When Pflueger urged more time to consider the plan, Kelham chided him: “That shows you have no conception of the thing. The elevations take much more time.” The younger Art Deco architect confided in his notes: “Of course, that was so damn ridiculous it makes me cry when I think of a man with a head like that being at the top of the pile.”24 Kelham and Brown had ample reason to fear Pflueger’s protest. In Chicago, Brown had witnessed the power of modernism to subvert Beaux-Arts planning. A pivotal moment came when Raymond Hood presented a fantastic bird’s-eye view in which he built up a layered, irregular urban fabric from Lake Michigan. It culminated in the crescendo of an off-center skyscraper whose irregular step-backs thrust dramatically off the page.25 Although a conventional Beaux-Arts plan was already in place, Hood’s plan thrilled the members of the Architectural Commission. They changed course and voted to develop his plan. Of course, Brown voted against Hood’s plan. He and Kelham would not let modernism hijack the fair in San Francisco, either. They blocked Pflueger from playing the role of Hood. When Kelham divvied up the areas of the fair, their contents were completely unknown. The palaces were little more than massive sheds in need of personality, the courts mere voids between them. They were designing hypothetically, absent any practical program. Even the thematic prompt was ambiguous, shifting as it did through these months from a celebration of the bridges to youth, recreation, trade, travel, and progress to the Pageant of the Pacific. As Pflueger observed in his private memoranda: “No program—what a hell of a job it’s been.”26 When Kelham pushed his plan through, Pflueger lamented: “We can’t do a damn thing, Kelham is going to develop the plan, he has the ability [i.e., power]— GREAT PLOTS, SMALL PLANS

none of us can do anything” about it.27 That summer, after these fierce battles, with no consensus, a plan that bore minimal resemblance to what

56

The basic plan was a fait accompli.

half of the commission wanted went public.28 The rendering, or rendu— the architects repeatedly used the French words from their training—of 4 December 1935 shows Kelham’s scheme (in their words, parti), most likely drawn by Brown’s partner, Edward Frick. It was a mirror image of Brown’s L-shaped cross-axis, integrated with the lagoon and pushed to the south of the island, leaving room for the “aviation group” [figure 24].

PLANNING FOR PUBLICITY While Kelham was clearly instrumental in the months before his death in October 1936, Brown and Frick played equally prominent roles, especially behind the scenes. After Brown left for Europe, Frick became the de facto chief draftsman of the fair, a role he later would take on officially. Settling on the basic arrangement early was necessary because the exposition company had hired the sculptor Pio Tognelli to build a plaster-block model for publicity purposes.29 Posters, exhibitions, articles, and postcards would follow [figure 25]. The postcard was little more than a painted photograph of the model. Publicity had rushed the plan into existence. Frick refined the plan without much input from Brown, who was in Europe and out of touch for long stretches.30 Frick sketched the earliest designs for the Tower of the Sun, Brown’s prized commission in late 1935.31 Again, publicity drove the process. Frick gothicized the tower with long buttresses and chunky spires and handed them to Francis Todhunter, a local commercial artist who prepared many of the early publicity illustrations for the ggie.32 Todhunter turned the fair into a grand campus, populating it with overzealous towers and domes. His vision recalled Brown’s work at Stanford University, but it failed to impress the commission. Frick called his illustrations “very broadly drawn” and “not very architectural,” but admitted their publicity value.33 The publicity was a fiction, but the plan on which it was based was not. Most of the architects were taken aback by Todhunter’s illustrations and the publicity, not least of all because they had not agreed on the plan yet now it was public.34 When they confronted Kelham, the meeting grew hot. “Imagine Kelham continually forcing this plan when he sees this disapproval of it,” wrote Pflueger to himself: “It is a lousy spectacle.”35 Frick polished the plan and made a series of renderings, including one begrudgingly adopted by the Architectural Commission. These were shown in the shop window of the White House, a fashionable department store on Post Street.36 Frick was uncomfortable with the scale of the buildings and courts and asked Brown to compare the massing and proportions to the buildings on the Place de la Concorde.37 Indeed, the palaces pinch the courts, which, in this version, were not yet fully formed as outdoor rooms. While Brown’s answer is lost, the ambition is clear. Savannah, Philadelphia, and Washington were fine precedents, but for the proper proportions of the grand manner, they needed Paris. By December 1935, having fixed the plan for the fair’s publicity, the architects agreed to begin sketching out their particular areas in earnest. Brown was still absent.38

57

A KEY PLAN With only two months left before the plan would have to be fixed in detail, the Architectural Commission gradually designed its

25. Fair ballyhoo. Promotional postcard, ca. 1937. [Author’s collection]

way out of the dense court plan of the earlier fair. By the first published “Key Plan” of January 1937, most of the parts had fallen into place; they resemble in broadest outline the fair as built [see figure 5]. A massive wall along the western edge of the complex blocks the elements. Weihe pierced it at two points where he marched out massive towers and contrived a clever system of perpendicular openings at their bases to protect the courts from the wind. The courts themselves, now as wide as the palaces, were decompressed and stretched across the site. The staccato of courts in Brown’s early plans were consolidated into broad promenades. Axis and court became one. They inverted the long, detached façades of the grand palaces and made these exterior walls serve the courts rather than the buildings or their contents, from which they were virtually divorced. The outdoor rooms of the ppie were thus relaxed, expanded in scope, elaborated, and fashioned into the main attraction, while the palaces melted into relative anonymity. This arrangement brings out a less appreciated benefit of the plan and gets to the essence of what the commission was trying to do on Treasure Island. In a pavilion system, like that used in Chicago or New York, individual buildings are plugged into a landscape. Whether or not they harmonize in massing, form, materials, color, or style, they create an episodic relationship of figure to ground or building to site, like crystals in a substrate of landscape. In Chicago and New York, the highly individualized buildings accentuated this relationship. It was a menagerie of stunning architectural specimens. There the landscape served the buildings; it was the silent partner or a buffer between buildings. In San Francisco, buildings and landscape worked together to create a comprehensive environment.39 Trees, plantings, street furniture, and fountains were treated architecturally, while buildings were treated almost as landscape. Plantings created gradients between GREAT PLOTS, SMALL PLANS

the courts and buildings and erased the sharp line so often drawn between landscape and architecture. The living landscape, moreover, was syncopated

58

featured spectacle of the fair. The plan dictated as much.

with the rhythms of the buildings, was scaled to them like architectural elements, and harmonized with the overall scheme. In effect, the typical figure-ground relationship gave way to a built environment where, instead of the promenade bringing people to the buildings, the buildings gave their façades to the promenade. The space of the court was primary, the experience of it as a space ascendant. Great courts replaced great buildings as the

26. Timothy Pflueger. Model of the Court of Pacifica. [Courtesy of John Pflueger]

59

PATHS NOT TAKEN Seemingly minor changes in the Key Plan carried major consequences. The main ferry terminal remained lined up with the northernmost court, giving Pflueger’s formerly marginal site pride of place. It now became a major entrance. Just to the north of his court Pflueger was also in charge of designing the main theater for the entire fair. His early designs show him as a freethinking, inventive architect, well aware of modernist precedents [figure 26]. The theater, a simple, open-air cylinder capped with a canvas top tied with tension wires, would offer a positive volume to echo the negative circular spaces cut from the corners of the Court of Pacifica. He was attempting to unify the area, instead of merely tacking on the theater behind the court. Neither strictly classical nor Art Deco or modernist, the design defies classification. The façade, articulated with piers, lent the court a conventional rhythm and recalled the use of monumental orders. The much lower double-columned colonnades inside the corner lobes created a smaller order and, on a purely visual level, relieved the ponderous, rectilinear piers with more sensual curves. Pflueger put these classical rhythms into tension with exquisitely thin materials, as if he intended to reduce the buildings to their barest minimum. The great wall of glass behind the statue of Pacifica and the quasi-reflective metallic surface inside the lobes suggest an architect reaching for something novel. Moody, sensual, monumental, even abstract, the design was a declaration of independence from the commission. The theater was especially so. The idea for a canvas roof may have come from Le Corbusier’s Temps Nouveaux Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition, where the Swiss architect, like Pflueger, stretched canvas over a frankly temporary structure using tension wires.40 The building also resonated with the Hall of Transportation at the Century of Progress fair, which used cables dramatically. George Kelham balked at the design and threatened to cut it from the fair. Pflueger argued sensibly that it was the “only thing in the Exposition so far that has a definite purpose.”41

GREAT PLOTS, SMALL PLANS

Pflueger had bigger plans as well. Unbeknownst to

60

Kelham, and much to his own delight, he had been appointed architect for the Federal Building and began to imagine how to link his court and theater to the new project. In a magnificent drawing, Pflueger took over an area of the fair equivalent to Kelham’s two courts [figure 27]. The complex would have eaten up much of the parking area and tied in his buildings with a secondary axis north of the fair proper. The Federal Building would have been a pendant to the chairman’s Administration Building. Instead of closing off the fair’s promenade with the Court of Pacifica, the northern lobes open up and lead to a crescent, which in turn leads to the

27. Timothy Pflueger. Alternative plan for the fair. [Courtesy of John Pflueger]

61

62

28. Timothy Pflueger. Theater area. From an alternative plan for the fair. [Courtesy of John Pflueger]

Federal Building. Pflueger wanted to make it the monumental entrance to the exposition. The scheme borrows from the crescendo of the ppie, where the crescent of the federal exhibition building flanked Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts.42 The resemblance is too close for coincidence. Pflueger played his game of architectural one-upmanship down to the last detail. In this expanded context the theater now appears more Roman, like the Castel Sant’Angelo, its canvas roof recalling the practice of shading coliseums with fabric awnings. The Federal Building is an oddity: a windowless volume, like some reconstruction of King Solomon’s Temple that rises from the base of a Roman basilica [figure 28]. The design seems out of character for Pflueger: an attempt perhaps to outclassicize Kelham and other commission architects. The older architect was already jealous. Pflueger wrote: “Kelham made a statement that I had gone ahead and made this the grandest thing in the Exposition, but, if the Commission was satisfied, it was all right with him.”43 Kelham was speaking strictly about the Court of Pacifica, and there is no evidence that he saw this drawing, but Pflueger already knew that he would have ample opportunity to upstage his nemesis. The drawing shows the versatile designer making a pitch to locate the Federal Building where it would have the greatest impact [figure 29]. Visitors arriving by ferry would immediately find themselves between Pflueger’s theater and Federal Building. Free of Weihe’s wall, the two buildings would have also refashioned the exposition’s skyline. They offered a lower but no less monumental counterpoint to Brown’s Tower of the Sun. It was an incredibly ambitious move, both architecturally and professionally. Of course, Kelham would pull the plug on the theater, and Brown would soon push the Federal Building to the far edge of the lagoon where it would command its own impressive setting but never compete with the official fair buildings.

BEYOND THE COURTS AND PALACES It is telling that the first official Key Plan would emerge only in January 1937, just after Kelham died. Brown, the new chairman of the commission, was left to sort out what had remained entirely schematic until the programmatic needs of the California Commission, the federal government, and foreign nations became clear. The lack of program had been maddening. These other areas, which formed a kind of fair within the fair, would occupy as much space as the official fair buildings. In the Key Plan, Pflueger’s theater survived, as did Maybeck’s “Temple of Youth,” 29. Timothy Pflueger. Alternative plan for the fair. Detail. [Courtesy of John Pflueger]

which had figured so prominently in publicity for the fair [figure 30]. This was to be the lone vertical counterpoint to Brown’s Tower of the Sun, but it was now generically labeled “Band Stand,” a foreshadowing of its demotion. The rest of the buildings around the lagoon remained schematic.

63

30. More fair ballyhoo in Popular Mechanics. [Courtesy of Hearst Publications]

31. W. G. Pigeon builds a schematic model for the fair. [Courtesy of Hearst Publications]

64

In a series of sketch plans Brown attempted to give the area a more realistic and cohesive footprint. He ran an array of real and suggestive axes through the area. In one plan of 26 October 1937, he drew the implied diagonals and rigorously divided the lagoon into foreign, federal, and California zones. He split the State of California building, filling its core with an ample court, like the great courts of the buildings in Washington’s Federal Triangle that Brown knew so well. Great rows of columns or trees, four wide and five deep, connected court and lagoon. They would have established diagonal sight lines for visitors as they emerged from Hobart’s Court of Flowers. In this way, fairgoers would have been able to see through the California building to the southeast and follow the lagoon to the northeast. Brown thus attempted to give some order to the whole by defining the transitions between the fair’s different zones. Sketching almost daily, Brown revised the plan repeatedly. Most of his sketches attempted to assimilate the group plan to the freer area surrounding the lagoon. He jammed courts and symmetrical buildings into the picturesque site, forcing the logic of the group plan onto this more picturesque zone. But Brown did experiment freely in other ways. He drifted branches of the lagoon south and north of the symmetrical basin and juggled the placement of the California and Pacific area buildings. His experiments followed the tireless formula of “formality picturesquely developed,” as John M. Carrère described his own design for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.44 When he eventually dropped the rigid diagonals, the buildings no longer turned to articulate them. As a result, the lagoon began to breathe and acquire suitable complexity, and its relationship to the palaces and courts became clearer.45

A WORKING MODEL By late summer 1937, the Architectural Commission had a working model built in order to test the massing and spacing of the buildings and to serve as a promotional tool [figure 31].46 The model gave flesh to the first Key Plan [figure 32]. A bird’s-eye view of the model shows the main features of the fair, much of which remained merely roughed out. Chesley Bonestell painted in the hills of the East Bay, Marin, and San Francisco, producing a Hollywood matte for the model. His artful deceptions allowed a suspension of disbelief similar to that of a backdrop in a film. They framed and compressed the space, refusing to reveal its nature. In fact, the white models, not the montage, spoiled the illusion. When shot by a clever photographer, they created the sense of a real setting. Scores of generic illustrations based loosely on the model followed.47

65

32. Model of the fair with background hills painted by Chesley Bonestell. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

66

The Publicity Department co-opted the working model for an aggressive advertising campaign and hired Bonestell to produce a series of views based on the model, including arresting images of the Temple of Music, the Elephant Towers, and an aerial view that was frequently republished [figure 33].48 Maybeck and Merchant’s building was so photogenic that it showed up everywhere. It was to be the star of the show. These illustrations dramatized the Beaux-Arts plans of the Architectural Committee without losing the architectural character of the buildings in scenographic indulgence. With the exigencies of construction upon them, Brown’s commission had to make hard decisions. Yet in the second and final Key Plan of January 1938, the layout remained surprisingly unresolved. Buildings were being erected all over the island, but with a year to go before the fair opened, Brown was waiting for dozens of architects to provide the exact footprints for their buildings. They continued to alter the plan and update the model. Instead of scrapping Maybeck and Merchant’s tower altogether, they attempted to make it work as the theme building of the emerging Pacific Area. This was an impossibly late date to be fussing with major buildings. The fair was to open in February, and a complicated structure like this would be costly both in dollars and time. In the model, the tower looks out of place, rising nonsensically over the picturesque lagoon. Designed as a theatrical backdrop for music and pageants, it looks ill at ease as the centerpiece for a collection of the more historically accurate Asian buildings that would gather around it. In time, the more neutral Pacific House—a cleaner, more modern pavilion—would mercifully replace it. Merchant, who stood so proudly beside the model of his tower, would have to produce it in a hurry [figure 34]. The final plan shows just how much Brown and his colleagues had relaxed the zone beyond the Temple Compound—the area that had given Brown fits. To one side, a lagoon leads across a bridge and into the Pacific Area, where another bridge pinches the “north lake” before the water encircles Pacific House. The grid was all but forgotten. Water replaced the axis that Brown had once insisted on ramming through the lagoon area. To the other side, a diagonal view cuts through the California and San Francisco Buildings, offering a vista of the bridge and bay beyond. The “south lake,” no longer crowded with buildings, now abuts the Temple Compound and the Court of the Nation. It opens a sight line through the Federal Building to the hills of the East Bay. The plan was not only looser, it was also more lucid, with California and the Pacific balanced on either side of the Federal Building, and vistas of the local topography in every view. Whether intentional or not, the plan reflects San Francisco’s ambivalent place in the world. In its broadest lines, it balanced

67

68

California against the Pacific, interposing the federal government between them. San Francisco’s ability to place itself at the center of Pacific commerce could be realized only through federal investment in its infrastructure, including the bridges and the future airport: the government did stand between San Francisco and the Pacific. While the Pacific Area meandered to one side of the lagoon, and the California Group to the other, the San Francisco Building took pride of place. It fronted the California Group and was the only county building to take its place on the lagoon. From the Temple Compound, where the palaces opened onto the lagoon, San Francisco took on nearly the same architectural prominence as California. By contrast, the Hall of Western States, while prominent in scale, was tucked behind the Pacific Area, invisible from the main visual axes. For a fair that showcased the West as a tourist destination and an area of future development, it did its best to hide California’s competition. The plan may not have expressed a fully realized “symbolic universe,” as Robert Rydell has argued fairs do, but it made its best pitch. Finally, the fair’s relationship to the city and region was unusual. At most fairs the buildings create a visual barrier to their urban environment—the better to allow visitors to suspend disbelief. Walt Disney picked up on the strategy, possibly from his visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and used it at Disneyland. By contrast, the ggie self33. Chesley Bonestell. Rendering of the fair with the Tower of Youth in the background. [Huntington Library and bnsf Railway] 34. William Merchant poses proudly in front of his model of the Tower of Youth. [EDA, UCB]

consciously offered up views of the cities and towns beyond. The oddly divided Federal Building framed views of the East Bay hills. The Court of the Moon opened up a view of the Oakland Bay Bridge, while the diagonal cut through the California Group aimed at Oakland. Everywhere visitors would glimpse the Bay Area’s urban fabric and natural topography: the campanile in Berkeley; Coit Tower in San Francisco; the ubiquitous hills, water, and fog; and the new bridges stitching them all together. Armed with their cameras, visitors could record a montage of fair fiction and urban reality as labile as any myth.

69

3:

Regionalism Unbounded: The Courts and Palaces

In December 1935, Edward Frick returned from the first meeting of the Architectural Commission and reported to Arthur Brown, Jr. The consensus was, he wrote, “that something as modern as the Chicago Fair of 1933–34 was not wanted, but, nevertheless, something modern was desired.”1 In the mid-to-late 1930s, “modern” was a relative term. For the Beaux-Arts men of the committee it meant restraining their Greco-Roman impulses and permitting modern materials and forms to find their way into the buildings. Brown had designed several buildings at the Century of Progress Exposition, all of which ably blended Art Deco and classical motifs, but which left the committed classicist cold.2 With almost no break, he began designing for the San Francisco fair—from a hotel in Paris, no less. We thus find the first designs for the San Francisco fair filtered through Chicago and Paris, where most members of the Architectural Commission had trained. At the Chicago fair, Brown would have seen many strands of modern, or at least contemporary, architecture. George Fred Keck had designed two houses of the future, both as advanced as anything in the United States at the time. Along different lines, but no less of the moment, the Transportation Building was theatrically suspended from 70

tension wires. Alongside these, Brown saw the spirited, garden-variety

Art Deco that provided the primary architectural aesthetic of the fair, if not of world’s fairs generally in the 1930s. The architects who designed the fair on Lake Michigan had insisted that its style derive from the exhibits within and from modern conditions and new structural possibilities.3 Kelham and Brown had no interest in following progressive prescriptions. At the ggie, the long façades of the continuous palaces were completely divorced from their contents, modern realities, and structural experimentation. The mere use of palaces looked back to the 1915 fair rather than to the pavilion system that predominated in the 1930s. Instead of using materials directly, as the Chicago architects had done, the architectural commission turned back to the plastered confections of the turn-of-thecentury fairs. On the surface, the buildings appear to be pure pastiche, a sham of architectural non-sequiturs drawn from cultures bordering the Pacific [figures 35, 36]. But the façades tell only part of the story. Following the geographical metaphor of the fair, the architects turned away from the East Coast, Europe, and modern fashions and projected a vision of California onto the Pacific. They thought like regionalists, designed like classicists, and gestured like showmen, all with more affinity to modernism than seems possible given the way their buildings looked.

71

36. Louis Hobart. Court of Reflections. [Treasure Island Museum Collection, Treasure Island Development Authority]

35. Louis Hobart. Court of Reflections, detail. [Francis Violich; College of Environmental Design Visual Resources Center, University of California, Berkeley]

72

OUTDOOR ROOMS Whether by design or by chance, Kelham’s early planning was decisive. The site plan encouraged the melding of building and landscape. The courts were more than the absence of buildings or the space between them. Each court was formed by the continuous façades of the palaces. Mere sheds on the inside, the palaces had double exterior walls, one to hold up the building, the other detached and given over to the adjoining court. The architects borrowed these walls to create cohesive outdoor rooms. In other words, their great opportunity, their chance to shine, lay in designing exterior spaces, not buildings per se. The spaces owed nothing conceptually and little visually to the buildings that formed their edges. The thematic discontinuity—the separation between the allegorical program of the court and the contents of the palaces—allowed visual continuity in the courts, which became the primary place where the architects could advance the fair’s larger theme. Thus liberated, each court became its own environment. The architects could think of the façades of the buildings, the landscape, sculpture, street furniture, water elements, light, and color comprehensively. Here was a Gesamtkunstwerk, or a total work of art, placed within a conventional landscape of promenades and parterres. Great courts had been features of world’s fairs for decades, from the White City of Chicago through the ppie, where harmonious monumental buildings sad astride great open spaces. The ggie amplified the effect with seemingly endless façades integrated with everything else in the court. In Kelham’s Court of the Moon, the outdoor room emerged conspicuously free from the sheds that lined its edges [figure 37]. The architect echoed the rhythms of his own Court of the Seven Seas with a pattern of square towers and niches syncopated with fullgrown trees and shorter lamps. He repeated the crenellations from the other court and used layered plantings and terraces as a gradient to ease the visual transition from promenade to palace wall. A long pool carried the water theme from Pacifica and the Fountain of Western Waters to the fountain on the southern tip of the island, just before the waters of the bay [figure 38]. The palaces faded into the fantasy of an exotic walled citadel. The Towers of the South culminated the court. Their thick mock stair towers and tiered central volume suggest a glowing compressed engine ready to explode into the night [figure 39]. For all of this abundance of ornament, the court was the primary event. We scarcely think to ask what the buildings held: Homes and Gardens to one side, Mines, Metals, and Machinery to the other. In the most elaborate court, George Kelham’s Court of the Seven Seas, the palaces disappeared behind built-up layers of applied

73

74

37. George Kelham. Court of the Moon. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

38. George Kelham. Court of the Moon, looking south. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

75

39. George Kelham. Towers of the South at night. [Treasure Island Museum Collection, The Treasure Island Development Authority] 40. George Kelham. Court of the Seven Seas. Detail. [Special Collections Research Center, California State University, Fresno]

76

ornament [figure 40]. Rows of ships’ prows, replete with galleys, oars, and figureheads in the form of the winged Victory of Samothrace, jutted out from the walls atop tiered piers, suggesting the arrival of European galleons from distant shores rather than the long sheds to which they were attached. The architect and critic Frederick Gutheim, writing in the

Magazine of Art, called the effect “heavy and nervous.”4 In a moment when Art Deco was still the most fashionable mode and the Modern Movement had just found a secure toehold in both the academy and practice, the heavily encrusted walls and obscure allegories must have looked more like the Progressive-era expositions than the modernist fairs of the day. But the buildings were also the product of practical decisions. The palaces had to shield the courts from the winds of the bay, and they had to be erected quickly and cheaply, long before their contents were known. Experimentation with new materials and methods could have jeopardized the fair. Given the premise of a continuous façade, it made sense to use stucco as an easily modeled material that could give unified expression with a variety of effects on the cheap. The palaces were thus a response to the site and to the exigencies of building. In spite of these practical considerations, it is fair to understand the palaces and the courts designed by the Architectural Commission as the last gasp of Beaux-Arts classicism in the United States in a monumental ensemble or group plan. Frederick Gutheim took this perspective. He called the commission’s work a “triumph of mediocrity, conservatism, the staleness of the compromised and the deadness of the average.”5 But instead of seeing the official fair buildings through this modernist lens—as a failure on the part of a stubborn old guard trying in vain to correct the excesses of modernism—it is more accurate to see them as a snapshot of American architecture at this fitful “hinge moment” in architectural history. While historians now might find the “triumph” of modernism in the period a foregone conclusion, to this group of veteran architects, Timothy Pflueger excepted, the future of architecture was uncertain, the stakes were high, and modernism was the enemy—and a foreign one at that. And yet the commission held unexpectedly complex views on architecture. Its members thought in abstract and regionalist terms, mapping an ambiguous idea of California architecture onto the wider Pacific. The convergence of Chicago, Paris, California, Art Deco, the Grand Manner, and the building traditions of the Pacific shows the commission trying to work out an impossible synthesis before retreating into the light-hearted mood of exposition architecture. 77

OUT OF TIME Inexplicably, scholars have mistakenly called the ggie’s architecture modernist.6 Like the other fairs of the period, one such

historian has written, it “frankly embraced the machine and its culture. The shapes of the buildings, the symbols used for the fairs—abstract pylons or bridges in place of art palaces or giant statues—and, most of all, the lavish and startling exhibition halls put up by huge companies like Ford, General Motors, and General Electric reflected a world in which the new was worshiped and the emphasis was on sensation and novel perceptions rather than the absorption of data.”7 This is true of Chicago and New York, but not San Francisco, where the official buildings rejected the machine, eschewed abstract symbols for allegories, and hid most of the corporate exhibits within the palaces. The issue of modernism went beyond mere buildings. It had to do with the creation of larger environments and the sorts of spectacles cultivated within them. The Progressive-era fairs were places of formal pageantry and modern ritual. The White City and its descendants tamed and overawed the modern crowd with Olympian-scale monuments and public spaces that established a civic ideal and standards of public comportment.8 By contrast, the more starkly modernist buildings of the fairs of the 1930s created, according to historian Neil Harris, environments anathema to the sorts of traditional ceremonies and processions typical of fairs.9 Again the ggie stands apart. There the architects strung together a series of formal settings perfectly suited for ceremonies and processions [see figure 8]. William Merchant’s Temple Compound formed, REGIONALISM UNBOUNDED: THE COURTS AND PALACES

in name and function, a monumental backdrop for mass gatherings. Here the cultural and political events that give fairs their meaning—and that

78

niche, and cupola lightened the load [figure 42]. The towers of Angkor

help sponsor them—took on the aura of some ancient ritual. Merchant, who had been associated with George Kelham and later with Bernard Maybeck, played the game of Pacific Architecture with brio. With its sweeping stairs, expansive reliefs, umbrella lanterns, and towers modeled after the sikhara of Hindu temples, this was the most elaborate stage set of the fair. Merchant’s façades enchanted the space. His Towers of the East were sure-handed, drawing liberally and confidently from Eastern architecture. He began with studies of the towers of ancient Hindu temples and Buddhist stupas and slowly adjusted their complex masonry to the planar plaster walls of the exposition [figure 41]. Robust entasis lent the towers an almost Doric solidity as the delicate “orientalisms” of entrance,

Wat, with their layered, convex forms and dissolving corners, are the obvious source, but Merchant carved out a Mayan motif for the vault of the openings. His process was pure Beaux-Arts, applying the free classicism favored by the French school to Asian exemplars. These were not direct quotations, but rather a search for sources whose synthesis might deliver novel, potent, and fitting forms to frame the public space. What made his wall convincing, at least as scenery, is that it functioned as more than a mere stage set. It was a stage. It formed the backdrop for one of the most important public spaces of the exposition. With a simple bandstand set against the lagoon’s edge, the ghats—or steps drawn from Indian architecture—became seating, and the space filled up with spectators who could watch performances or listen to speeches. The roles could also be reversed, with actors or speakers on the ghats and the audience puddled around them. Either way, Merchant’s wall was alive to the modern rituals of the exposition. Put differently, his wall aspired to a form of public culture that Neil Harris has shown was abandoned by Chicago and New York.10 Where in Chicago and New York the themes of progress, science, or the future turned architects to streamlining or the abstractions of the Modern Movement, the Pacific theme invited allegory and symbolic references.

CRITICAL RECEPTION Swearing off modernism did not necessarily make the commission’s buildings old-fashioned. They were more eccentric than retrograde. Like Hollywood sets inflected with the cubistic geometries of Art Deco, they were neither outdated nor exactly of their time. This made them difficult to judge. Most critics took the easy way out, as the pithy Herb Caen did when he called the fair “Bagdad in the Bay,” humorously surrendering to the architecture’s exoticism without looking deeply at it.11 Such breezy descriptions assumed that the palaces were not serious architecture, but rather illusion, diversion, stagecraft. And yet these buildings beguiled the public. They invited fairgoers to suspend disbelief and enter into a social pact with an alternate reality. And they were the product of the most sustained, considered planning by some of the most accomplished architects practicing in the Bay Area. This fact begs us to take them seriously as architecture, something that critics of the day and historians since have been loath to do. Talbot Hamlin, one of the most astute and forgiving architectural critics of the day, shrank before the task. “Every imaginative license was permitted, every fantastic vagary sought,” he began. “One feels that these architects took neither themselves nor their problems

79

41. William Merchant. Sketches for the Towers of the East. [Courtesy of Hanley Wood] 42. William Merchant. Temple Compound. [Perry Stewart; College of Environmental Design Visual Resources Center, University of California, Berkeley]

80

with undue seriousness; that they perhaps met together, dined gaily, and, filled with the pleasant warmth of a good dinner and good wine, let themselves go.”12 Little did he know how contentious the Architectural Commission’s deliberations had been. Hamlin did candidly concede that “in front of buildings of this kind, the ordinary canons of architectural criticism seem almost powerless.”13 The buildings expressed “a consistent and an understandable attitude, . . . and before it such spectacled and bearded critics as myself, with their talk of functionalism, of expressionism of new materials, of a new architecture for a new world, must stand silent and rather abashed, for what we are criticizing is nothing but pure play. One might as well attempt the serious analysis of a child’s headlong rush through a daisy field.”14 Critics like Hamlin were in a pickle: praise the fair and betray the modernist cause; criticize it too vehemently and abandon the brotherhood of architects, to which he belonged. To liken the architecture to child’s play was little more than patronizing praise, but it brought him to deeper insights. “Here in New York we are trying to be real,” to stage an exposition where people could go to “learn the truths about the world.” In San Francisco, the architects planned the exposition as “a grand frolic,” “a folk vacation,” rather than “a serious international enterprise.” Both aims, he admitted, were equally legitimate and “healthy.” On these terms, he considered the ggie a success. Its visitors will be “amazed, delighted”; “like children, they will be enabled to enjoy its wealth of imaginative and fairy-tale phantasy.”15 Once Hamlin visited the fair, his convictions sharpened, as did his architectural criticism. “Taken by themselves, its arches, its mouldings, its ship prows, its grilles are all derivative,” he wrote, “certainly not expressive of their material—lath and plaster—and in style completely neutral.”16 Yet he lauded the “quieter aesthetic approach” of the California architects, who were “not afraid of the pretty.” In the end, he reasoned, “all of the arguments for or against radicalism in design which trouble and confuse the New York designer are not necessary and may not in the long run work out for a sounder, a more deeply based attitude than the simple and impulsive attack of the San Francisco designers.”17 With the world now at war, “attack” was still a musical rather than a martial analogy. Hamlin used the term to call into question the high seriousness of modernist dogmas and to characterize a different, more intuitive and emotive manner taking shape in California. George Kelham’s early description of the exposition buildings confirms Hamlin’s view. Before he died, Kelham called for a sensual architecture, one that would “transport [visitors] into another and more joyous world where the everyday worries and problems do

81

not, at least for a time, exist.”18 He wrote of beauty, mental ease, happiness, and the “sensual appeal” of the “idealized, glorious show”—in short, an escape from the realities of the city and the Great Depression.19 In this attitude, at least, the Architectural Commission followed him unapologetically.

TEXTURE, LIGHT, COLOR: THE PORTALS OF THE PACIFIC Ernest Weihe’s Portals of the Pacific bring home the effect Kelham sought, even as they reveal unexpected complexity [figure 43]. The massive Elephant Towers, stark entrance plaza, and inventive openings were simultaneously abstract and referential, barren and sensual, ponderous and frivolous, exotic and local. Weihe’s work was also eminently practical. The portals, composed of telescoping sixty-foot walls alee to the wind and framed by the towers, sheltered the courts from the gales that swept across the bay [figure 44].20 Weihe “spent hours with cardboard baffles, electric fans and chicken feathers, trying to figure out how to get customers through the turnstiles while keeping the wind out.”21 The “immense vertical baffles” ushered in visitors on axis with the Tower of the Sun and at the “Western Gateway.” The buff walls of lathe and plaster were brutally simple, “like the fly wings of a stage” made for giants [figures 45, 46].22 Fellow Bay Area architect Irving F. Morrow uncharitably described the portals as “distended entry wickets.”23 But Talbot Hamlin appreciated the effect: “One sees crowds of people pouring into what seems at first merely an ordinary recessed court. Magically they disappear; no door, no opening is visible. The psychological effect of this kind of entrance is definite and adds not a little to the sense of wonder,

REGIONALISM UNBOUNDED: THE COURTS AND PALACES

the sense of separation from the world, the sense of being in something

82

precious and beautiful which the San Francisco Fair so definitely arouses.”24 In fact, Weihe had to respond to the scale of the entrance and that of the bay. As ferries approached, the vaguely Asiatic light standards would come into focus. Solid and opaque by day, the salmon-colored sentinels stood guard before the mysterious compound. Visitors would pass between the Elephant Towers and then slide between slits in the walls, whose ends were also painted salmon. At night the lamps became luminous beacons that radiated a buttery light from their hoods like glowing parasols atop stupas [figure 47]. Only then would the delicate lines and the zigzag patterns emerge, revealing the translucent fabric for what it was. Fashioned of “glyptal-impregnated canvas,” the lamps imparted “warm, exotic hues in a colorful glow from the lighting elements concealed within.”25 The lighting fixtures struck the first note in the fugue of materials, color, and light that linked all of the courts together. Like all

the walls of the exposition palaces, they were coated with vermiculite, a micalike mineral normally used for insulation. When heated, ground into a powder, and applied wet to the 200,000 square yards of palace buildings, the coating created a depth and iridescence to the usually matte plaster, which now gave back the light in a constellation of shimmering effects.26 Like the vermiculite, the official fair colors lent continuity to the fair, guaranteeing a shared palette [figure 48]. Jesse Stanton, the director of color, borrowed the general strategy from Chicago, where color enlivened the great expanses of wall in the windowless buildings and created continuity for the disparate pavilions.27 The comparison ends there, however. Stanton, an architect who had worked both for Bernard Maybeck and Louis Hobart, envisioned something much like the ppie [figure 49]. In Chicago the fair hired modernist architect Joseph Urban, who drew the analogy between his colors and musical scales or compositions, an abstract analogy that likened the chromatic scale to something like the universality of musical intervals.28 By contrast, Stanton’s palette at the ggie, with names like Exposition Ivory, Polynesian Brown, and Imperial Dragon Red, was regional in inspiration—color’s contribution to a Pacific architecture. The way Urban and Stanton presented their schemes makes the contrast clear. Urban’s resembled a Mondrian painting, while Stanton’s looked like paint samples in a Benjamin Moore catalog [figure 50]. Modernist or not, Stanton’s color scheme smoothed over the differences between the courts. Lighting did the same [figure 51]. Lighting expert A. F. Dickerson integrated it with the architecture.29 Experimental and spectacular, it was also entirely off-the-shelf: incandescent bulbs, along with Lumiline, arc, mercury-vapor, sodium-vapor, neon, and fluorescent bulbs and tubes, as well as ultraviolet “black light” used with luminescent paints.30 Dickerson claimed to have pioneered the last two at the fair. Fluorescent bulbs became available commercially only in 1938. This would be one of the first times that the public experienced a fluorescent environment. Dickerson hid floodlighting in trenches, setbacks, and soffits; spotlighted architectural features such as towers, sculpture, and niches; and used light standards and recessed fixtures in syncopation with the buildings. He sunk floodlights underwater and under the lips of fountains to further conceal the source of these mysterious effects. All of this was part of an effort to outdo previous world’s fairs. Since 1876, expositions had used electrical lighting “to unify entire fairgrounds as coherent electrical landscapes.”31 The ppie marked a turning point in which “the lights themselves ceased to be the focus of attention.” There, “entire buildings were lighted by spotlights, displaying the fairgrounds in sumptuous detail. Tinted filters transformed

83

43. Ernest Weihe. Portals of the Pacific at night. [San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library]

84

44. Ernest Weihe. Portals of the Pacific, with Tower of the Sun. [San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library]

85

45. Ernest Weihe. Portals of the Pacific under construction. [San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library] 46. Ernest Weihe. Entrance to the fair. [Louis J. Stellman; California History Room, California State Library]

47. Portals of the Pacific at night. [San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library]

87

48. Official Exposition Colors. [EDA, UCB] 49. Jesse Stanton. Proposed color scheme. [Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley]

50. Joseph Urban. Color scheme for the Century of Progress Exposition, Chicago, 1933–1934. [from Lisa D. Schrenk, Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago’s 1933–34 World’s Fair]

89 89

the buildings’ appearance, and multi-faceted crystals embedded in the walls (called nova-gems) glittered and gave off a rainbow of iridescence.”32 It was the first fair to try to erase the distinction between day and night. The lights slowly went on as the sun went down and “a bogus sunrise in the west was staged, using powerful search lights in San Francisco harbor below. . . . They created an artificial aurora borealis that extended from the Golden Gate to Sausalito.”33 The ggie had much to live up to. By the 1930s, the “surging energy” of earlier fairs and the “discordant, flashing lights of the commercial zone with their illusions of movement” gave way to “still pattern” and “uniform color schemes.”34 Lighting was planned as part of the building design. Designers began to hide lights, and banned floodlights because they tend to make buildings look the same at night as during the day. “In this way,” writes historian David Nye, “the fair at night not only looked far different than by day, but it became a textualized landscape that emphasized painting, writing, flags, statues and corporate logos, each set off by contrasting areas of obscurity.”35 At the ggie, at least in the palaces and courts, the lighting painted broad surfaces and picked out architectural details more than corporate logos, which were scarce [see figure 39]. “Mazda projectors concealed in troughs” floodlit the walls, with “color reliefs” at the entrances.36 Lanterns with the same “glyptal-treated fabric” lit the court with rhythmic patterns.37 Lighting concealed the roughly handled surfaces of the walls and helped create the playful, mood-altering effects that Kelham sought.

THEY CAME TO SEE THE ELEPHANTS Weihe’s design would have pleased Kelham, as well. REGIONALISM UNBOUNDED: THE COURTS AND PALACES

The Elephant Towers, executed by sculptor Donald Macky, and full of

90

“their traditional flavor of foofaraw and ‘big doings,’ ” are arguably the most iconic buildings of the fair [figure 52].38 Malayan howdahs atop Burmese elephants that stand at the apex of Mayan pyramids, they have been described as pure kitsch, roadside pop come to rest at the fair.39 This description is not far off. Although their enormous interiors housed a lost-and-found, a Traveler’s First Aid Quarters, and a “large unfurnished barn like place,” holding “lost children of all ages and sizes, and all degrees of impudent naughtiness,” they were more like enormous garden shams, eye-catchers scaled to the expanse of the bay.40 The mish-mash of styles drawn from Pacific cultures receded as the formal power of the ensemble advanced. An early design shows that the architect experimented with various ways of topping the animals, including a giant pineapple.41 Pure form was as important as the source from which it came. The elephantmountains break the planes of Weihe’s massive walls.

Like the other architects, Weihe was Paris-trained, but he thought in terms of formal abstractions: “The dominant effect is gained by the use of great masses and broad planes, and the set-back pyramid idea, which is a Malayan theme.”42 One can espy as much Boullée as Malay in these walls, the route of infusion coming through the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, rather than merely the books or magazines that the Eurocentric architects would have consulted.43 In spite of these distant points of reference, Weihe surprisingly thought of his work for the fair in frankly regionalist terms: “We are trying to do something in California that will always be recognized as Californian. We are not interested in making it universal, for architecture cannot be truly universal; it must always be influenced by climate, topography and the character of the people who produce it.”44 Weihe then mapped California onto the wider theme of the fair: “We have attempted to design an architecture which will apply to the whole Pacific, and still will not be any particular school of architecture. It will express our definite and separate theme, employing many motifs based on the great architectures bordering the Pacific Ocean.” He thus interpreted Mayan and Malay architecture through Paris and California. Here was a gentle manifesto of regionalism coming from a classicist who, as Hamlin might have put it, was free to explore the conditions of his place and time while searching for “our individual California quality.”45 Far from being alien exotics imported for atmosphere, the elephants were Californian in their own way. Weihe weakly explained the odd but compelling tactic of mounting cubistic elephants atop the entrance to the fair by way of their grandeur: “Elephants are the largest living sculptural form.”46 But a more local reference is the Gold Rush. People who ventured to California in 1849 spoke of coming to “see the elephant,” a metaphor for the circuslike atmosphere of speculation and prospecting, but also for the danger and enormity of the undertaking, if not the exoticism and expanse of the frontier.47 Those who turned back would speak of having “seen too much of the elephant.”48 In fact, the phrase comes from rural usage. When the circus came to town, people would go “to see the elephant.”49 Weihe and Macky’s prodigious pachyderms would have called forth the many layers of California history and myth being celebrated at the fair. Aside from the obvious reference to Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island was named for the gold dust washed out by prospectors and deposited in the bay by the Sacramento River. The Gold Rush itself, whose centenary was just ten years away—something fair organizers were well aware of—recalled the pivotal event in the early

91

51. A. F. Dickerson. Lighting the Elephant Towers. [Architectural Record] 52. The Elephant Towers at night. [Special Collections Research Center, California State University, Fresno]

92

93

growth of the region and offered an apt metaphor for the prospecting of the fair. Likewise, the elephants extended the fertile idea of the frontier beyond California to Asia. The bridges and the Golden Gate, visible from the new island, acted as the symbolic link. The circus, of course, offered the most accessible analogy. Indeed, the elephants had come to town and San Franciscans came to see them. Weihe added one more twist to his short description of the architects’ intentions: “We are attempting to achieve a mystical effect,” something he admitted was “an easy thing to talk about,” but “hard to produce in architecture.”50 Dickerson’s lighting diagram brings this out [see figure 51]. An Art Deco and film noir aesthetic overtook the elephants. In one quiet statement, Weihe managed to eschew all of the rational, international, and universal claims and ambitions of the Modern Movement without naming it. In their place he embraced a formalism of “great masses and broad planes,” part of the shared patrimony of the Beaux-Arts and modernism. He filtered these influences through Art Deco and the particularities of California. What at first appears to be a naïve and incoherent approach to design in fact anticipated the rise of regionalism, countered the brittleness of modernism, and advanced a simple but subtle theory of architecture that could be applied anywhere. It is essential to keep in mind that these ideas were being put into practice in Northern California. The architects of the New York World’s Fair could neither have imagined nor designed an “Atlantic Architecture.” As Hamlin suggested, eastern architects were more attached to the hardening orthodoxies of modernism, while the far more REGIONALISM UNBOUNDED: THE COURTS AND PALACES

conventional architects of the ggie were up to something new, or at least something of its time. On the surface, to aim for a “Pacific Architecture”

94

into caricature. Once the artists were done with Timothy Pflueger’s

recalls the eclecticism of the nineteenth century, when the ambition to discover or invent a style for the age was in full force.51 Underneath this outdated urge, however, one can sense a more contemporary spirit about place and region, freedom and sensuality, broad effects and an incipient phenomenological approach at odds with functionalism.52 Along with the contemporary modernist concern with region, as advanced by Lewis Mumford or Benton MacKaye, such an approach embraced a nativist reaction to the international and universal ambitions of the Modern Movement.

TOWARD A PACIFIC ARCHITECTURE The fantasia created by the Architectural Commission balanced unsteadily between putting on a “glorious show” and devolving

Court of Pacifica, for instance, it was so thematically heavy-handed that all measure of his original spare design was lost [see figure 4]. Pflueger, whose training was mostly informal, counterbalanced the inbred classicists on the commission.53 He was an obvious choice. In his movie palaces of the 1930s he had already combined Asian, Moorish, Mayan, and Egyptian motifs in vigorous compositions of metal and glass. More than any of the architects on the commission, he knew how to play freely and to great effect with the dominant Art Deco style—and he had been involved in both bridge projects. A member of the Bohemian Club—a favorite of architects and powerbrokers in the city—who moved comfortably in elite social circles, he would leave his mark all over the fair, from the Federal Building and the California Group to the Fine Arts and Native American exhibitions, which he helped organize.54 His court, a square with rounded corners, capped the great axis and provided a backdrop for Ralph Stackpole’s statue of Pacifica, the icon of the fair. Behind her, a shimmering curtain of metal was to “give off melodious sounds as it fluttered gently in the breeze” [figure 53].55 Although it brims with a lively ornamental program, the Court of Pacifica’s final form was much altered from Pflueger’s original concept. Partway through the design process, Kelham ordered the architects to cut the construction cost of each of their courts by 40 percent and claimed that he had done so by reducing the ornament. After hiring Chesley Bonestell to paint his model and Gabriel Moulin to photograph it, Pflueger wrote to himself: “Everyone had to cut down to the bone and then probably take out part of the bone.”56 As a result, his walls became “blank canvases,” repositories for the paintings, sculptures, and inscriptions that screened the palaces [figure 54].57 In front of the stark walls of his court, Pflueger stretched tall fabric columns and topped them with “umbrellas” suggestive of Indian stupas. They lightly tapped out the metrical beat of columns, on the cheap. The smaller flags fluttered in the wind, lending the columns something akin to nautical imagery. Behind these walls lay the Ford Building, Vacationland, and the Department of Social Welfare, all carefully concealed. Behind them visitors would see Margaret, Helen, and Esther Bruton’s enormous painted bas relief, The Peacemakers, whose 270 panels stretched 144 feet across and rose another 57 feet above the spare cutouts of the exit [figure 55]. Like everything in this court, it aimed at cultural miscegenation. A dark Buddha—the Orient—sits behind a Roman-nosed woman—the Occident—swaddled in white and enthroned above the waves of the Pacific Ocean. The figures on both sides of the mural bear tribute in two horizontal bands that recall Phidias’s

95

53. Ralph Stackpole. Pacifica. [Francis Violich; College of Environmental Design Visual Resources Center, University of California, Berkeley]

54. Timothy Pflueger Court of Pacifica. [EDA, UCB] 55. Margaret, Helen, and Esther Bruton. The Peacemakers. [Francis Violich; College of Environmental Design Visual Resources Center, University of California, Berkeley]

Parthenon frieze or the figures bearing tribute from the Apadana at Persepolis, which had just been uncovered in the early 1930s.58 To the right, a procession of Americans of every ethnic type marches under the shadows of a motley range of architecture of the Americas.59 To the left, the Asians, some bare-breasted, none modern, bear their fruits, oxen, and spears. Above them, marauding horsemen and the Great Wall connect a tower from Angkor Wat with the Chinese Gateway to the Ming Tombs.60 The mural perfectly expressed the attitude of the fair. This might not be a meeting of equals, but it would be aesthetically pleasing.61 These interventions must have displeased the architect immensely. In a letter to Pflueger, a friend confided: “Mr. Stackpole has achieved the ultimate—sculpture with sound effects: why bother with the symbolism of ‘Pacifica’ when apparently the figure is shouting ‘Step up now and get your tickets. Show starts at 3 p.m.’? . . . It makes me shudder. I expect the stunning Bruton bas relief to advertise Coca Cola any minute! To ruin your Court with commercial barbarism must make you wild.”62 While the commercial aspect of the mural is now difficult to discern, its melodrama was repeated throughout the court. The names of great Pacific explorers, all European, graced the court’s rounded corners, encircling the metaphorical ocean. The court makes clear just how much the Pacific, understood as a region, was a European invention tied to the heroic colonial project of civilizing, if not possessing, the Other. The idea was carried into the fountain and sculptural program. Water cascaded from the feet of the Buddhist colossus, disappeared under the plaza, and flowed into the massive Fountain of Western Waters. Here allegorical figures represented the people of the Pacific [see figure 4]. “Why no China and Japan represented in the outer row of nations?” asked Juliet James, who wrote a pamphlet on the “meaning of the courts.” “Because,” she answered, “both of these countries derived their culture and religion largely from India, so become secondary nations in this scheme of representation.”63 More anthropologically sophisticated and scientific methods were used to develop the exhibits of the Pacific Area, but the same hackneyed stereotypes and categories of race that had dominated world’s fairs since the Victorian era were rehearsed again in this public space. At least Pacifica herself, impassive and stiff, was ethnically indistinct, as if the court acted as a cultural mixer that blended all the ethnic bodies of the Bruton sisters’ mural and the sculptures arrayed around the fountain into a monumental fetish [figure 56]. Their Otherness melts into a single body, Pacifica, who presides over them. The fair aimed to turn the Pacific into just this sort of a melting pot. Similar messages could be found throughout the other courts.

97

TOWER AND ARCH Two architectural interventions broke the spell of the courts: the Tower of the Sun and Louis Hobart’s triumphal arch [figures 57, 58]. For being the main architectural icon of the fair, Brown’s tower was greatly maligned. From the earliest sketches, the Architectural Commission balked at the design. Louis Hobart asked Pflueger to “get rid of that terrible tower.”64 Weihe wanted it “shorter and fatter,” and Kelham thought it was too high and “dominated the Fair.” According to Pflueger, “there was a good deal of hesitancy about discussing it,” likely because Brown was respected and absent.65 In the end, W. P. Day, director of the Department of Works for the fair, sided with Kelham and ordered Brown to lower it in order to save money.66 Brown’s disappointment must have been keen. It was the vertical accent of the exposition, especially after Maybeck and Merchant’s Tower of Youth was cut (possibly by Brown himself). The Tower of the Sun dominated the skyline, oriented visitors within the grounds, anchored the fair’s most important pivot, competed with the bridges, and served as a symbol in publicity materials. As Brown knew well, it would also have been in dialogue with the monumental towers of the regional skyline. These included Brown’s recently finished Coit Tower in San Francisco and John Galen Howard’s campanile in Berkeley, if not the memory of the celebrated Tower of Jewels that had loomed over the ppie. He took the time to draw it next to these great towers and had the

audacity to compare it to the campanile in Venice, as well [figure 59]. From the beginning Brown had fussed and fretted over the tower, drawing dozens of versions on the backs of envelopes, hotel stationery, and scraps of paper. He sketched it in pencil and pastel, REGIONALISM UNBOUNDED: THE COURTS AND PALACES

painted it in watercolor, produced vivid renderings for presentation, and

98

hired Chesley Bonestell to do the same [figure 60].67 He began with a Gothic spire and then experimented with an eighteenth-century English hall church tower, followed by an Art Deco version and the pared-down classicism then fashionable.68 In these drawings, arches, buttresses, obelisks, pilasters, and other ornaments rise and shrink, come and go. The Phoenix atop the tower appeared as a giant acorn in one version, an eagle in another.69 Brown was stymied. Curiously, he then retreated into formal abstractions, dropping all mention of the historical references that weren’t working. The essence of the tower, he wrote, was about the “Relation of ‘Mass, Space, Line and Coherence,’ ” and emphasized the tower’s “vertical motif” as a foil to the horizontality of the fair, island, and bay.70 For someone who upheld the Grand Manner against the incursion of modernism, style had become Brown’s bugbear and the modernist language of abstraction offered an escape route.

56. Ralph Stackpole. Pacifica. [EDA, UCB] 57. Arthur Brown, Jr. Tower of the Sun. [EDA, UCB]

58. Louis Hobart. Triumphal Arch. [EDA, UCB]

99

60. Chesley Bonestell. Painting of the Tower of the Sun. [Oakland Museum of California]

59. Arthur Brown, Jr. Tower of the Sun next to its great ancestors. [EDA, UCB]

100

61. Tower of the Sun and Arch from the Federal Building. [Special Collections Research Center, California State University, Fresno]

101

The public reception was disheartening. Bay Area architect Harris C. Allen noted the tower’s deficiencies: “It is startling, to say the least, to find a quite charming spire a la Christopher Wren torn from its sturdy base and lifted into the sky on long, slender stilts.”71 Hamlin called it “definitely ugly” and found it “too slim to be impressive, too high to be a mere central motif, yet too low to be truly aspiring.”72 The famed industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague dismissed it curtly as banal.73 The problem with the Tower of the Sun, unlike the fantastical courts, was that it took itself seriously. An ambitious and overly sincere interjection of classicism into the stage set of the fair, it hit a dissonant note. Shadows, fog, and masterful color and lighting could make it look good, but they could not make it harmonize. It was uncomfortably real. Critics begrudgingly accepted fakery in the service of illusion, but Brown’s tower tilted backward to the classical ensembles of past expositions. Beaux-Arts confection could still suit a fair, but the American Renaissance was over. The same might be said for Hobart’s arch, which framed the important vista from the courts to the lagoon through Merchant’s Temple Compound [see figure 58]. In the right light, it could say its lines with conviction, but the arch was also a problem for the dysfunctional committee. Timothy Pflueger objected to the Roman intruder: “He has a certain triumphal arch between the two courts through which Brown’s tower will be seen. Personally I think that this arch complicates the tower situation even more. It is another thing added in front of an already ridiculous architectural proposition which everyone on the Board except Kelham and Frick fully realizes.”74 After Kelham’s death, Brown apparently REGIONALISM UNBOUNDED: THE COURTS AND PALACES

concurred with the minority, and the cliché remained.

102

Hobart, a latecomer to Art Deco, used the faceted massing of the popular style. He bolstered its corners with octagonal towers that gave way to buttresses. Like the Tower of the Sun, however, the arch stuck out. The overzealous moldings are only slightly more convincing than the Guelphic battlements Hobart had abstracted for its crown.75 The landscape architect Mark Daniels took pains to soften the arch by flanking it with ninety-foot “bamboo trees” as counterpoints to its heavy-handed Roman forms.76 Of course, it was far more important as a frame than as a form. The arch opened onto the arcaded Court of Flowers, followed by the so-called Temple Compound and, on the other side of the lagoon, the Federal Building, which culminated the axis. The reverse view, from the Federal Building, shows how Hobart scaled the arch to fit Merchant’s immense Temple Compound, with its ghats sunk in shadow and the exotic, bulging “Indochine” towers making the Tower of

the Sun appear even frailer than it was [figure 61].77 The scale of both the arch and tower may be urbanistically correct, but they were stiff and out of place, like Latin interlopers in a Pacific fantasy.

REGIONAL CHARACTER Needless to say, the courts and palaces of the ggie were far from the flamboyant Art Deco and modernist architecture that predominated at other fairs of the era. But California has always been a world apart, and the Bay Area the cultural equivalent of a microclimate within it. In a region of extraordinary topographical variation and heterogeneous microclimates, where landscape, light, and local materials have long been as important as style, architectural currents have been absorbed and expressed differently. Since the beginnings of the First Bay Area Tradition at the turn of the century, architects combined styles freely and with whimsy. It was a manner “in which classical columns, entablatures, Gothic windows and gargoyles, pieces of Islamic summer houses, Byzantine capitals, Roman sarcophagi, and other historical tid-bits were loosely, even carelessly applied to wood frame boxes.”78 By the 1930s, a self-conscious sense of Bay Area regionalism in architecture was firmly rooted in the architectural establishment. Beaux-Arts-trained architects such as Bernard Maybeck, John Galen Howard, and Julia Morgan had experimented with local vernaculars for decades, moving easily between brown shingles and classical columns, often combining the different modes in a synthetic manner that they thought of as native.79 As Gebhard and Von Breton put it, a regionalist manner has been the “soft background music” for the dominant Academic Classical revival.80 This regionalist idiom offered a recipe for the exposition. The classicists who dominated the Architectural Commission—all native Californians or longtime transplants—would have seen no conflict in designing buildings with Beaux-Arts bones, “Pacific” skin, and a local or California sensibility. All of these were crucial parts of modern—as opposed to modernist—architectural practice in the period, especially in the Bay Area, where they coexisted relatively free of the ideological bent of the East Coast. Some of this open-minded approach originated in the Beaux-Arts itself, which, while partial to classicism, was in fact agnostic about style. It preferred the idea of caractère, loosely understood as the attempt to make the building express its inner essence, the way a person’s face, as was once believed, revealed her or his character. While the concept, born in eighteenth-century France, varied with different architectural theorists, caractère went straight to the “expressive function of

103

the building” and the effect it had on viewers or occupants.81 In BeauxArts teaching, the idea could be extended to its material properties, even “to the sphere of colours and sounds, positing synaesthetic analogies” between the physical properties of the work and ideals such as “greatness, nobility, majesty, and beauty.”82 In turn, caractère could be projected onto nation (national character) or nature (vis-à-vis the sublime); it could be didactic or inflected in any number of ways to make it current. As a profound expression of a building’s meaning, “character” was completely compatible with the rational planning of the French school because the essence of a building began with its parti, or generating idea, which was at root a decision (the word comes from the French for cause, choice, or resolution) about the way the building should express itself spatially. Buildings take positions. Character was also compatible with modernism, since it could come equally through conventional allegories or abstractions. The concept continued to be an important part of BeauxArts education and design in France and the United States into the twentieth century.83 In its desire to create a “Pacific Architecture,” the Francophile Architectural Commission of the ggie looked beyond superficial stylistic games for a character to express the fair’s theme. Paradoxically, the plan of the ggie stood in the way of a direct expression of character. As decorated sheds whose contents were unknown at the time of design, the buildings gave no hint of their inner essence to the architects. This is why Timothy Pflueger was so incensed when Kelham cut his theater (the “only thing in the Exposition so far that has a definite purpose”).84 By the twentieth century, the façades of most fair buildings professed their inner workings, at least in some idealized way. Even the most resolutely enclosed exhibition spaces, such as Norman Bel REGIONALISM UNBOUNDED: THE COURTS AND PALACES

Geddes’s General Motors building at the New York World’s Fair, brought the inner life of the building to the surface. As huge “black boxes,” the

104

San Francisco in order to make the fair coherent. As architecturally

palaces at the ggie could do no such thing. Inside, dropped ceilings, artificial lighting, and careful use of partitions created discrete internal environments [figure 62]. Critics found the disjunction unnerving. “The illusion is shocked,” wrote one, “if we enter one of the mysterious doorways. We come not upon incense and altars or an emperor’s hall, but into the smells of a cafeteria, or the anatomy of the hormone lady, or engines and automobiles, or beverages and foods.”85 Because of this disjunction the burden would fall to the courts to craft coherent narratives for the fair, which freed the architects to think of these monumental spaces as the site of Pacific caractère. Kelham’s commission had only to map the Pacific onto

62. Czechoslovakia Exhibit. [EDA, UCB]

105

muddled as it would seem, it was ideologically uncomplicated. The idea that the Pacific constituted a coherent region was the larger conceptual conceit. Such thinking already had a purchase in the Bay Area. By tracing mining, water, business connections, and the flow of capital, Gray Brechin has shown that San Francisco perceived itself as the center of a vast western region that extended across the Pacific.86 The city’s regional consciousness had imperial ambitions. The rhetoric of the ggie tapped into this idea, extending the reach of imperial San Francisco to the Pacific in a moment when air transportation promised to shrink the oceans and make such a plan possible. The immense symbolic power expressed by the China Clipper landing at Treasure Island brought these associations into plain view. The name of the island itself echoed the sentiment. And so would the architecture become an accomplice of this fantasy. While this attitude inevitably papered over the vast differences that existed throughout the Pacific in order to create a mythic ideal of a shared culture, it was of its time to think in these terms. Mesoamerican motifs increasingly infused American architecture, appearing frequently in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and others in the 1920s. Under the aegis of a Pan-American architecture, these patterns made their way into skyscraper design, where the tiered pyramids of Mexico and Guatemala propitiously provided a formal language for the setbacks demanded in tall buildings.87 The official account of the ggie cited scholarly studies as a source of inspiration for the architecture.88 Alongside archaeology, mass-circulation magazines disseminated the results with popular accounts, photographs, and fanciful

REGIONALISM UNBOUNDED: THE COURTS AND PALACES

reconstructions that were made to order for exhibition architecture. Many of the leading scholars of Latin American art and archaeology,

106

Under what cultural conditions would a Southeast Asian Buddhist stupa

including modern architecture, had Bay Area connections. Esther Born, an architect and photographer whose husband, Ernest Born, would design part of the California Group and the whimsical map at the entrance to the fair, published a key text on modern architecture in Mexico just as the fair was being built.89 This all played into a larger concern among American architects with Pan-Americanism.90 All these influences led to the awkward attempt to cobble Mayan, Asian, and modern forms into a “Pacific Architecture,” an artificial union of fundamentally different building styles and types, materials, methods of construction, and traditions of craft. The architecture breaks down under the gentlest of interrogations. Why would elephants surmount towers? (In some Hindu temples they form the base.)

rise over a Mayan pyramid? Or where would one find a Buddhist temple hoisted above South Asian ghats, a modification of riverbanks in Hindu tradition related to taking ablutions in the Ganges? Here were architectural citations forced together with total disregard for specific cultural meaning. Behind the myriad stylistic solecisms lay equally discordant social, political, economic, and religious beliefs and practices that make a mockery of the proposal that a Pacific Architecture could grow out of shared “Pacific Culture.” In appropriating the architecture of these many places for its aesthetic and scenographic potential, all sense of place was obliterated. How can such geographical restlessness be reconciled with the committed regionalism of Bay Area architecture? Regionalism, after all, requires an abiding sense of place. The answer has to do with the paradoxical way that Californians have made regionalism overlap with imperialism. In creating a Pacific Architecture, Kelham’s commission could disregard specific cultural meaning and do whatever violence its members wished to indigenous traditions because they were creating a larger regional synthesis in the name of mutual progress and profit. The Federal Building, California Court, and the Pacific Area would test out different ways of doing the same thing.

107

4:

The Federal Building

After the formal yet fanciful buildings of the exposition proper, the Federal, California, and Pacific areas presented a more modern face. From the Temple Compound, visitors encountered three distinct, but conceptually linked areas. To the southeast, the California Building gave way to a cluster of smaller pavilions representing California’s counties. These were grouped informally around smaller courts. To the northeast, visitors encountered the national pavilions of the Asian and Latin American countries, with Pacific House at their center. And on an axis with the Tower of the Sun, Timothy Pflueger’s Federal Building dominated the massive Court of Nations, with the California Building and the California Auditorium framing the vista from the lagoon. Architectural critic Frederick Gutheim, who disdained the palaces, praised the Federal Building and California Group. He called the area a “ ‘ fair within a fair’ being in every respect lighter, more attractive, gayer, more suitable, more modern, more economical and more imaginative than the ‘official’ architecture of the Fair.”1 “Free from the ennobling influence of a dictatorial Board of Design,” these buildings “escaped the plaster restrictions” of the palaces and had “sprung up lightly built in plywood.”2 Unpretentious and as varied as the architects who designed 108

them, the buildings east of the palaces were only improvised into coherence

in the final months before the fair, but as a break from the courts and palaces they created a cohesive environment almost by default. The contrast between these two parts of the fair was more than aesthetic. The palaces and courts were geographically fanciful. In the area beyond the courts, visitors found real places represented more or less in real time. San Francisco, California, Japan, “Johore,” the Dutch East Indies, and Latin America all claimed their place around the watery basin. Here, aside from historical exhibits and a number of architectural clichés, a more contemporary microcosm of the Pacific unfolded. The Federal Building, set between the California Group and the Pacific Area, commanded the head of the lagoon [figure 63]. This symbolic position suggested a hierarchy of power, with the federal government presiding over the state’s ambitions in the Pacific. The program was complex. Pflueger had to find space for a theater, artists demonstrating their techniques, exhibits on crafts, and a range of other exhibits by federal agencies. But two major exhibits dominated the building: to one side, a massive exhibit on Native American culture; to the other, a propaganda machine for the New Deal, which resonated with the great bridges and island that were its setting. All of these were funded by federal dollars, reminding visitors of the relationship among Washington, D.C.,

109

63. Timothy Pflueger. Federal Building seen across the basin. [EDA, UCB] 64. Timothy Pflueger. Aerial perspective of the Federal Building, with Native American Colossus. [Courtesy of John Pflueger]

the development of the West, and the interest in the Pacific. The building’s highly attenuated colonnade gestured toward the pared-down classicism common to federal buildings at the time, but Pflueger modified it in fresh and unexpected ways. The project grew from a modest budget and crushing schedule. Congress appropriated 1.5 million dollars for the building, less than a fourth of what New York had received and roughly the same amount that Japan would spend on its pavilion. At first, the government thought to “go in for simple one-story redwood construction rather than marbles and bronzes, and with plenty of courts where the park and forestry services could show what they were doing.”3 With the limited funds and time, federal planners opted for “exhibits functional in character” and chose to group exhibits as a sequence of activities rather than by department so that “citizens might see the whole picture and not a part.”4 Complicating matters, Pflueger also had to contend with the shifting layout of the fair. As late as 1937, there were still plans to place Maybeck and Merchant’s Tower of Youth on the lagoon as the culmination of the east-west axis. In fact, Maybeck continued drawing what he called the Federal Court through the summer of 1937, and his oddball Tower of Youth continued to show up in publicity until the end of that year. The tower would have given the fair a second vertical accent, anchored the lagoon, and diminished the visual importance of the Federal Building by blocking it. It also would have completed the symbolism of the axis, pairing youth and the sun, two of the most persistent clichés of California. When the tower was cut from the plan—presumably sometime after Pflueger got the commission for the Federal Building—the symbolic diagram ran amok. As the termination of this axis, the Federal Building would become the counterpoint to Brown’s “ridiculous architectural proposition.”5 Pflueger thus found himself with a complicated program, meager funds, limited time, and the chance to create an architectural riposte to Brown’s tower. The result was an unusual but widely admired building, one that carried a large burden. It commanded the lagoon, framed the hills of the East Bay, and echoed the trusses of the bridges. It also acted as a stage for large ceremonies, nodded to the classical treatment expected of federal architecture, and offered usable space for government exhibits. Pflueger accomplished all of this with inexpensive, impermanent materials, and in rapid fashion. By late 1937, Pflueger had arrived at the basic solution: two U-shaped courts separated by a gigantic open-air colonnade and fronted by lower wings that spread out to embrace the public space in the

111

manner of a Greek stoa [figure 64]. The forty-eight columns of the “nave and aisles,” as Talbot Hamlin called the open-air colonnade, represented the states; its three rows represented the three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial). It rose one hundred feet to provide visitors with views of the hills across the bay. In this early rendering, Pflueger included a colossus of a Native American shooting an arrow skyward. More than a massive cigar store Indian, the figure was a dynamic vision of the Greco-Roman statues that Maybeck envisioned thrusting into the lagoon area [figure 65]. Pflueger, a close friend of Leslie Van Ness Denman, who organized the Native American exhibit and Pacific House, was deeply committed to staging a sober exposition of Native American culture in the building.6 The so-called Indian Court ended up filling much of the north wing, but only after a struggle to have it placed there. Pflueger and Denman privately worried that the Indian exhibit would be “forced away” from a prominent position “and put over somewhere on the Oakland side.” They were quite aware of the symbolism of having it in the Federal Building and insisted on staging it in a visible, central place.7 The colossus takes on even greater meaning when we realize that its pendant on the other side of the open colonnade was a “Flying Fortress,” the U.S. Army’s giant bomber [figure 66]. The building’s emphasis on the New Deal’s public works and the redemption of federal Indian policy could not hide the gloomy realities of war. Inevitably, it also served as a military recruitment center. As seen from the other direction, the Federal Building sympathetically framed Hobart’s triumphal arch and Brown’s Tower of the Sun, while it revealed how tired and old-fashioned they looked [figure 67]. The juxtaposition brought out just how unusual the building was. The critics were dazzled. Hamlin called it “so superb, so daring, so large in scale, and so well carried out in detail that it makes one forget much of the rest.”8 “Both as a monument and as an exhibition machine,” he concluded, it “is almost perfect.”9 He told the architect personally, “I’ll go so far as to say I think it’s the finest building of either fair.”10 Frederick Gutheim called it “the happiest exhibition pavilion the United States THE FEDERAL BUILDING

Government has ever built.”11

112

Gutheim’s point is well taken. The federal buildings at the world’s fairs of the 1930s were a strange and varied jumble. At the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, Edward Bennett attempted to update the staid and predictable tradition of federal architecture by sinking a dome derived from the Jefferson Memorial into the crux of three Art Deco towers that represented the branches of the government [figure 68]. Although one of the fair’s icons, it was a vigorous pastiche.

65. Bernard Maybeck. Colossus (not built) in front of the proposed Federal area. [EDA, UCB]

113

THE FEDERAL BUILDING

66. Bomber in front of Timothy Pflueger’s Federal Building. [From United States Golden Gate International Exposition Commission, Your America, 1939] 67. Timothy Pflueger. The Federal Building “nave.” [Treasure Island Museum Collection, courtesy of the Treasure Island Development Authority]

114

68. Edward Bennett. Federal Building, Century of Progress Exposition. Chicago, 1933–1934. [Courtesy of Chicago Architectural Photo] 69. Howard Lovewell Cheney. Federal Building, New York World’s Fair, 1939. [Author’s collection]

115

At the 1935–36 San Diego Exposition, the federal building went native. Architect Juan Larringa wrapped a concrete box in a trite Mesoamerican cloak that followed the general idiom of the fair’s architecture.12 Unlike most of its kind, the pavilion was a permanent building that looked like a temporary one. The federal building at the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936, also permanent, turned to stock moderne curves and Art Deco details. And at the World of Tomorrow in New York in 1939, architect Howard Lovewell Cheney dropped an essay in bold social realism into a classical setting [figure 69]. Blocky towers framed a conventional strippeddown classical colonnade. Cheney, a federal architect who knew the formulas for government architecture well, broke up these bookends by tacking heroic, overscaled sculptures onto their façades. The building culminated a monumental green that married Jefferson’s plan for the University of Virginia to St. Peter’s in Rome. Next to these examples, the San Francisco building comes off as a novel reconsideration of the building type and its aesthetic. Pflueger’s design was a tour de force both as a whole and in detail. The frank use of wood, metal, and exposed bolts testified to the architect’s ability to integrate the direct elegance of modernism with more referential modes of the day [figure 70]. The soaring colonnade created the same effects in wood that the nearby bridges created in steel. Pflueger faced the wings in slabs of redwood and supported their roofs with tripods of wiry steel more like the cables of a suspension bridge than the columns of a classical building [figure 71]. That is exactly what the front was: a new interpretation of Friedrich Schinkel’s conception of the Altes Museum in Berlin as a modern stoa ornamented with allegories to inspire visitors to higher notions of citizenship.13 Images from the fair show how these colonnades functioned socially. People met and gathered in them for lectures, concerts, and public events [figure 72]. Here the heroic figures of Social Realism, “bright with pure spectral colors in large masses,” found their rightful architectural frame and spatial context [figure 73].14 On one side spread pioneers engaged in the “Conquest of the West,” and on the other “those THE FEDERAL BUILDING

natural resources that constitute America’s heritage.”15

116

Of course, such high-minded ideals occasionally met with perplexed responses. According to local architect Fred Jones, the building “brought forth more comment, good, bad and indifferent, than any other structure on the island.” He claimed to have overheard “an aged couple from the Middle West” who were bemoaning the early closing of the fair: “ ‘Huh,’ said the old man, ‘I don’t see why they want to close the Fair ahead of time when even now all the buildings ain’t completed.’ ”16

70. Timothy Pflueger. Federal Building. Detail of construction of the “nave.” [Francis Violich; College of Environmental Design Visual Resources Center, University of California, Berkeley]

117

THE FEDERAL BUILDING

71. Timothy Pflueger. Federal Building. The piers of the front colonnade. [Francis Violich; College of Environmental Design Visual Resources Center, University of California, Berkeley] 72. Timothy Pflueger. Federal Building. [Courtesy of Helaine and Blair Prentice]

118

73. Herman Volz. Federal Building. South Range Mural. [Courtesy of Paul Totah and Peter Summerville]

119

The comment, though likely apocryphal, is understandable. The building had a raw, unfinished quality. In his notes on the project, Pflueger wrote: “Think it best that all framing be surfaced as inside of plywood.”17 Few people would have seen plywood, a relatively new building material, used as finished cladding. In fact, the architect used the stock sizes of plywood to define the dimensions, employing a module of eight feet.18 This combination of grandeur and off-the-shelf immediacy was unusual for its time. The Federal Building was—and still is—a hard building to pin down stylistically. At night, it seemed to dissolve in fog and light [figure 74]. Vertical rows of lights wedged between the thin metal supports and fluorescent tubes along the roof reduced the building to two glowing murals split by a soaring light sculpture. The effect was other-worldly [figure 75]. Relieved of their ponderousness, the clichés of federal architecture appear lithe and buoyant, an appropriate light construction for the Depression, when New Deal programs depended on improvisation and quick action to stem the period’s social and economic emergencies. The design was undoubtedly a response to the architectural confusions of the day. Neither overtly influenced by European modernism nor brandishing the imagery of Art Deco, of which Pflueger was a master, the Federal Building was its own independent creation. In spite of its colonnades, it would diminish the building’s achievement to lump it in with the spare classicism then popular. It used wood dramatically, a clear gesture to the fair’s interest in propagating something indigenous to California, but it transcended the nostalgic woodsy vernacular of the Bay Region Tradition. The building’s influence on later architecture is difficult to measure, as well. Its light, crisp touch and suggestive approach to historical style anticipated the return to classicism in the work of Edward Durell Stone and others in the late 1950s. In fact, Stone had driven crosscountry in 1939 and met his friend Gardner Dailey, who was responsible for the Brazil Building at the fair.19 He undoubtedly saw the Federal Building on this visit, and likely met Pflueger, one of the area’s progressive architects. Stone was then a celebrity among modernists for his

THE FEDERAL BUILDING

design with Philip Goodwin of the Museum of Modern Art. In fact, Stone

120

contributed to a distinctly modernist architectural exhibit that Pflueger and Ernest Born organized for the fair in 1940, and it is possible that Stone had come to see his own work [figure 76].20 Pflueger’s plan concealed a number of interventions and exhibits that were indivisible from the architecture, especially given how closely he worked with the exhibition designers [figure 77].21 The Sylvan Theater filled the north court with rustic seats of rough-hewn redwood logs and seatbacks of simple fabric stretched between metal stakes

74. Timothy Pflueger. Federal Building. [EDA, UCB] 75. Timothy Pflueger. Federal Building. [Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley]

121

122

76. (opposite above) Architecture Exhibit: all the materials needed for a building. [EDA, UCB]

[figure 78]. It paid homage to national park architecture, much of which

77. (opposite below left) Timothy Pflueger. Federal Building. Plan. [Courtesy of Hanley Wood] 78. (opposite below right) Timothy Pflueger. Federal Building. Sylvan Theater. [Treasure Island Museum Collection, Treasure Island Development Authority]

scale led to unexpected collisions of forms and styles and to the sort of

was built or improved as a result of the New Deal. Visitors to the theater encountered the Bay Area Tradition where it dovetailed with kitsch. Moving beyond mere redwood shingles, Pflueger’s unorthodox use of space and “horizontal and vertical explosions, often bewildering if not deafening,” that mark the Bay Area Tradition.22 Given that travel was one of the subthemes of the fair and that wilderness tourism was one of its biggest beneficiaries, the imagery was appropriate. To bring the point home, a massive wheel of redwood sheathed in bark peeked behind the auditorium. Little more than plywood with redwood facing, it was simultaneously signage, advertising, and exhibit: a sectional re-creation of the “General Sherman,” a sequoia thought to be the largest tree in the world and a major attraction in Sequoia National Park. Here fairgoers were transported to a secluded den where they could worship simultaneously at the altar of California’s wilderness and the New Deal, which sponsored the theater. The stage led directly to the Indian Court, thus drawing a connection between the federal government, wilderness, and the native people of the nation. This was a world away from Pflueger’s famous Paramount Theater in Oakland or even the one he proposed for the Court of Pacifica. It shows his versatility as an architect. The wpa exhibit filled the south court [figure 79]. East Coast modernists Alfred Kastner and Julian E. Berla worked on it with local landscape architect Garrett Eckbo, whose isometric drawing accentuated the dynamic tension of the willfully asymmetrical design.23 There visitors found paintings of urban slums, new model communities, and examples of bad suburban development [figure 80]. The ideological theme centered on planning: “Today’s Jerry Building, Tomorrow’s Slums,” read the mural with an image of a “drab suburban area.”24 A life-size four-story tenement built onto the southern wall of the court was “brought out from an eastern city,” alongside a sharecropper’s shack, “transported intact from a southern county.”25 Beside the shack were photographs of Rural Resettlement Administration houses intended to replace them. Gutheim, an authority on housing, called the federal displays the “most significant aspect of exhibits work in the entire history of Federal exhibits” because, he believed, it came to “grips with real issues, especially in the elusive field of social and economic affairs,” and did so by converting “abstract issues into visual presentations” with vivid, full-scale demonstrations.26 He might also have been partial to the modernist aesthetic [figure 81]. The exhibits were recognized as groundbreaking in the first major study of exhibition strategies. Dramatic viewpoints and moving parts were seen as the most effective strategies. In the Federal

123

124

THE FEDERAL BUILDING

79. (opposite) Kastner and Berla. South court, Federal Building. Axonometric drawing. [EDA, UCB] 80. Works Progress Administration, Housing Exhibit, Federal Building. [United States Golden Gate International Exposition Commission, Your America, 1939).

125

Building, a device “dropped the walls and sidewalks of a miniature slum section to reveal a beautiful rehabilitation project with grassy lawns, playgrounds and schoolhouses, W.P.A., and everything one’s heart could ask. Visitors were quite surprised in another place to see one of the imposing conservation landscapes suddenly succumb to a violent attack of earthquake and proceed to turn completely upside down.”27 Exhibits presenting the government’s role in stimulating science, the economy, conservation, and social affairs filled the interior spaces. Despite this relationship of architecture to exhibits, the building’s plan makes obvious just how separate the façade and exhibit spaces were. The colonnade was little more than a Brobdingnagian entrance, while the murals were mere screens that hid the long halls. It was, in the end, not much different from the maligned walls that concealed the exposition’s palaces. The building chastened the artifice and exuberance of the courts and palaces. One can only imagine how the entire fair would have looked had Pflueger guided the commission, which had been William Wurster’s vision from the start. As early as the summer of 1935, as Kelham and Brown first plotted their way onto the Architectural Commission, Wurster called on Charles B. Henderson of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, hoping that the federal government could trump local ambitions: “There is only one man equipped by training, strength and ability,” he wrote, “and that is Tim Pflueger. I would be saddened to see it go to lesser hands as Kelham, Day, Hobart, or Bliss and Fairweather. Arthur Brown is great but not interested in the newer aspects of things.”28 The Federal Building, as Pflueger’s only independent creation at the fair— he merely supervised the California buildings—demonstrated the split between the old guard and the younger generation of architects. It realized Ernest Weihe’s call for a California mode of design free of “any particular school of architecture,” with “great masses and broad planes” and “capable

THE FEDERAL BUILDING

of a mystical effect.”29 If Pflueger failed to map it onto the Pacific in

126

any literal fashion, he did project the idiosyncratic resolution of seemingly incompatible architectural ideas that was the point of departure for Weihe’s notion of a Pacific architecture. Here more than anywhere else the architecture tapped into the tabula rasa of Treasure Island as a metaphor akin to Lawrence’s “void Pacific.” The California Court would go one step further, submitting an architecture self-consciously Californian to forms and ideas drawn from the wider Pacific.

81. New Deal exhibit, Federal Building. [EDA, UCB]

127

128

129

5:

82. (preceding pages) The California Group as seen from the air. [from California at the Golden Gate International Exposition, 1941]

California and the Pacific

The California Group was universally seen as a counterpoint to the palaces and courts [figure 82]. Here Timothy Pflueger finally had his chance to plan on a large scale free of the more traditional ideas of the Architectural Commission. As the architect of the Federal Building and supervising architect for the California Group, he brought coherence to the motley array of buildings and the informal plan. With little-known architect Fred Chapman serving as chief designer, Pflueger and a group of architects and engineers set about site planning, designing the state buildings, and coordinating the county buildings. For lack of funding, the California Commission combined the fifty-eight individual counties into eight regional groups and San Francisco, and selected architects for these buildings.1 This turned the California Group into a random assemblage of buildings tied together with similar materials and scale, as well as sensitive site planning done by younger draftsmen working under Chapman. The earliest designs by Edward Frick’s Division of Architecture reveal a much more homogenous and formal group plan [figure 83]. Had Arthur Brown, Jr., and his commission had their way, it might have ended up

130

looking like a satellite of Stanford University’s campus, where in various

combinations Bakewell, Brown, Weihe, and Frick had been campus architects for more than two decades.2 Long arcades with red-tile roofs connected a two-story central block to its lower dependencies. A tall arch cut through the center, framing a view of the East Bay hills. The gentle Mediterranean architecture would have been an antidote to the theatrical palaces. Given California’s long engagement with Spanish Colonial and Mission architecture, the design can just as easily be understood as an attempt to create an indigenous California architecture to relieve the exotic piles of the exposition.3 Frick’s long façade confirms what the second Key Plan suggests: that the Architectural Commission conceived of the building as another palace. Once the California Commission took up the design, it changed radically. The commission jettisoned the palace idea and adopted the premise of a collection of individual buildings. One hundred thousand square feet of enclosed space was to be parceled out to groups of contiguous counties.4 The architects carefully laid out the ratio of court to each self-standing building.5 Designs as different as these intensified the need for smart site planning and a well-conceived transition from the fair buildings. The long façades shown in the drawing by the Division of

131

83. Architectural Commission. Proposed California Building. [Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley] 84. California and San Francisco Buildings. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

Architecture could still serve as a formal entrance into the California zone, a kind of urbanistic screen behind which anything could happen. In the built version, the lagoon façade remained formal, even if Pflueger refused to fall back on the clichés of Mediterranean architecture [figure 84]. His architects joined the California and San Francisco Buildings with an open colonnade (the Court of Seals) of gold columns, giving the two pavilions the stature of one monumental building. As viewed from the Temple Compound, the California Building and the California Auditorium, its pendant across the lagoon, formed a triad with the Federal Building. The colonnaded porticos and the murals that covered the façades of all three buildings presented a unified, strippeddown classicism that reinforced the formality of the axis. Beyond the Court of Seals, all hell broke loose—or so it would have seemed to anyone expecting more Beaux-Arts propriety [figure 85]. Ernest Born’s model for three of the county buildings shows how dynamic asymmetry, abstraction, paving, and the judicious use of screens, flags, trees, and street furniture harmonized the composition of three dissimilar buildings. Photographed from a position above the California Court, the model demonstrates how Born sensitively rounded the San Joaquin Valley and Alta California Buildings to play off of the circular part of the Sacramento and Lake Tahoe Building by Henry Howard. The odd site forced him to stagger their façades, but a clever use of screens and paving made assets of the remnant spaces. Born began by disciplining the buildings with an implied axis from the tail of Howard’s building that he projected in a line straight to the San Joaquin Valley Building. Howard’s pavilion clashed with the simple massing and materials of Born’s buildings, but the radiating lines of the pavement in Born’s model brought them into a tight composition. Three tall screens, each set on a different line and scaled to the side façade of the San Joaquin Valley Building, articulated the rhythms of the court from the bay and cast their overlapping shadows in an ever-changing pattern that complemented that of the paving. A second screen peeled off the side façade of the Alta California Building, again aligned on one of the radiating lines. This screen helped create an intimate space in the tight, fragmented area between buildings, while its rhythm answered the flags on the other side of the rectangular building. Born’s model was a manifesto of modernist site planning, the complete antithesis of the palaces and courts. Many of the details were elided in the buildings and paving as constructed, but their compositional power is still evident from photographs taken by Esther Born [figure 86].6 The simplicity of Born’s façades and typography and his direct use of modern materials, especially

133

85. Ernest Born. San Joaquin Valley, Alta California, and Sacramento and Lake Tahoe Buildings. Site model. [EDA, UCB] 86. Ernest Born. Alta California Building. [EDA, UCB]

in the San Joaquin Valley Building, make evident why Frederick Gutheim ranked him among “the really first class people in creative work” in the region.7 Behind the grid of glass, the structure creates an abstract pattern. The rounded wall of corrugated glass produced a “Venetian blind effect,” as if it were lightly clad in glass shingles [figure 87].8 Gutheim called them “the best buildings in the Fair,” “sure-footed and skillfully thought out,” and he lamented that Born had been left out of designing the interior exhibits.9 On the other side of the area lay the Redwood Empire Building, a kitschy exaggeration of Northern California regionalism by Bernard Maybeck and William Merchant [figure 88]. Visitors entered through the trunk of a great redwood tree and confronted “brooks, ponds, and gardens planted with wild native flowers,” and a “de luxe,” “modern” “hunting lodge with redwood planks arranged in Art Deco patterns” [figure 89].10 Inside they found the odd mix of woodsy tourism, urban amenity, and modern industry of the region. Here were the two extremes of the Bay Area: Born’s relaxed modernism and Maybeck’s woodsy vernacular made cartoonish for the fair. The other buildings fleshed out the many overlapping modes of architectural design in the period, from the studied historicism of the Mission Trails Building [figure 90] to the self-consciously modern Southern Counties Building, with its monumental wall of glass, which transformed the façade into a radiant Art Deco lantern by night. Roughly adjacent to one another, these buildings showed the stylistic diversity of approaches in the late 1930s, when the Mission Revival, Art Deco, and the Modern Movement crossed paths. The San Francisco Building, by Clarence Tantau, was alone among the county buildings in honoring the monumental, unified façades along the lagoon and the irregular, intimate spaces of the California Court [see figure 84]. The open Court of Seals allowed views of the bay and bridge. In a cramped space, the court reconciled the softly medievalized but contemporary San Francisco Building with the period Mission Trails Building [see figure 91]. Shaded arcades granted the building a smaller scale, while clusters of variegated plantings around a Spanish brick fountain lent the court the intimate feel of a cloister. Tantau helped the effect along by easing his building to the ground via an ample terrace. Tantau organized the building around an oval internal court that allowed him to adjust the axis, shifting it one way to meet the Lake of the Nations façade and the other to empty into its more private court [figure 92]. The two-story internal rotunda was a surprisingly contemporary design for an architect trained in the Beaux-Arts who

135

87. Ernest Born. San Joaquin Valley Building. [EDA, UCB] 88. Bernard Maybeck and William Merchant. Redwood Empire Building. [Courtesy of Helaine and Blair Prentice] 89. Bernard Maybeck and William Merchant. Redwood Empire Building. [Courtesy of Helaine and Blair Prentice]

90. Harold Edmonson and Robert Stanton. Mission Trails Building. [Courtesy of Helaine and Blair Prentice] 91. Courtyard between the Mission Trails and San Francisco Buildings. [Courtesy of Helaine and Blair Prentice]

137

92. Clarence Tantau. San Francisco Building. Plan. [from California at the Golden Gate International Exposition, 1941). 93. Clarence Tantau. San Francisco Building. Interior court. [Courtesy of Hanley Wood]

specialized in Spanish Colonial Revival and vernacular houses [figure 93]. Slender columns clad in stainless steel rose five stories from a black terrazzo floor through a mezzanine used for events, culminating in an oculus filled with faceted glass.11 Inside the San Francisco Building, Ernest Born’s exhibits show his awareness of modernist exhibition techniques and graphics, which he mixed freely, even idiosyncratically, with trompe l’oeil effects [figure 94]. In his exhibit for the San Francisco Airport, he used diagrams and graphs both informationally and aesthetically. He painted with light. The dropped ceiling enabled him to blend the blues into a gradient of color that resembled a dusky sky. The great curved wall, which at first seems merely whimsical, made the most of the odd-shaped space he was given. Floor, ceiling, wall, lighting—even the bench—all collude in sweeping fairgoers around the intrusive column and through the circuit. On the other side of this wall, Born used the clouds to connect the airports with his exhibit for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission [figure 95]. Here he made use of Isotypes, a modernist technique for displaying quantitative information in charts.12 Isotypes had just made their way over the Atlantic from Austria. Ernest Born was among the first designers to disengage them from charts and to use them aesthetically, combining them with images, models, and maps.13 For Born, they were very much of the moment. He also incorporated the biomorphic shapes then in vogue in painting, graphic art, and landscape architecture. Here was a graphic modernism inserted into novel display techniques and used with absolute freedom. Behind the San Francisco Building, Irving F. Morrow’s Alameda–Contra Costa County Building (acccb) was the only other county building besides Born’s singled out by Architectural Forum as worthy of mention—which meant that the magazine, one of the leading arbiters of contemporary design in the country, found it modern enough [figure 96]. Morrow, known for being the architect of the Golden Gate Bridge, pared down the program to the essential demands of exhibition and let these drive the overall form of the building and grounds [figure 97]. For the internal exhibits, he avoided decoration, murals, painting, columns, draperies, and festoons, because, as he wrote, “they distract from the main business, which is the exhibit.”14 He wisely rejected the use of dioramas: “Every other County exhibit is going to be so full of almost nothing else that the jaded visitor will not have the slightest idea whether he has just seen Mount Shasta or San Diego Bay. The one sure way to be remembered is to avoid dioramas.”15 Without the sort of complicated installations common in exhibition design in the period, the

139

94. Ernest Born. San Francisco Airport exhibit. [EDA, UCB]

140

95. Ernest Born. San Francisco Public Utilities Commission exhibit. [EDA, UCB]

141 141

96. Irving Morrow. Alameda–Contra Costa County Building. Court. [EDA, UCB] 97. Irving Morrow. Alameda–Contra Costa County Building. Plan. [EDA, UCB]

142

98. Irving Morrow. Alameda–Contra Costa County Building. Court as theater. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library] 99. H. W. Shepherd. Alameda–Contra Costa County Building. Landscape plan. [EDA, UCB]

143

space remained unencumbered. “Since there are no exhibits depending on trick lighting, etc.,” he explained, “it is unnecessary to plan the building like a basement. You do not need to grope about in a cocktail-bar obscurity.”16 Court and building became one. The building took the shape of a “quarter cut of pie” whose straight sides sheltered deep, open loggias that met the curved exhibition building at its two side entrances.17 A simple corridor with a wall entirely of glass faced the court, while a solid wall for exhibits on its far end allowed even northern light to illuminate the interior. Although the basic shape may recall the colonnade of Maybeck’s much grander Palace of Fine Arts at the ppie, light, site, and exhibition strategy drove Morrow’s solution. With its open center, it was in line with Bay Area traditions, as well as modern planning. “Through the glass wall of the exhibit building, interior and exterior become one unified exhibit,” Morrow wrote.18 He left the court open to the inside as a “seasonally changing exhibit of horticulture, always visible from the inside.”19 A simple open-air stage filled the corner where the loggias met, allowing the court to function as a theater for special events [figure 98]. Unlike most of the fair buildings, which tended to use art and sculpture as appliqué, the landscaping, sculpture, and murals at Morrow’s building were integrated into the design [figure 99]. The landscape architect Harry W. Shepherd aligned large olive trees, smaller evergreen hedges, boxwoods, and beds of flowers in syncopation with the fenestration and loggias. Sargent Johnson’s oddly diminutive sculptures echoed these rhythms. The artist Marian Simpson designed her murals that lined the walls of the loggias “to complete the architectural plan, not merely to embellish it.”20 Morrow’s building created an enclosed court, but much of the informal appeal of the California Group came from the way the irregular courts were stitched together with simple but arresting gateways [figure 100]. From the court of the San Francisco Building, visitors peering through the yawning circle of the fourteen-foot “Moon Door” encountered the rear façade of the California Building, whose colonnade CALIFORNIA AND THE PACIFIC

echoed in flattened form the rear façade of the San Francisco Building.

144

The inside of the opening and surrounds were painted in Chinese red, creating an astonishing contrast to the Spanish Mission Revival court. The surprising opening framed the square entrance, putting the continuity of the two buildings into tension. The trick for the California Commission architects who designed these walls and gateways was to divine ways of connecting dissimilar pavilions in irregular spaces with an economy of means. Clifford E. Wolfe, the commission’s architect who designed the Moon Gate and

100. California Group. Moon Gate. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

145 145

other gateways, wrote of these as “forward looking” designs that combined modern materials and techniques with “bits of design borrowed from” Pacific cultures.21 Radical it was not, but it did offer a simple, contemporary alternative to the histrionics of the palace buildings. The California county buildings displayed the raw materials and products of their respective regions, often reducing them to clichés and stereotypes. These were seamlessly mixed with dioramas and murals about modern life. The old Gold Rush areas, represented by the Sacramento Valley and Tahoe Region Building, exhibited over “$100,000 in nuggets, gold dust, wire gold, rich quartz and other specimens,” alongside dioramas of highways, industrial plants, beet farms, and vast scenes of recreation.22 The San Joaquin Valley Building exhibited redwoods, the Central Valley Water Project, and “the agricultural riches of that region,” including samples for visitors.23 History was ubiquitously exhibited as a tourist commodity. The Mission Trails Building, described as “an old friend surrounded by strange modern companions,” is the best example. Visitors walked into a simulated Spanish courtyard replete with “two-story stucco building fronts,” grilled windows, and a fountain. An “azure-colored arched ceiling” created the illusion of permanent twilight—as if the sun would never fully set on old California.24 As a group these buildings formed a composite picture that suited the vision of the California Commission and the expectations of visitors of the state as a wonderland of commerce and agriculture, adventure and recreation, travel and California living. The flamboyant exhibit of the Southern Counties Building, the largest of the group, brings home the collision of culture and commerce as California attempted to represent itself to the nation and world [figure 101]. In a Barnumesque big tent of an interior worthy of Hollywood, visitors to the Los Angeles County exhibit first encountered a vaguely Islamic tower of oranges and Asian textiles with water cascading down to a mosslined fountain. Palms festooned the airy space. This was California as human-made paradise. The exotic mixed with the theme of Southern California as cornucopia. Artist Millard Sheets designed a “ceiling mural”

CALIFORNIA AND THE PACIFIC

called Horn of Plenty and 128 varieties of fruits, vegetables, and flowers

146

were constantly refreshed. Dioramas detailed the produce, commerce, industry, and history of the counties, including a mural with Native Americans on one side and dinosaurs and mammoths on the other.25 Murals could massage such anachronisms into aesthetic coherence, but they could barely conceal the conflict between California as paradise and California as commodity.26 The world’s fair embodied this conflict most fully in the county buildings. The buildings themselves told a slightly different story. Their informal, restful courts were set against the ponderous gigantism

of the palace courts. At the same time, they also would have taken on added meaning as the war began in Europe. Even more than the forced eclecticism and imperial scale of the palaces, the more easygoing amalgam of Asian, Latin, California, and modern images provided an alternative to the Atlantic world that seemed on the verge of self-annihilation. The buildings of the Pacific Area would take up this theme even more vigorously.

101. Harold C. Chambers. Southern Counties Building. Interior. [Treasure Island Museum Collection, Treasure Island Development Authority]

147 147

6:

The Pacific Area

From almost any perspective, the Pacific Area appeared to be the typical “museum” of foreign pavilions that had been a standard format at world’s fairs since the Paris Exposition of 1867.1 Beginning with this early fair, exposition architects created “a realm of foreignness,” a discrete space for those nations that were far away and whose people lived in premodern societies.2 Expositions designed the buildings and often stocked and arranged the contents, giving organizers vast control over how they represented the non-European other and themselves in the world order. The results were predictable. Imperial nations took pride of place and expressed their preferred racial and cultural hierarchies architecturally, spatially, and through material culture. Modernity triumphed over traditional culture, even if Europeans looked upon the latter with nostalgic pangs of imminent loss. The world was thus divided geographically and temporally. Western Europe, the champion of progress, juxtaposed itself to Africa and Asia—as well as less industrialized parts of Europe—those areas it considered backward. Architecture became a measure of civilization. This convention peaked with the European colonial fairs 148

of the 1920s and early 1930s. At the Exposition colonial internationale

de Paris of 1931, one of the most elaborate of its kind, the architecture represented Europe’s “mission civilisatrice,” or “the responsibility of the civilized white race to bring enlightenment and progress to the benighted savages of the world in the form of colonization.”3 Following “scientific” principles of the time, “the pavilions incarnated the precise standing of each colony” within France’s colonial order.4 Architecture was used as a racial index rather than merely as an innocent demonstration of culture. At the same time, the French architects endeavored to elide discontinuities in order to make the empire appear seamless and untroubled, part of a natural and inevitable order.5 The ggie has been understood as the inheritor of this tradition. It has been called “America’s version of the colonial expositions that swept Great Britain and Europe between the world wars.”6 At first blush, the claim rings true. San Francisco’s business community had economic ambitions in Asia. The fair was a forthright attempt to secure the city’s place in Pacific trade at a moment when the airplane promised to shrink the great ocean. But visions and realities seldom converge. In truth, the fair was more complicated, its reach more local. Imperial intentions were intermixed with and sometimes trumped by cultural concerns. Economic

149

interests were tempered by sincere attempts to conceive of the Pacific as a harmonious area free of the “greed and fury of the White Colonials” and the cataclysms of the Atlantic world.7 Exposition planners turned to the Pacific as the antidote. This geopolitical drama played out most vividly in the Pacific Area. There, as in the colonial fairs, the foreign pavilions were collected into a menagerie of exotics around the lagoon, but they were adapted to a different cultural vision. Surrounding this symbolic Pacific, the array of nations and colonial possessions formed an ideal if haphazard vision of Pacific community held together by Pacific House, the fair’s theme building. While parts of it still resonated with the colonial project, the Pacific Area gestured to unity rather than hierarchy, cultural cooperation rather than the civilizing mission, and the flowering of a new peaceful geopolitical order rather than the catastrophe unfolding in Europe. The reasons for the emergence of a more sympathetic foreign area at the ggie are both obvious and subtle. The Architectural Commission had little control over the buildings. Foreign architects designed many of them and foreign commissions determined their contents. Claude Albun Stiehl, an architect from Honolulu, and Filipino architect Gregorio P. Gutierrez designed the understated pavilions for Hawaii and the Philippines, the major U.S. possessions represented at the fair. The pavilions most colonialist in their bearing were not American at all, but rather those of the Netherlands East Indies and French Indo-China. With Japan’s war in China and the German bombing of Guernica taking place as the fair was being planned, most overt expressions of imperialism and war were suppressed. This did not prevent the architects from indulging in exposition clichés. The pavilions varied from kitschy replicas of traditional architecture to modern adaptations, but they remained mostly free of imagery imposed by the colonial powers of the day. This differed from New York’s fair of the same year, where “no imitations either of historic architecture or of permanent materials were permitted.”8 The site plan was, moreover, more aesthetic than ideological. Nations and colonies mixed in an area that lacked an overarching plan to express national hierarchies spatially. Scale, opulence, style, and placement thus carried little com-

THE PACIFIC AREA

parative or explanatory power. All of this greatly diminished the possibility

150

of using architecture as an index of race or degree of civilization. It was impossible at the ggie to discern a clear geographical journey from civilized to barbaric, or a temporal one from contemporary to past civilizations, as architects had scripted into the colonial expositions.9 Instead, the entire fair was framed by a contemporary geographical conceit that propagandized unity in the present. Asian and Latin American nations

and colonies were rendered neither geographically distant—this would have undermined the fair as a cultural fantasy and a business proposition —nor represented as temporally remote. A temporal divide would have undermined the urgency of conceiving of the Pacific as a coherent alternative as the Atlantic world heaved toward self-destruction. The Pacific Area stands apart from the colonial fairs in still another way. It was not a national exposition staged from the “metropole,” or colonial capital. While Paris could stand in for France and London for the United Kingdom, San Francisco put on a more regional affair. The architecture reflects this. In the Pacific Area, pavilions dedicated to a number of Asian and Latin American countries surrounded William Merchant’s Pacific House. Colonies were represented amid a mish-mash of sovereign states. The area abounded in odd juxtapositions. The profiles of the pavilions of Japan, the Netherlands East Indies, the Javanese Restaurant, and Johore (now Johor, part of Malaysia) created a bumpy skyline along the lagoon’s edge. Behind them the Latin American group occupied its own discrete area. The Latin American nations would each receive standalone buildings, but their compound remained self-contained in the northwest corner of the Pacific Area. On the other side of the water, Alaska, the Philippines, French Indo-China, New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaii completed the Pacific Area. From almost any angle, strange juxtapositions belied geographical and cultural realities. Only at a world’s fair could one find the steep peaks of a Malaysian house flanked by a Japanese castle tower and a Balinese water temple. This arbitrary order had important consequences. Expositions had historically laminated race and geography onto ideals of progress and civilization. The Pacific Area tried to encompass the Pacific in all of its racial, cultural, and economic vitality, instead of homogenizing caricatures or orientalizing stereotypes of Asia. The message was both explicit and implied. As a pamphlet for Pacific House presciently claimed, the “old concept of mankind as divided by color lines into four great races—Black, White, Yellow and Red—is obsolete today among anthropologists. Still, classifying peoples into races remains an elusive and unsettled problem.”10 The architecture did not attempt to solve it. Each pavilion was its own affair, quite out of the reach of exposition planners. Unlike the colonial expositions, which were nationally funded events, American expositions were promotions put on by individual cities with ambitions scaled to match. At the ggie, the foreign nations bought space from the exposition corporation. In other words, economics determined much about the layout and form of the Pacific Area. This is why Japan, then a belligerent imperial power whose presence threatened to undermine the peaceable vision of the fair,

151

built by far the largest foreign pavilion at some 50,000 square feet [figures 102, 103]. Following Japanese pavilions at earlier fairs, the building was a pastiche of various periods and building types in Japanese architecture, set in a traditional garden. A Japanese pamphlet described it as a “Feudal Castle” combined with a “Samurai House,” both premodern buildings in a rapidly modernizing nation.11 Along with the “kaiyu style” gardens designed by Nagao Sakurai, landscape architect to the emperor, it spoke to the loving cultivation of continuous craft traditions [figure 104].12 As had been the habit since the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, native craftsmen designed the building in Japan and reassembled it on site. It was intended to be more than a mere representation of Japanese architecture: it was the very thing itself.13 The size and ambition of the pavilion is telling. Japan had been a major exhibitor at American fairs, and Americans flocked to Japanese exhibits. As historian Neil Harris explains: “Americans delighted in the juxtaposition of European and Japanese culture because it allowed them to see Europe’s antiquity as less impressive. Americans, having used Europe as the measuring stick of their own cultural achievement, used Japan as a way of easing their sense of cultural inferiority. . . . The theme of orientals beating Europeans at their own game appealed to Americans.”14 This American attraction to Japan would have been especially the case in California, which so often turns away from the Atlantic World, and even more so given the theme of the fair and the state of Europe in 1939. The Japanese pavilion might also have struck a chord with American ambivalence about modernity itself. Japan intrigued Americans in part because it simultaneously seemed to court modernity while retaining much of its traditional culture.15 The exhibit’s own guide proudly stated: “Built with all the care and detail of the Japanese artisans, the structure could stand for ‘centuries’ ”—a permanent building for a temporary event.16 The wooden building, handmade by Japanese craftsmen, embodied indigenous culture and restored faith in the possibility of its survival. The description of the building in the official history of the fair reads like a nostalgic paean to premodern life: “In flexible soled sandals, known as zoris, and blue and white kimonos, Japanese workmen climbed nimbly about on a scaffolding held together by rope lashings THE PACIFIC AREA

instead of nails. Their manner of handling and using tools kept a group

152

of curious onlookers agog.”17 Inside, visitors found native craftsmen and exhibits on silk, pottery, screens, fans, flower arranging, and other objects that “brought the essence of the people’s artistry into the rooms.”18 They also found exhibits that celebrated the modern family and the extensive railroad and communications systems. Tradition and modernity were represented as perfectly reconciled.

102. The motley array of pavilions in the Pacific Area. [Treasure Island Museum Collection, Treasure Island Development Authority] 103. T. Toki and Nagao Sakurai. Japan Pavilion. Court. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library] 104. Nagao Sakurai. Garden of the Japan Pavilion. [College of Environmental Design Visual Resources Center, University of California, Berkeley]

153 153

Next to Japan, across the neither ironically nor triumphantly named Western Way—it faced west and led to the Hall of Western States —stood the Netherlands East Indies Building. With fears of Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia, the Dutch used their presence at the fair to remind visitors of their long presence in the Dutch East Indies.19 Robert Deppe, a Dutch-born and -trained architect who lived in Jakarta, modeled it loosely on the Hindu Penataran Temple near Blitar in East Java [figure 105]. The relatively obscure choice allowed an iconic tower to rise over a compact building. The building could thus make a powerful impression on a modest footprint. Both inside and out, the imagery was hackneyed. The Dutch put natives on display making Batik and carving wood, while dioramas pictured traditional Javanese village life, with volcanoes erupting and water buffalo drawing carts.20 Next to the pavilion stood the Javanese Restaurant, also by Deppe, repeating an enduring theme in the representation of colonies at world’s fairs. Since the 1867 exposition, national restaurants and bars had been erected next to national pavilions, putting literal consumption side by side with cultural consumption.21 Most American fairs attempted to restrict concessions to the amusement zones, removing the stain of commerce from the exhibition proper. Food, however, was an easy exception, as fatigued visitors required breaks and refreshment. But the presence of a restaurant among the national pavilions was unusual, if not jarring. It mixed high and low culture, people and products, in ways that the rest of the fair resisted, thus breaking down the strict zoning that upheld the separation of these increasingly overlapping realms in the world beyond the fair. Nearby stood the Johore Pavilion, described as a replica of the sultan of Johore’s council house and built at the sultan’s whim [figure 106].22 In fact, with its hipped roof and dormers drawn from Minangkabau architecture, it nods to the Ceremonial Hall at Bandung Institute of Technology, a building by Henri Maclaine Pont.23 Pont, who was born in Jakarta and trained in Delft, designed the Ceremonial Hall in 1920 as a self-conscious hybrid of indigenous and European architecture. The reference must have been intentional. The Sultan Ibrahim, then known as one of the wealthiest men in the world, personally financed the

THE PACIFIC AREA

building and filled it with his collection of jewels. In looking to this model,

154

he presented himself as a modern ruler finding a compromise between native tradition and the West. As an independent kingdom in the Unfederated Malay States with close ties to the United Kingdom, Johore itself had much at stake at the exposition. Here Ibrahim attempted to boost his prestige in a moment when his own kingdom was increasingly under pressure from

within as Malay nationalism threatened to absorb his state into Greater Indonesia. At the same time, imperialism in Asia threatened, as well. The act of presenting the building as the council house, his personal seat of power, placed his own rule on a par with that of other nations and colonies. The exhibit within of Johore’s modern rubber industry brought home the same point through other means, especially once the war made rubber an essential commodity. The closest the fair came to a classic example of a colonial pavilion was French Indo-China, designed by Georges Besse and Claude Meyer-Levy and supervised by local architect Eldridge T. Spencer [figure 107].24 The brochure for the pavilion boasted of how the French had modernized the vast colony (now Vietnam and parts of Cambodia and Laos) by building thousands of miles of highways, railroad and telephone lines, airports, and hospitals.25 Here was the civilizing mission reduced to sound bites and housed in a building its organizers called “true Annamese style.”26 An image of an Annamese temple within the brochure, replete with multiple layers of red-tiled roofs and overhangs, richly carved and painted surfaces, and complex bracketing, gave the lie to the claim. By contrast, the white cruciform pavilion with an open-air court looked more like the headquarters of a minor colonial office. It was a Western building with enough indigenous ornament to make it pass at the fair. The interior was more authentic to vernacular traditions in Vietnam. Heavily lacquered ancient wooden columns and panels had been hand carved by native craftsmen and shipped to San Francisco. Some of the exhibits, including pieces of the building, were for sale, again blurring the lines between culture and commerce. The Latin American Court took up the entire northwest quarter of the Pacific Area. The pavilions ranged from picturesque stereotypes to outright caricatures of traditional architecture from Mexico, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Panama, El Salvador, and Costa Rica [figures 108, 109]. All but Colombia’s were designed by the Division of Architecture under the supervision of Edward Frick. This is not surprising given how cartoonish some of the designs were. In fact, Colombia tore down Frick’s building and built “a more imposing one.”27 The entire court has been understood as evidence of the colonial message of the fair: “By organizing Latin American pavilions, with their exhibits of natural resources and aboriginal artifacts, into a Latin American Court across from the Pacific Basin, exposition builders cemented American images of Latin American nations as culturally backward and economically valuable producers of raw materials and

155

105. Robert Deppe. Netherlands East Indies Building. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library] 106. Architect unknown. Johore Pavilion. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

156

107. (above) Georges Besse and Claude Meyer-Levy. French Indo-China Building. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library] 108. (above right) Pablo de la Cruz and Rafael Ruiz. Colombia Building. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library] 109. (right) Architectural Commission. Ecuador Building. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

157 157

potential consumers of industrial surplus.”28 This is an accurate but selective reading. The California county exhibits were also filled with the agricultural products and the raw resources of their regions. And like the California pavilions, the Latin American nations sent their own exhibits. Frick’s buildings offered up clichés, but the foreign nations represented themselves within. The arrangement had as much to do with funding as ideology. The Latin American Court differed from the Asian pavilions largely because the Latin American nations could not afford to erect their own buildings. It fell to the exposition to house their exhibits. Since Frick’s Division of Architecture took on the design of the buildings midway through the planning, a quick and dirty solution had to be found. Neither studied nor calculated, the Latin American Court comes off more as naïve and hastily improvised than deeply symbolic or subconsciously oppressive. What brings this point home is that Frick also designed the New Zealand pavilion in the overworked form of a Maori meetinghouse. In mere months, he had to design and oversee the building of all of these pavilions, as well as the Australian pavilion, the Hall of Western States, the façades of the Fine Arts and Aviation Buildings, and the bridges, kiosks, and other embellishments throughout the fairgrounds. His division also produced the finished drawings for the palaces and courts. He was too busy to plot out colonial schemes.

PACIFIC HOUSE The motley array of buildings also helps explain Pacific House, a building that stood in sharp contrast to the more animated façades of the national pavilions that surrounded it [figure 110]. As the fair’s theme building, Pacific House had a complex mission. It was to articulate the promotional message of the Pageant of the Pacific, provide an anchor for the eclectic buildings of the Lagoon of Nations, and fulfill the propagandistic program of the Institute of Pacific Relations, which ran the exhibits within. William Merchant’s design, in contrast to his exuberant Temple Compound, was a simple cross-plan with stripped-down, white façades broken by vast banks of glass. It was nearly a neutral vessel, a blank THE PACIFIC AREA

building that allowed full expression to the many architectural languages of its neighbors without having to assert itself. Looking out from within,

158

ringing the lagoon.

the great windows afforded picturesque views of the lagoon and the national pavilions. Visitors could study the topographical map of Asia in the lobby, take in Covarrubias’s celebrated murals of Pacific cultures, and then look out at the architectural equivalent of these representations

110. William Merchant. Pacific House. [EDA, UCB] 111. Bernard Maybeck and William Merchant. Tower of Youth. [EDA, UCB]

159

Merchant’s solution was hardly his first instinct. He arrived at the idea of a greatly simplified building at the eleventh hour and only after many months of collaboration with Bernard Maybeck on much more complicated designs [figure 111]. The two had worked for years on a building variously called the Temple of Youth and the Temple of Music, which was never built. Originally intended to sit on the main lagoon as a pendant to the Tower of the Sun, the design, Maybeck and Merchant thought, could be salvaged as the theme building for the Pacific Area. Had this idea won out, the assertive tower would have competed with the national pavilions. Its strange stylistic mash would have made a greater cacophony of the area and offered little by way of exhibition space for the fair’s ideological mission. While the Temple of Youth would have made a great icon and supplied a perfect image for postcards and publicity, it would not have served the mission of the Pacific Area. After the Architectural Commission abandoned the Temple of Youth, Pacific House was a delicate assignment for Merchant. As the theme building, it carried the burden of the exposition’s ideological message. On the surface, “Pageant of the Pacific” was pure promotion, a phrase offered by the Publicity Department to drum up business. But underneath the publicity lay something more substantial. The Pacific theme was partly the product of the Institute of Pacific Relations (ipr), the first serious attempt to study issues endemic to Pacific cultures, especially as they related to one another. The ipr filled a gap in U.S. knowledge of Pacific politics, as well as history, culture, and business and economics.29 In a world with little understanding of Asia, the ipr offered in-depth studies of the economic, social, and physical realities of the Pacific Rim.30 From its initial conception in the 1920s, the institute was much more than a scholarly organization.31 It promoted the region’s interests and cultures, attracting philanthropists, business leaders, and activists from around the world who thought that the organization should play a larger role as an aggressive lobbyist for Pacific concerns.32 San Francisco’s business elite knew it well. In fact, many of the city’s leading names could be found among its membership.33 By the mid-to-late 1930s, given the state of affairs in Europe, the ipr began to conceive of a “new THE PACIFIC AREA

Pacific order” set explicitly against the Atlantic world.34

160

By the time planning for the ggie gained momentum, the ipr had matured as an organization. With Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, the institute’s work took on new meaning. The coming fair in San Francisco became an obvious means to propagandize its efforts.35 The idea of Pacific Civilization superseding an exhausted Atlantic world inspired the fair’s Pacific theme. Stanford University president and ipr

member Ray Lyman Wilbur wrote: “The possibility of the stark tragedy that is now overwhelming the world was sensed in the early days of the Fair, when the thought of making the theme of the 1939 Exposition, A Pageant of the Pacific, a living reality first took place.”36 He urged greater knowledge of the peoples of the Pacific “since the Old World has embarked into savage, suicidal wars that will leave it maimed, if not destroyed, to convalesce for many years to come.”37 Behind the scenes, ipr members agitated for a serious presentation of their ideas at the fair. “The peoples of the Pacific area are . . . not a static thing,” wrote ipr member John Oakie to the Women’s General Committee, which was instrumental in developing the fair’s theme. He called for the exhibits in Pacific House to “sound this keynote.” All portrayals of the Pacific, he urged, must be of “complex and interlocking cultures . . . , vital and active.” Wary of essentializing the cultures of the Pacific, he offered one example about how to proceed: “The director would bend every effort toward securing from New Zealand a comprehensive exhibit showing the Maori culture in its original form and as it has been affected by the impingement of other forces. This, complemented by displays of New Zealand’s contributions to the westernized Pacific of today would round out that contribution.”38 The Women’s General Committee of the ipr pressed for “a scholarly, artistic, and distinguished presentation of the Pacific Area.” “So far,” the committee chided, “this has never been adequately done, and it may be the last opportunity for historical and romantic pageantry before the scientific changes of the near future blur the outline of differences.”39 Through the nostalgia glimmers a genuine fear of the changes wrought by modernity, and a serious attempt to study traditional cultures before they were changed by industrialization. The colonialist project of civilizing the world had become a conservationist project of saving cultures from modernity, or at least a museological project of exhibiting the Other for high-minded purposes such as mutual understanding and peace in the region. From the outset, the ipr hoped that the Pacific Area would be “considered as a unit, apart from other foreign countries,” and hoped for exhibits of “permanent value.”40 Its ideas would have a profound effect on Pacific House, if not the entire Pacific Area. The ipr used Pacific House to advance its mission.41 Wilbur considered the exhibits there “a forecast of a new era in which common human needs will tend to be met more and more by operations that transcend national and racial boundaries, while a diversity of cultures, conditioned by environmental and historical factors, will survive under the protection of increased mutual tolerance and appreciation.”42 He thus neatly summed up the ipr’s mission and mapped it onto Pacific House.43

161

A BUILDING FOR THE PACIFIC With this program in mind and little time for design, Merchant offered his simple cruciform building, whose four truncated arms ended in immense curved walls of windows [figure 112]. The four sides superficially represented the four continents abutting the Pacific.44 Merchant arrayed vertical fins along these curves. In plan, each traced an imaginary line that met at the center of the building [figure 113]. The fins revealed the elemental geometry of the building: a mandala inserted into a circle, the partial circle traced by the windows. The gentle, curved steps down to the lagoon reinforced the sense of the building sitting on a circular base. The eastern cosmological symbol thus meshed exactly with the rational Western globe. The spiritual and mathematical worlds were meant to intersect with complete harmony. Even though buildings are not experienced in plan, Pacific House’s cross shape seemed to require explanation. An official press release from the exposition company claimed that it was “designed in the form of a Maltese cross,” an absurd explanation for a building with a Pacific theme.45 What a contrast to the Trylon and Perisphere, the theme buildings in New York and the counterparts to Pacific House! Deeply experiential, full of theatrical devices and moving parts, the Perisphere was part of a new breed of exhibits.46 A monumental, blank globe, it was a cosmological abstraction that contained within it an abstraction of the ideal city called Democracity. Visitors glided up the longest escalator in the world, a helix that afforded them changing views of the fair from above before depositing them inside. Perched above Democracity—a model of the decentralized city of the future—visitors listened to a disembodied voice narrate the world of tomorrow as dramatic lighting directed their attention to various parts of the city. The show culminated with workers projected by film on the walls marching toward the audience. It was a theatrical microcosm: a workers’ utopia given urban form through the heavy-handed spectacle of Social Realism. Highly orchestrated, it ushered visitors through with near-total control. By contrast, Pacific House, if also propagandistic, was direct, earnest, and naïve. It too was blank, even a bit bare, rather like THE PACIFIC AREA

a lobby grown into a building. Unlike the Perisphere, whose blankness suggested a celestial orb, Pacific House evoked the simple, uncluttered

162

word can describe ensembles of buildings at fairs, it had to function very

spaces sometimes associated with East Asian architecture. In form and purpose, it was little more than a container or gallery for the maps and murals commissioned for the space—a transparent clearinghouse for “information” about the cultures of the Pacific. Urbanistically, if such a

112. William Merchant. Pacific House. [EDA, UCB] 113. William Merchant. Pacific House. Plan. [Courtesy of Hanley Wood]

163

114. William Merchant. Pacific House at night. [Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley] 115. William Merchant, Pacific House. [Perry Stewart; College of Environmental Design Visual Resources Center, University of California, Berkeley]

164

116. William Merchant. Pacific House. Interior with pool. [EDA, UCB]

165

differently from the Trylon and Perisphere. Instead of posing as a great and eternal monument, it had to herd the jumble of national and colonial pavilions into coherence. To this end, Merchant designed a neutral building. Neither historicist nor modernist, nor even obviously referential, the building could take on radically different aspects. By night the walls dissolved and the windows became great lanterns [figure 114]. From either side of the glass membrane, visitors were engaged with exhibits. Full-sized trees growing within the hall accentuated the flow from outside to inside and back. In 1940 Jesse Stanton, the fair’s color expert, changed the neutral color scheme—and greatly altered the building’s resonance—by painting the walls “Imperial Dragon Red” and the fins “Ming Jade Green.” Pacific House became resolutely “Asian” [figure 115]. Even then, the broad walls, flat roofline, and unobtrusive massing honored the picturesque buildings and landscape around it. The loungelike interior encouraged informal encounters rather than the scripted spectacle of Democracity [figure 116]. To one side Merchant fit a flexible hall with a large library for ten thousand volumes; to the other lay an ample lobby with comfortable chairs. The great hall was large enough to host events for hundreds of visitors and to accommodate a range of exhibits, from cabinets with fossils, plants, and archaeological finds to specimens of flora native to the Pacific.47 In the center a colorful ceramic relief map of the Pacific by Antonio Sotomayor lay submerged in a fountain. On the balcony a “group of young hostesses” served tea each afternoon. The Department of the Pacific Area used the area for lectures and to bring “strangers from the Pacific countries together with the people in the Bay Area.”48 The building also displayed an array of didactic exhibits and maps on Pacific culture, commerce, religion, politics, recreation, and history. Artists were commissioned to create original maps and dioramas of the nations, peoples, exploration, and unification of the Pacific area, including the first projection of the world centered on the Pacific.49 This map presented the ideological message of the fair with Cartesian rationality. Miguel Covarrubias’s famed murals concentrated this

THE PACIFIC AREA

message, proclaiming both the diversity and collective unity of the vast

166

region [figure 117]. The images themselves were intentionally cartoonish —note the self-satisfied “easterner,” whose cigar smoke becomes the St. Lawrence River, and the bikini-clad Californian [figure 118]. The map was part of a colonialist tradition of representing and classifying races pictorially.50 Nonetheless, the murals amplified the theme of the fair by putting all the peoples of the Pacific on the same level. Each nation was

represented by its bounty of flora and fauna, art forms (only indigenous; modernism was omitted), and native transportation. The artist’s Economy

of the Pacific managed to avoid hierarchies or a value system by representing the products essential to different regions of the Pacific: Covarrubias gave a water buffalo and an ocean liner equal value.51 By avoiding contemporary products, arts, and economies, he avoided the inevitable hierarchies common to comparative exhibition. No longer aimed at reinforcing control in the colonies, the artist’s maps of products, people, and art turned away from Europe and, by association, from the European system of colonization that was implicated in the world war. Exhibitors still larded the fair with colonialist themes and the imperial aspirations of San Francisco, but a new attitude was discernible. The choice of Covarrubias spoke to this new attitude. Covarrubias’s authority to depict the peoples of the Pacific with purportedly objective, scientific distance rested on his standing as an amateur anthropologist in Bali, his interest in Native American art, and his own Mexican background.52 He was of the Pacific and steeped in the Pacific, and thus seemingly free of colonial biases. Wilbur called him an “ethnologist and anthropologist, subtle and sensitive to the unrecorded past of unknown peoples, with a humorous, penetrating perspicacity of contemporaneous life, and a wide knowledge of the governmental forms and trade relations, of the moving forces, that bind peoples together or sever their relations.”53 By co-opting him for the fair, the organizers armored themselves against the most obvious prejudices of the colonial project. The landscape conspired with the building and maps. In an opportunistic use of the cross-plan, landscape architect Geraldine Knight installed plantings from all four continents of the Pacific.54 In essence, she created an encyclopedia of Pacific flora, as much an exhibit as anything else in the building. How better to reinforce the fantasy of a single Pacific culture than to transplant and synthesize it in one setting? Fair officials repeatedly spoke about the plantings as if they represented the melding of Pacific cultures.

BEYOND THE PACIFIC Adjacent to the Pacific Area, the rest of the foreign pavilions took their place in an equally random order. Argentina, Brazil, Italy, France, and Norway—the only other foreign nations to erect buildings at the fair—shared ground with a French café, the Christian Science Building, and the National Cash Register exhibit [figure 119]. The Dairy Products and Press Buildings were clustered nearby. The area feels like an afterthought. Blocked by the palaces, closed to the major axes, and

167

168

117. Miguel Covarrubias. Peoples of the Pacific. [EDA, UCB] 118. (opposite) Miguel Covarrubias. Peoples of the Pacific. Detail. [EDA, UCB]

119. Hodge-podge of buildings in and near the Pacific Area. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

excluded from the Pacific Area, which played such an important role in the fair, the meager non-Pacific foreign area of the ggie tells us much about the meaning of the fair. Europe barely showed up in San Francisco.55 By contrast, in New York all of the great powers erected pavilions. European nations, knowing that they needed the United States as a future ally, courted American public opinion through elaborate exhibits.56 And the fair assembled them in a prominent Court of Nations, on an axis with and presided over by the Federal Building. If anything, the exhibits in New York were more overtly imperialist than anything at the ggie. Giant maps showed off colonial possessions. Holland “built a sixty foot long scale model of the Indonesian countryside, showing representative coffee and tea plantations, as well as rice and tapioca farms.”57 These nations’ colonial presence became more important after Germany annexed the Netherlands in May 1940, when the Dutch looked to Batavia (now Jakarta) as their potential capital.58 France erected a separate building called “France Overseas,” where a massive globe of glass made French possessions around the world transparent from all sides.59 “Indeed, failure to participate in the potlatch of the world’s fair,” David Nye has written, was “virtually tantamount to a direct admission of enmity, as can be seen in the refusal of both Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany to send exhibits to New York.”60 In other words, while New York threw a potlatch for Europe, San Francisco threw one for the Pacific. This made for the fair’s strange asymmetries. The plan was a muddle. The Brazil Building, modern and monumental, shared a block with Italy and Norway, while Argentina, equally contemporary in design, sat next to France. The layout was far too fragmented to create a coherent vision. The Brazil, Argentina, and Italian Pavilions, though thrown together haphazardly, were individually among the most arresting designs of the fair. While the palaces and courts turned to Beaux-Arts confection, the California Court to a mythical California-Pacific synthesis, the Federal Building to idiosyncrasy and improvisation, and the Pacific Area to a carnival of native traditions, these three buildings explored different veins of modernism free of the shackles of any thematic context save the fair itself.

THE PACIFIC AREA

Argentina’s pavilion spoke to the modernity of this

170

still-young nation [figure 120]. If architectural modernism can be understood as an index of progress, as it so often is, then the fair presented a dilemma: Argentina came off as the most advanced of the national pavilions. Architect Armando d’Ans employed modern materials, an open plan, and contemporary exhibition techniques. He turned I-beams on end as columns, screened the rear terrace with a wall of glass block, and curved a great

bank of windows where the building takes the turn from one street to another. People could spill out of the café to smoke on the terrace above the crowds. Self-possessed and cosmopolitan, the building would feel more at home on a great boulevard in Buenos Aires than in an American city. His drawing of the interior shows the sort of dynamic space he had in mind [figure 121]. It was the closest the fair got to International Style modernism, thus subverting one of the usual expectations of fairs—to chart architecture against a hierarchy of civilization that reinforced Euro-American classifications of the world order. By contrast, local architect Gardner Dailey designed the Brazil Building.61 Stiffer and less self-assured than its Latin American neighbor, the pavilion was nonetheless contemporary, if not particularly Brazilian in spirit [figures 122, 123].62 Its monumental stature made for great spectacle. Dailey, just the sort of younger modernist whom William Wurster wanted more involved in the exposition, stretched the proportions vertically (as often happens in Bay Area houses) to create a navelike interior that he glazed on the courtyard side of the building [figure 124]. The result was an arcade of slim pylons, picked out and lightened by color and softened by the floor of Brazilian wood. One could well imagine any country taking up residence in the pavilion, but Egypt would have looked right. Ernest Born’s simplified exhibits allowed the building to appear more contemporary than Dailey’s design. Italy, too, built a modern pavilion, with all of the trappings of Fascist architecture that one might have expected in the late 1930s [figure 125]. Architects Alfio Susini and Peter Canali created a billboard of nationalism, embossing the overscaled tower with names of cities that stood in for the magnificence of Italian culture. While the campanile simultaneously speaks to the power of Italian cities and recalls the larger embrace of the Middle Ages by Italian Fascism, the planar colonnade and quarries of marble revetment referred back to Roman grandeur and civilization. A curved bank of banded windows on the rear façade spoke to the modernist program of the state under Mussolini.63 The interior continued the architectural embodiment of the Fascist program of progress and historicism [figure 126]. Bologna’s towers and a great industrial crane echo the lotuslike flange of the standing lamps. This vertical striving collides with the invitation to slump in the buttery leather of the chairs under the implied gilded dome. Ancient history, contemporary design, lavish materials, and emptiness mix with almost chilling precision. But it would be anachronistic to read the architecture as automatically signifying something totalitarian in 1939. Its neighbor— of all things, the Tower of Peace—used a similar vocabulary [figure 127].

171

120. Armando d’Ans. Argentina Building. [EDA, UCB] 121. Armando d’Ans. Argentina Building. Interior perspective. [EDA, UCB]

172

122. Gardner Dailey. Brazil Building. [EDA, UCB] 123. Gardner Dailey. Brazil Building. Perspective sketch. [EDA, UCB]

173

124. Gardner Dailey. Brazil Building. Main hall. [EDA, UCB] 125. Alfio Susini. Italy Building. [EDA, UCB]

174

126. Alfio Susini. Italy Building. Interior. [EDA, UCB] 127. Architect unknown. Tower of Peace. [Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley]

175

There a lean, almost bare, colonnade ran into a monumental square tower whose moderne forms abruptly halted at the flat top. It could easily have been mistaken for a modern Italian interpretation of a campanile. Had the word “Italy” been written on its blank white surface in bold sans-serif lettering, no one at the fair would have thought twice about it. Through these buildings a story might be told of modernist architecture challenging the more conventional buildings and plan of the fair. For Argentina and Brazil, modernism offered an escape from the colonial imagery that dominated world’s fairs and that stereotyped the other Latin American nations. The two South American giants may have been pleased to sit with the European pavilions. The site signified their self-determination as much as their buildings did their modernity. While the fair sublimated temporal references to geographical ones, the Argentina, Brazil, and Italy Pavilions did just the opposite. Much of the story of the Pacific Area can be inferred from the very plan of the fair. The Architectural Commission distributed the nations and colonies of the Pacific around the symbolic Pacific Ocean, segregating the Pacific Area from California, to which it gave equal weight. The Latin American nations were further separated into their own court. As tempting as it is to see this as a symbolic universe expressing imperial power, the arrangement does not sustain a reading of the fair as imperialism in microcosm. The trope of the Pacific complicated the pat categories and hierarchies of race and civilization that one finds at earlier fairs. If we judge merely by the space allotted and the scale and elaborateness of the buildings, Japan, Brazil, and Argentina overwhelmed the modest California County buildings. The South American giants also undermined Pan-American conventions. Having no coast on the Pacific, they were placed outside the Pacific Area. The arrangement also broke down the usual strict colonialist separation of Euro-American and “native.” Europe found itself tucked incoherently in the remaindered space. In their scale, style, materials, virtuosity, and exhibits, the buildings reinforce this reading. Without the documents that reveal how the plots took shape, we can only guess at the rationale behind the plan. As former colonies gained greater autonomy in representing themselves at fairs, their buildings

THE PACIFIC AREA

began to compete proudly with the most prominent exhibits. The ggie

176

reflected a moment between the glorification of imperialism at the 1931 Paris exposition and later fairs where national hierarchies fade away. San Francisco’s exposition planners appear little like their counterparts in Paris or London, who were working at the nerve center of an overt empire. They were more concerned with Los Angeles than Tokyo, more aware of the decline of their port or concerned with losing out to other

western cities in aeronautics than in dominating foreign ports. This is why Pacific House could aspire to easy neutrality among a more or less random assortment of Asian and Latin American pavilions, while the California and Federal buildings were so carefully plotted as a monumental ensemble, with San Francisco looming large. Other forces redirected the gaze of the inward-facing city. The work of the Institute of Pacific Relations brought advanced ideas on race, geography, and culture, if not economics and politics, to a mass public. In toppling the older modes of classification, it anticipated the current vogue for thinking in terms of historical flows, territoriality, and the dissipation of boundaries, while at the same time it looked ahead to postwar racial discourse in California, particularly the “racial liberalism” of the 1940s, whereby New Deal liberal ideas were applied to racial policy.64 Instead of policy brought into being through legal challenge, Pacific House attempted to change ideology through education and cultural exchange. The ipr’s vision of Pacific civilization, to which the Architectural Commission strained to give form in the palaces and courts, materialized as bricolage in the Pacific Area. And while that vision was complicated by other motives throughout the fair, at the very least Pacific House acted as a vessel for promulgating a unified, peaceful alternative to the crumbling Atlantic world. But as San Franciscans projected themselves grandly into the void Pacific, the great ocean offered little more than a mirror revealing local habits of mind and regional ambitions.

177

178

179

7:

128. (preceding pages) William Wurster. Yerba Buena Club. [EDA, UCB]

A Room of Their Own: The Yerba Buena Club

On the southern edge of Treasure Island, wedged between the behemoths of the fair, stood the Yerba Buena Club [figure 128]. A modern building of light construction, it was the lone example of the Second Bay Region Tradition at the fair. Widely publicized in its day, but largely forgotten today—it has no presence on the Web and remains little-known among scholars—it compares favorably with the seminal exposition buildings of earlier fairs, a body of work William Wurster knew well.1 Wurster had been to the expositions in Chicago in 1933 and Paris in 1937. Nonetheless, he designed an ambivalent glass box. The architect had to balance the demands of the Beaux-Arts-leaning commission that oversaw the architecture of the fair, the socially elite women who organized the Yerba Buena Club as a hospitality building, and his own interest in advancing a progressive architecture suited to Northern California. As a building, it tells the story of this negotiation. It also reveals how BeauxArts and modernist sensibilities clashed and sometimes meshed within an emerging regionalist sensibility at early mid-century. The Women’s Clubhouse, as it was called, was an oddity. Arguably the most admired building at the fair, it was forward-looking, difficult to classify, and, next to the other exposition buildings, out of

180

place on Treasure Island. Frederick Gutheim wrote that Wurster “has

single-handed developed an important modern vernacular well illustrated in this building.”2 It departed from the fair theme, eschewed the kitschy tendencies of fair architecture, and flirted coyly with the Modern Movement. Wurster left its wood mostly bare. Inside, Frances Elkins’s eclectic decoration provided a jarring counterpoint to the building’s simplicity [figure 129]. Yet its dissonance with other fair buildings matched its function as a private refuge from the fair itself. Beyond the courts and palaces, with its own entrance and public spaces protected from the public gaze, the club worked out the persistent ambiguities that women faced in the public sphere. Of all the self-conscious attempts to create a California architecture for the fair, this was the only one that did so effortlessly. At the time of the ggie, Wurster was the most prominent progressive architect working in Northern California. By the mid-1930s, he had an international reputation based primarily on a string of houses that reconciled modernism with vernacular forms, achieving a “soft” or “everyday modernism.”3 With his direct use of local materials, sensitivity to site, inclination toward modesty and simplicity in design, and dedication to outdoor living, Wurster became the best-known practitioner of the second generation of the Bay Region Style.4 If his self-conscious evocation of

181

129. Frances Elkins. Yerba Buena Club. Interior. [EDA, UCB]

182

earlier Bay Area architecture produced a “close to make-believe tradition,” as David Gebhart put it, his buildings offered a fertile and nativist, but still progressive, alternative to the Modern Movement. Such a mixture was accessible and potent, especially in a moment when many Americans resisted anything that smacked of European culture. We can only wonder how the exposition would have looked had Wurster, rather than Arthur Brown, Jr., been in charge. But modesty and world’s fairs do not mix. Although Wurster had studied under Beaux-Arts master John Galen Howard at Berkeley, the fusty Architectural Commission blocked him from playing a major role. The California Commission overlooked him, as well. This was not for lack of his trying.5 He went as far as to appeal directly to exposition president Leland Cutler. “I went to Chicago and am very interested in a sane modernism,” he insisted.6 The note of compromise that characterized his architecture was also evident in his writing. Wurster would make do with a number of smaller exhibits, but the Yerba Buena Club presented at least one significant, high-profile commission that commanded a prominent place at the fair. Lined up with the two monumental white pylons of George Kelham’s fountain and Ettore Cadorin’s Dawn and the Moon, and with the Hall of Transportation in its airplane hangar looming behind it, the earthy, light, asymmetrical club looked like a building under scaffold. It acknowledged its place, but refused to give the axis its climax. Instead it opened up into a courtyard in its middle, where light and air could do much for the building. Wurster inherited a long and narrow lot. Dwarfed by Kelham’s Administration Building and the hangar, his building had little chance to sit in harmony with these monumental forms if it played by their aesthetic rules. Wurster wisely chose dynamic asymmetry, while acknowledging the axis and the footprints and dimensions of the building’s neighbors, and letting the club building speak its own language. It would be a beautiful, independent, but harmless interloper at the fair. Some of its charming but peripheral status had to do with the nature of the building and the client.

WOMEN’S CLUBS AND CLUB BUILDINGS As much as the building satisfied the women who hired Wurster, it fits awkwardly into the history of women’s club buildings and women’s buildings at world’s fairs. In the late nineteenth century, women formed clubs in response to their isolation in the home and “exclusion from the male-dominated public sphere.”7 Known primarily for civic and charitable work, women’s clubs created a separate and socially acceptable institution that women used to define and expand their own sphere, undertake

183

social reform, and take political action in the absence of suffrage. By 1910, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, which had formed in 1890, claimed more than one million members. A decade later, membership had doubled. In the Progressive era, the clubs gave women an expanded voice in civic life and politics. Under their aegis, women were able to elaborate on their conventional domestic roles and engage in what they called “municipal housekeeping.”8 The metaphor drew a parallel between emerging expertise in home economics and larger issues such as public health and education, recreation, children’s welfare, sanitation, immigrant assimilation, and even urban planning.9 It also veiled the fact that the private sphere of the women’s club, explicitly set up as an alternative to the public sphere of men, was not as separate as it appeared. In the 1920s, even as the women’s clubs in California engaged in extensive building campaigns, the institution was already in decline. With women’s suffrage, the “self-consciously female community” formed out of their disenfranchisement began to disintegrate.10 “The social, educational, economic, and political structures that had brought women together” to form clubs in the first place “were no longer so firmly entrenched.”11 As women sought assimilation into the public sphere by gaining jobs traditionally held by men, their club communities became less relevant. By the 1930s, club building had slowed to a trickle. The onset of the Great Depression also dealt a blow to the clubs’ philanthropic basis. Just as important, the public programs of the New Deal supplanted some of the “charitable” work that lay at the core of the clubs’ mission. At the same time, “generational differences . . . rendered residential club life obsolete.”12 This made the Yerba Buena Club a swansong of sorts. Its raison d’être was hospitality: the interiors reveal

A ROOM OF THEIR OWN: THE YERBA BUENA CLUB

a mood of fashionable banality. The club and the cause had drifted apart.

184

For similar reasons, Wurster’s building also fits uneasily into the other obvious architectural stream to which it belongs: women’s buildings at world’s fairs. For more than sixty years, the great expositions had offered women a conspicuously public perch from which to exhibit their work and press their agenda—that elusive place in the public sphere. Beginning with the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and carrying through the fairs of the Progressive era, women’s buildings held a prominent place.13 By the 1930s, however, women’s buildings had all but disappeared. At the 1933–34 Chicago World’s Fair, organizers and society women rejected the idea of a women’s building. Women “pointed to the Nineteenth Amendment and women’s accomplishments in the professions and education, claiming that since women had achieved equality, they no longer desired special recognition or separate space at the fair.”14

Women would play an important role at the fair, but their presence would not be concentrated in a special building. The 1939 New York World’s Fair also decided against erecting a women’s building. Organizers used much the same rhetoric: woman “will not sit upon a pedestal, not be segregated, isolated; she will fit into the life of the Exposition as she does into life itself—never apart, always a part.”15 As San Franciscans planned the ggie, the role of women at world’s fairs—and in the public sphere—was in a state of flux. The women of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs who sought to build a clubhouse at the ggie had to cope with these changing attitudes. And so did Wurster. His club could take its cue as a building type from the club buildings that had grown to be common features of California towns and cities in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Aside from Irving Gill’s Women’s Club in La Jolla (1913), these were largely conventional buildings. Many of them took the house as their point of departure, the house being the architectural equivalent to “municipal housekeeping.”16 Wurster thus had a wealth of examples from which to choose, but a narrow premise upon which to work. His Yerba Buena Club followed the well-worn formula of the house exaggerated to institutional scale. But Wurster would treat it freely, innovating in his treatment of the skin and the way he organized the spaces. He thus made the conventional building type satisfy the progressive concerns of the women for whom he designed.

THE WOMEN’S CLUB HOUSE ASSOCIATION The women of the California women’s clubs who initiated and built the Yerba Buena Club were socially engaged elites with progressive leanings who devoted their time to both domestic and international issues. Emma McLaughlin, for instance, was active with women’s causes, the peace movement, and Pacific concerns, including the Institute of Pacific Relations (ipr).17 McLaughlin, Leslie Van Ness Denman (another ipr member), Jean McDuffie, Helen K. Forbes, Evelyn Danzig Haas, and other prominent clubwomen helped shape the agenda for Pacific House. This engagement with the fair left them free to think of the Yerba Buena Club as a social entity. While women’s clubs and women’s buildings may have lost their political agenda in the period, their members simply acted through other organizations, leaving their clubs to attend to the particular needs of women at the fair. This included showering and changing clothes for various types of events, taking refuge from “exposition fatigue,” socializing, and hosting prominent speakers and visitors, especially women. The uncomplicated agenda did not necessarily translate into a simple building. The Women’s Central Committee of the California

185

Federation of Women’s Clubs met in May 1937 to develop a program. McLaughlin wrote: “The thing most prominent in my mind is the social care of those women who cannot belong to a club whose minimum dues are ten dollars.”18 Beyond this, the club also had to pay for itself. The program would be extremely specific. Jean McDuffie wrote that the building should have “board” rooms for special use and official entertaining, “member” rooms such as a lounge for tea and a bar, dressing and rest rooms, and a dining room with adjustable partitions. She also insisted on a large lounge for club members, a restaurant, and a dance floor, with some way of dividing the special member rooms from the others.19 For the selection of a designer, she proposed a “competition open to younger architects of the Bay Region . . . not associated with the Exposition.”20 Her emphasis says it all. The women planning the clubhouse were not in sympathy with Brown’s commission. Denman, McDuffie, and Haas joined Helen Russell and Elinor Raas Heller to form the Women’s Club House Association. Arthur Brown, Jr., provided some guidelines for staging a competition and submitted a list of names for their consideration. But the competition never materialized.21 In October 1937, the committee officially retained Wurster as its architect. He fit McDuffie’s call for a younger architect who had been skipped over for a role in the exposition. Just as important, having designed apartments for Helen K. Forbes in San Francisco in 1935, Wurster had an inside track. The house had fortuitously been published in Architectural Forum in December 1937. Forbes would have known about the article in advance, just as the clubwomen were deliberating about an architect. The Forum wrote of “Mr. Wurster’s characteristic disregard for the conventional modern idiom.”22 In Wurster, the asso-

A ROOM OF THEIR OWN: THE YERBA BUENA CLUB

ciation found a free-thinking architect unbound by either modernist or

186

Beaux-Arts dogmas. Within months, every woman on the Woman’s Club House Association hired Wurster for private projects.23 The architect clearly moved with ease in this social milieu. As the project developed, Leslie Van Ness Denman focused the architectural program for the club. She emphasized that the restaurant should be “unusual and interesting” enough to be an attraction and draw revenue. “The Coffee Shop is to be Tyrolean,” she declared: the “smartest, gayest, most modern cafeteria.”24 To modern eyes, the room comes off as pure kitsch, but it delighted the clubwomen. They sought out wpa workers to paint “various things that would give it atmosphere, such as the hat rack on which a long Tyrolean cape falling in great folds is hanging.” They also asked for bright-green doors and tablecloths with bright roses painted on them. The soda fountain was to have a large hood

over it to make it look “Tyrolean.”25 Whatever he thought of the idea of a themed café, Wurster gave the club women what they wanted. Denman asked Wurster to pack in “official committee rooms, including a committee room large enough for formal dinners; a large lobby, reception room, large room for dances and receptions, large dining room, private dining room, tearoom and cocktail room, rest rooms, telephones, writing facilities, dressing room and necessities.”26 The association estimated that the club would have to accommodate an average of two thousand visitors per day, and at least double that on peak days.27 The women were clearly comfortable with their accommodating architect. Jean McDuffie wrote a list of criticisms. “Unhappy about the top of lounge,” she wrote, almost in shorthand; “want diaper pattern on Dining Room and Lounge” and a “fresco” on back. She asked him to drop the ceiling of the dining room: “Want balance? Peristyle? Columns toward pavilion,” and she asked that he restudy the entrance façade.28 The comments run the gamut, but overall they were the forceful demands from an empowered, intelligent client. Leslie Van Ness Denman, one of the sharpest members of the committee, wanted to melt away the entrance still further: “The entrance court, if open and glassed at hangar side giving a view of ‘beyond’ from the garden approach, would add to the general effect of the building, would it not, as part of the gardens and lights at night?” Her criticism reveals her good eye for form and space: “Value of flow of rhythm between cocktail lounge and private dining rooms. Good connections between private dining rooms and kitchen.”29 The architect took all of this with his usual grace. At the same time, he managed to work easily with interior designer Frances Elkins. Her lavish decorative schemes melded the domestic sensibility expected of such a building with the gilded opulence of a hotel lobby. Femininity and class, less visibly part of Wurster’s design, become the major notes of the interior [figure 130]. What can be made of their apparent collision? Did his exteriors mediate between this highly feminized and sensuous interior and the fair itself? When asked about her design, which would seem to be in total conflict with his approach, Wurster wrote that it “so far seems to strike a happy note. Mrs. Elkins is doing interesting things to it.”30 While he would have made different choices for the interior, he was content to give Elkins complete freedom.31 Talbot Hamlin, one of the few critics to write about the interiors, found them “almost surrealist,” “perhaps decadent”: their “frankly baroque or even rococo notes are certainly in the opposite extreme from anything we usually call modern; yet the whole is as fresh as it could possibly be, gay, insouciant, almost the ideal place to have

187

130. Frances Elkins. Yerba Buena Club. Lobby. [EDA, UCB]

188

a cocktail—or several.”32 On this level, Wurster and Elkins’s designs somehow worked together, betraying the degree to which modernism and traditional design were not yet polarized, at least in the Bay Area. “Fresh” was the key word. Wurster and the classicists on the Architectural Commission used it, as did the women who hired him. Hamlin merely recognized it and tried to place it in the spectrum of approaches. In tandem with “modern,” “fresh” signaled a free approach, one committed to no particular camp.

THE CLUBHOUSE For Wurster, the Yerba Buena Club was neither domestic in scale nor forthrightly institutional, but rather a compromise of the two: a house-and-a-half whose long windows, high ceilings, and prominent horizontal overhang exaggerated the mannerisms that distinguish Bay Area houses from their modernist kin. Since the 1920s, Wurster had experimented with wrapping his houses around open spaces, displacing the hearth for the California sun, replacing walls with tall windows and doors, and unfolding the box into an array of patios, terraces, and balconies that stitch his houses into their sites and make the most of the views. In his houses of the 1930s, when the lot permitted, Wurster would stretch them across the site, linking private and public wings with halls or galleries, and at times with mere shelters that doubled as entrances. Gone were the foyers and internal halls of more formal house types. The meandering plan of the ranch house may have provided the initial impulse, but once in play the open center became the pivot around which he organized many of his buildings. Wurster designed the club from the inside out. He first drew a series of squares and rectangles with the dimensions of each room, just as a way of looking at the program in its crudest state. From the earliest diagrammatic or schematic sketches on trace, he imagined a curving ramp to the dining room. The sketches provide a view into his working method. They show him allowing the sensual gesture to sneak into the most analytical of exercises. He began with an L-shaped building, with the larger rooms—the dining room and lounge—set at right angles and divided by a large hall. But he quickly resolved to divide the building into two blocks joined by courtyards and halls. Site, program, and spatial flow were paramount. When the women asked about his choice of materials, he replied that he would use the least expensive, “feeling that material used would not mean as much as the way the bones of the room lie and the views come.”33 The bones, if complicated, were among his most interesting. In plan the finished building was little more than a scaled-up version of his houses [figure 131]. Two wings unfold to the north

189

and south of the entrance court. Wurster oriented the public functions of the club—coffee shop, checkroom, men’s lounge, and restrooms—toward the fair. But two terraces and a garden buffer them. To the other side of the entrance lay the more private dining room and its attendant spaces, which opened away from the fair to a view of the bay. The entrance court ate into the core of the building [figure 132]. Although highly informal and asymmetrical, the court nodded to the more formal architecture of the fair. This is most evident in plan, where the cypress trees stand like columns in antis—or even with the wall: the same double beat, in fact, of the pylons in George Kelham’s fountain to the west, with which they share an axis. That this was intentional is beyond question. Originally the building had been slated for a different site. When the site changed to the long, narrow lot between much larger buildings, Arthur Brown, Jr., insisted that “it would have to be a symmetrical building because the whole feeling of that part of the Exposition is one of symmetry.” He demanded that Wurster change his plans.34 A minor crisis ensued. The Architectural Committee of the Women’s Club was conflicted. It had already unanimously approved Wurster’s design and wanted the “same architectural freedom [with] the new site.” Nonetheless, the committee asked him to produce a symmetrical plan for comparison’s sake.35 Wurster replied gently: “As a rule you pay for symmetry because you haven’t the privilege of allotting space between the need of your internal organization.”36 He had let the program determine the shape of the building. “It was difficult in a symmetrical building,” he continued, “to plan for the two large units, the lounge and the dining room, inasmuch as it was desired that they should both face the same way.”37 This was his reason for breaking up the block. But

A ROOM OF THEIR OWN: THE YERBA BUENA CLUB

Wurster’s conciliatory nature came out in a telegram to Helen Russell.

190

“Be assured,” he wrote, “whatever comes this office will gladly design on the site as finally decided. . . . It is still to be decided just how much pressure the exposition will bring to make it a symmetrical building if it be moved to the new lot which has the east west axis of the garden to be taken into account.”38 While his was not the willful asymmetry of a modernist assailing classicism, Wurster still found himself at odds with Brown’s aesthetic. In the latter’s instructions to the Woman’s Club House Association, Brown wrote: “It would seem proper to give the Women’s Building a fresh, gay, fanciful, airy and colorful character. . . . No limitation as to so-called architectural styles is imposed, but the architectural expression should follow the dictates of good taste and the consciousness of aesthetic function.”39 With this, Brown called for symmetry. For his part, Wurster

131. William Wurster. Yerba Buena Club. Plans. [EDA, UCB] 132. William Wurster. Yerba Buena Club. Perspective drawing of the entrance. [EDA, UCB]

191

133. William Wurster. Yerba Buena Club. Aerial perspective. [EDA, UCB]

192

134. (opposite) William Wurster. Yerba Buena Club. Entrance court. [EDA, UCB]

193

wrote: “The essence of the Club House is something that doesn’t balance, something that is light and gay, and with symmetry one might get something entirely too formal and would be forced into competition with two tremendous buildings, one on either side.”40 Similar language led to different architectural conclusions. Wurster edged his way toward compromise. His first design for the new site neglected the axis and celebrated the asymmetrical composition. From Wurster’s point of view, the building and its formal site demanded an asymmetrical design, but he agreed to present “rough sketches of a symmetrical building” at the following meeting.41 The women opted for asymmetry [figure 133]. But Brown continued to complain about the building’s silhouette and massing.42 Wurster accommodated him: he placed the building on axis, lopped off a great curving wall and the bridge across the entrance, and carved out the edge of the waiting room to accentuate the appearance of symmetry. The entrance became the most important place of compromise. Wurster juggled the building’s volumes in order to put the entrance court on axis. The two rows of trees in the rendering of the entrance [see figure 132] reinforced the sense of symmetry, balancing the asymmetrical court and making a nearly monumental gesture in the intimate space. At the rear of the court a colonnade of trees screened the wall, another classical motif that made it into the built version. Beyond the significant reorganization, the building continued to present itself as a flat-roofed glass box obscured by a vertical trellis. The reality was quite different, especially when winter rendered the leafless trees skeletal [figure 134]. Cascading planters painted in silver took up the symmetry of the court, but the overall effect was much freer. Wurster shaded the long plate glass windows with the colonnade of trees and applied screens of wood that hung from the open eaves, whose

A ROOM OF THEIR OWN: THE YERBA BUENA CLUB

shadows become entangled with the tree branches. Because of the ambiguity

194

among trees, walls, and screens, the last can be read as structural. The effect is of an astonishingly diaphanous, frankly temporary building whose precise lines make it look like a drawing come to life. This is precisely what Wurster sought: a building reduced to “vertical posts and horizontal lines, so that its structure would have more the quality of a tree than large bleak surfaces.”43 Upon closer inspection the picture changes yet again. It is not a glass box at all, but rather a wood box with an abundance of windows and a gently sloping roof. Bearing walls come into view as structure and screen become disentangled. Wurster used plantings as applied ornament, hanging a garden above the entrance, both to shelter it and to obscure the fact that the windows above it were conventional openings— appropriate fenestration for the lounge behind it. In other words, the

building was calm, but changeful, idiosyncratic, and gently referential. It reversed Gebhard and Von Breton’s pithy summation of Bay Area architecture by making classicism into the soft background music for vernacular and modernist experiment.44 On the inside, Wurster clustered the most public rooms —the lobby, waiting room, and coffee shop—and the circulation around the entrance. Making dynamic use of the diagonal of the off-center entrance, he extended a short stair into the lobby [see figure 130]. It made the switchbacks of the plan more legible, while clearly marking off the more private spaces beyond as less public. The columns and low partition wall communicated as much. A generously wide hall, with a view onto the lobby and court, led to a curiously curved ramp that wound round to the dining room. The curve, present in the earliest plan sketches, was either an idée fixe or an intuition about the importance of a sweeping motion in a blocky building. Either way, the asymmetrical lobby revealed the path to the private parts of the club, and the curving ramp obscured it. The unorthodox circulation afforded unusual privacy for the dining room. It also held the surprise of this double-height room with its bank of vertical windows and extraordinary spiral stair [figures 135, 136]. Wurster lavished attention on the room. He tested out rhythms of fenestration and screening for the all-important west façade, where the afternoon sun could have created an unpleasant greenhouse effect [figure 137]. On the upper two-thirds, which would have been most affected, he doubled the screening. The finished building shows the subtlety of his architectural intelligence [figure 138]. Under the ramp, just visible behind the glazing in the center of the photograph, Wurster tucked a waiting room, men’s and women’s restrooms, and a switchboard, and, as the ramp curved away, he found room for an office on a mezzanine serviced by a diminutive stair beside the switchboard—all without fussing with the strong massing of the building’s exterior. Above these spaces sat the writing room, a space defined by a thin, elegant wall of panels. Myra Gates, whose diary of her visits to the fair provide some of the most intimate accounts of the buildings, never saw women writing at the tables. Instead, it became a sort of private, enclosed viewing platform where women watched the lights of the fair. “The western side was all windows,” Gates wrote, “and commanded a magnificent view.”45 Where the ramp met the wall, Wurster inserted the writing room. Brown had repeatedly asked Wurster to lower the building’s height, and perhaps he simply tried to meet this demand. But by lowering the entire volume of the writing room, he achieved multiple effects: symmetry

195

196

135. (opposite) William Wurster and Frances Elkins. Yerba Buena Club. Dining room. [Roger Sturtevant, EDA, UCB] 136. William Wurster. Yerba Buena Club. Spiral stair to balcony. [EDA, UCB] 137. William Wurster. Yerba Buena Club. Façade study. [EDA, UCB]

197

A ROOM OF THEIR OWN: THE YERBA BUENA CLUB

198

138. William Wurster. Yerba Buena Club. West façade. [EDA, UCB] 139. William Wurster. Yerba Buena Club. Porch. [EDA, UCB]

for the entrance, a picturesque roofline for the building, and higher dining room and lounge ceilings, as befitted their importance. Here was a masterful game of varying heights to create intimacy for one room and stature for another, while also serving the legibility of the overall building. In spite of its boxy appearance, the entire rear wing of the building unfolded on the inside with unexpected curves and switchbacks in a fugue-like succession of interior and exterior spaces and views. Extraordinarily complex spaces flowed around the simple block of the dining room. An informal terrace spilled off in one direction, with two private dining rooms at its far edge, and stairs that led to the upper terrace and porch. This completed a circuit with the balcony of the large dining room. In spite of the cramped lot, diners could stroll from their tables through the verdant terrace, catch views of the bridge and Yerba Buena Island, and climb the stairs to the upper terrace, where the plantings created enough privacy to give it the sense of an outdoor room. There they could take shelter from the exhibition and catch views of the East Bay Hills [figure 139]. The circuit led back to the dining room through the balcony and the spiral stair, which was a spectacle itself. A column of glass around a steel pole seemed to hold the stair aloft [see figure 136]. Around this time Wurster had begun using spiral staircases as “a key force linking the various floors” of his houses “spatially as well as functionally.”46 In this case, the entire dining wing pivots around it, even as the ramp and other stairs duplicate the circulation—a doubling of paths that recalls Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, which Wurster would have known well. At the same time, he would surely have seen the ramp in Le Corbusier’s Temps Nouveaux Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1937.47 Together, the stair and ramp knitted the blocky volumes together and centered the otherwise opaque paths of circulation. Aside from the ramp and spiral stair, the most remarkable parts of the building were the outdoor spaces that opened off of every façade: the terraces and decks, which constituted such a generous part of its footprint. From the outside, these spaces broke up the massing and hinted at the plan’s complexity. From the inside, they endowed every major room with a view and, as fair publicity put it, “spectacular phases of California outdoor living.”48 The view of the Founders’ Deck from the Founders’ Hall reveals the privileged space of the women who subscribed to the club at the highest level. This outdoor space was more relaxed than the interiors. As opposed to Elkins’s eclectic formality, the rattan furniture there was entirely in sympathy with the building. The sensuous curves of the former suggest a nest built into a crook of Wurster’s “tree house.” Shielded by

199

the low wall of plantings, the clubhouse women could watch the comings and goings. These outdoor spaces are the story of the building, which as an institution had to walk a fine line between a public space and a private clubhouse. The garden, terraces, and decks are legible as both public and private spaces. The deep overhangs, pergolas, and plantings common to Bay Area houses established several gradations of privacy: the deeply concealed porch off the lounge, the more public Founders’ Deck, and the most exposed East Deck, which fronted on the fair. Wurster broke up the public space of the building and folded it in upon itself, creating the intimacy of a domestic court in a public building. For all of its seduction, the building is ambivalent as exhibition buildings go. From the outside it offered up a spectacle of glass only to obscure it in picturesque plantings and the wooden scaffolds, which might be understood best in terms of the ubiquitous eaves and trellises that adorn the walls of so many Bay Area houses and paint the surfaces with mottled light. Wurster elongated this airy eave and then seemingly reoriented the horizontal eave into a vertical screen, entangled it in plants, and let it shade, shelter, and provide modesty to the naked glass walls. For an archmodernist like Frederick Gutheim, the building was little more than a relief from the “bathos of the other work.”49 From his point of view, the Yerba Buena Club did not go far enough. Wurster’s baldly picturesque massing and screens would have been anathema to unsentimental modernists; his apparent commitment to using rooms conventionally, as opposed to open planning, would have seemed retrograde; even his ramp may have come off as a ham-fisted attempt to crib from Le A ROOM OF THEIR OWN:THE YERBA BUENA CLUB

Corbusier, when in fact, it operated like a glorified staircase. But Wurster was not a revolutionary and didn’t believe that architecture was a heroic

200

bility, and the clubwomen whom he so clearly respected.

tool of social transformation. He was more temperate and accommodating. To think of the plywood and two-by-fours that served both as structure and ornament as “heavily engineered” in appearance, as Gutheim called them, is to miss the point of the progressive, regionalist sensibility then being elaborated in the Bay Area. Engineering was not on the architect’s mind. Rather, he thought in terms of naturalizing architecture and finding solutions that fit local conditions, many of which would have been novel since California was still a relatively new and protean environment. His clubhouse was exactly this, a creative compromise between the BeauxArts Architectural Commission, his own progressive and regionalist sensi-

The contrast to the rest of the fair made Wurster’s building all the more intriguing. Even before debates about regionalism and monumentality initiated the first serious internal critiques of modern architecture, Wurster was trying to overcome some of its shortcomings. While he had long practiced in a self-consciously regionalist mode, he had few opportunities before 1939 to think through how this might look in an institutional building. Just as important, his attempt to sheathe the glass box gets at one of the more stinging and lasting criticisms of International Style modernism, namely, its inability to be symbolically potent. In the 1943 essay “Nine Points on Monumentality,” authors José Luis Sert, Fernand Léger, and Sigfried Giedion wrote of the “devaluation of monumentality,” calling most recent attempts at monumental architecture “empty shells.” They called for “co-relation” between architecture and town planning and between city and region, with monuments as “the most powerful accents in these vast schemes.” The Yerba Buena Club preceded the essay by four years, but it anticipated many of its arguments, including the authors’ call for a “lyrical architecture” made of light materials with “big animated surfaces” that correlated “man-made landscapes” with “nature’s landscapes.”50 Next to the “empty shells” of the exposition palaces, the clubhouse provided a powerful alternative. Here was a building of wood and glass that achieved a modest monumentality appropriate to its purpose, while simultaneously suggesting a possible route out of the flatness of the International Style. In the 1930s, Americans commonly dismissed the International Style as naked, calling self-consciously modernist buildings “stunts.” Wurster’s building was neither. It was experimental yet controlled, playful yet at ease, asymmetrical but sensibly so, and boldly glazed yet warmly clothed in wood, plants, and color: in short, a “sane modernism.” It thus escaped both the common criticisms of traditionalists and anticipated the important debates that would send modernists on a search for form and tectonic expression, if not resonance with past architecture.

201

Conclusion

Buildings of different scale, style, and purpose populated the fair—much as in a city. Corporations such as Bank of America and Ghirardelli chocolate and organizations such as the Dairy Council erected smaller buildings wherever the exposition corporation could fit them. In some of these buildings, the clean lines of what has sometimes been called New Deal Modern prevailed. In the Coast Guard Building, with its flat roof, spare loggia, lally columns, and murals, elements of Art Deco and moderne mingled freely with modernism and classicism [figure 140]. Similar observations might be made of the Christian Science Building or the Illinois State Building [figure 141]. A strong essay in Art Deco, the latter was one of the few state buildings. All of these were marginal to the fair, but emblematic of its architectural diversity. The Gayway—part carnival and, with its false fronts, part western town—marked its own precinct. Elsewhere, the public could see some of the earliest modernist landscape designs, in particular at the National Garden Show in 1940. Here Thomas Church designed a landscape for a “modern house, to harmonize with the direct architecture now being built for people who believe that new materials and simple design may combine to give them the maximum of comfort and the best relationship to contemporary living” [figure 142].1 In a totally different spirit, landscape architect Mark 202

Daniels designed the Chinese Village [figure 143]. This was to be an ethnic

village designed on the model of older world’s fairs. “In order to maintain the true atmosphere of old China,” Daniels wrote, “the streets must of necessity be narrow but they debouche into small courts and plazas surrounding which are shops, cafés, and craftsmen’s village buildings.”2 Being both a cultural concern and a concession, it muddied the separation of instruction and entertainment that American expositions maintain. It thus fit uneasily in the fair, especially after Daniels had to compromise his ambitious, studied, and picturesque designs and churn out absurd architectural clichés in a consumerist protomall replete with jade dealers and other trinket shops [figure 144]. This explains its placement in the Gayway, apart from the official fair and carefully segregated from the Pacific Area. As these examples show, heterogeneity was the most characteristic feature of the ggie’s architecture. This quality has made the fair resistant to historical analysis, which favors clear narratives over messy realities. The motley array of buildings complicates the widely held view that expositions are symbolic universes through which elites reinforce narratives about their own cultural hegemony. Although this may hold true for the European colonial fairs and the turn-of-the-century American fairs, the buildings of the ggie tell a tale of compromise, contingency, and symbolism gone awry.

203

140. Architect unknown. Coast Guard Building. [Treasure Island Museum Collection, Treasure Island Development Authority] 141. Architect unknown. llinois Building. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library]

204

142. Thomas D. Church. Garden design for a modern house. [EDA, UCB]

205

143. Mark Daniels. Perspective of the proposed Chinese Village. [Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library] 144. Mark Daniels. The Chinese Village. [Louis J. Stellman; The California History Room, California State Library]

206

If symbolism was to be found anywhere, it was in the segregation of the fair into zones. At least in dividing culture from commerce, foreign from domestic, Asia from Latin America, and women from everything else, the Architectural Commission suggested an order to its microcosm. Where these lines blurred is equally revealing. The ggie followed the primary division in world’s fairs by separating its pleasure zone, the Gayway, from the fair proper. Here in the land of amusement the cultural conventions of polite society were turned on their head, providing an antidote to the museological sobriety of the rest of the fair. The bawdy Gayway, like all of its ancestors, was a zone mostly of male pleasure, an exaggeration of those parts of cities that served male street culture. In San Francisco, such entertainment districts included the Barbary Coast, Market Street, and other areas that catered to rooming houses. Here men found penny arcades, cheap amusements and food, burlesque theaters, and houses of prostitution.3 In a navy town gearing up for war in the late 1930s, the Gayway had a special burden to filter through a transient, nervous population of young men. The concessions themselves tell the story directly. Aside from the national attractions, such as Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch, most of the concessions were set up by local San Francisco concerns. These were not the city’s leading businessmen who staged expositions, but rather the impresarios of popular street culture whom elites periodically try to shut down, but who become useful for events such as expositions. In earlier fairs, the division between zones of entertainment and instruction invited two different forms of comportment. The exposition area was governed by the tacit rules of the burgeoning institutions of modern society, such as schools, libraries, and museums. The exhibits and dioramas and the spaces that held them reproduced the sober, if not paternalistic, relationship of these institutions to visitors. The pleasure zones subverted these emerging conventions, even as the rest of the fair reinforced them [figures 145, 146]. For every display that celebrated modern manufacturing or products, on the other side of the fair an exhibit displayed women disrobing as men (and sometimes women) ogled them. The diorama and the peepshow used similar visual techniques and asked visitors to assume similar roles, the latter form of display turning the high seriousness of the former on its head. Where the one fair abounded in serious “scientific” demonstrations of progress marbled with racial categories and nationalist sentiments, the other side of the fair reveled in humanity’s oddities.4 The relationship between these two types of exhibits was all-important, and it was an unsettled and changing one.

207

208

The division explains why the Chinese Village ended up in the Gayway. It would not do to have a concession compete with the formal exposition: it had to behave like a concession or a sideshow, rather than a didactic environment. And yet the boundaries were not so firm in 1939, especially in San Francisco, where the deeply rooted Chinese population that sponsored the area was wealthy and powerful. The very category of Chinese American, in fact, presented uncomfortable problems. Here was a fair heavily invested in Asia without official participation from China, which was then at war with Japan—an inconvenient fact for those who sponsored the idea that Pacific civilization could supplant the troubled Atlantic world. The Chinese Village as Daniels planned it would have made the community’s clout evident. Even as built it was monumental. Its gateway echoed the triumphal arch of the fair, and its white pagoda became an unintended pendant to the Tower of the Sun. Daniels’s far more ambitious plan would have challenged the implicit ethnic and cultural narratives of the official fair. “Chinatown” had to remain a tourist site, even as the Japanese Pavilion veiled urgent political realities with timeless imagery. The point is that organizers of fairs have had far less control than one might imagine. As ventures in urban planning, fairs have been in tension with the chaotic realities of their urban context. American 145. The Gayway. The World in Motion. [Courtesy of Helaine and Blair Prentice]

fairs have often begun with boosters battling for their favored sites in

146. Fuller-Pittsburgh Paints exhibit. [EDA, UCB]

legacy of some private buildings, and other infrastructure, fairs bid to

the city as thinly disguised development schemes. Most of them involved expensive public funding of land reclamation that eventually benefited private interests after the fair. With new land, roads, public transit, a alter the urban center of gravity. The result was a kind of urban land grab. Fairs were both symbolic projects that modeled urban possibilities and literal planning projects that altered cities. It is no wonder that Frederick Jackson Turner first aired his frontier thesis at the 1893 Chicago fair. These ambitious projects were part of the way cities supplanted the extensive development of the frontier with the intensive development of the urban frontier—how, in other words, they tamed the wild city of industrial capitalism. The Progressive-era fairs narrated and smoothed out this transition. When cities again hosted a flurry of fairs in the 1930s, the end of the frontier had renewed resonance for a nation with an increasingly urban population struggling to lift itself out of the Depression.5 As a New Deal project, the ggie stimulated work, improved land, and added major new infrastructure in the form of an airport. It linked the city to larger regional projects in a moment when regional planning was in vogue

209

and as San Francisco found itself in competition with Los Angeles and other West Coast cities. And it offered a vision of San Francisco as a regional giant, dominating trade with the Pacific. Finally, in projecting San Francisco into the void Pacific, the fair attempted to expand a longexpired frontier at the precise moment when the bridges expanded the city’s own boundaries. In short, the fair attempted to re-envision a new identity for San Francisco. There is no evidence that fairgoers understood any of these grandiose visions as anything more than publicity. But fair makers are also fairgoers. And judging by their sincerity, the fair’s Pacific theme was part of a search for identity that links up with a larger quest. The historian Warren Susman observed that Americans in the 1930s came to a new understanding of culture as the collection of things that a group of people who share a common geography know and do, as well as the way they think and feel about those things.6 His core observation was about a heightened awareness “of what it means to be a culture, or the search to become a kind of culture.”7 Put differently, culture, identity, and geography were self-consciously woven together in new ways in the era. Susman wrote: “Americans then began thinking in terms of patterns of behavior and belief, values and life-styles, symbols and meanings.”8 Phrases like the “American way of life,” “American Dream,” and “grass roots,” he noted, were all popularized in the period. To these, historians could add Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” which were offered to the “American people,” another phrase popularized at this time. Suffice it to say that the Great Depression roused awareness of “life-style, patterns of belief and conduct, special values and attitudes that constitute the characteristics of a special people.”9 But how did this consciousness fit with the deepening grooves of regionalist thought and sentiment in the same period? And how did the California fair register these dual interests in a moment when the Atlantic world seemed destined for destruction? Where New York and Chicago created world’s fairs that transcended, at least in their themes, the geographical and cultural differences in the nation, San Francisco did not. The ggie was a regionalist affair with fragile concep-

CONCLUSION

tions of nation implicitly defining the fuzzy concept of region. It marked

210

a turning away from the East Coast and the Atlantic world, as much as it did the concentric cultural interests of San Francisco, California, the West, and the Pacific. The contrast highlights one of the understudied themes of the period: the tension between nation and region. Historians have located this tension in the universalizing forces of modernity rubbing

up against the local color and habits that persist often in opposition to it. The decade expressed unbridled enthusiasm for the future and, at the same time, deep nostalgia for the past as found in Williamsburg or the Cloisters in New York City. Isolationism and nativism encountered counterarguments in the form of organizations like the International Houses that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., built at various universities, or the Institute of Pacific Relations. Artists and writers dealt increasingly in abstractions, while Thomas Hart Benton and the Federal Writer’s Project drew out the local color and regional sensibility of their sites. National corporations, products, and chains met local patterns of work and consumption. Everywhere we look in the 1930s, we find nation and region in dialogue and often in contest. This is the meaning of the two world’s fairs of 1939 when viewed in tandem. The one in New York looked to the future, sought universals, indulged in abstractions like the Trylon and Perisphere, fetishized urban life in Democracity and the Futurama, and celebrated modernity. The one in San Francisco looked to the Pacific, rooted itself in seductive fictions about region, represented itself allegorically, offered up myths of California living, and blended past, present, and future with whimsy. Although it overstates the case, New York was nation; San Francisco was region. Through the fair, San Francisco self-consciously attempted to work out a new cultural identity for itself, one based on many of its longstanding characteristics, but enriched and amplified by a vision of the Pacific as a peaceful and productive alternative to Western civilization. The architecture—varied, hyperbolic, and full of contradictions—represented

147. (overleaf) Ernest Born. Map of the Fair, 1939. [Courtesy of Hanley Wood]

this quest well [figure 147].

211

212

213

Notes

ABJ Arthur Brown, Jr., Papers

2. The best historical account is Lisa Rubens, “The 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair: The New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Pacific Basin” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2004); see also the less scholarly but lively book by Richard Reinhardt, Treasure Island: San Francisco’s Exposition Years (San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1973). The best source of information on the fair remains the official history: Jack James and Earle Weller, Treasure Island: “The Magic City,” 1939–1940; The Story of the Golden Gate International Exposition (San Francisco: Pisani Printing and Publishing Co., 1941).

Bancroft The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

3. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 54.

CHS California Historical Society, San Francisco

4. “The International Exhibition: Its Purpose and Prospects,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (April 1862), 476.

EDA Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley

5. David E. Nye makes the point that European fairs were nationally sponsored and funded, while American fairs grew out of urban boosterism. See “European Self-Representation at the New York World’s Fair of 1939,” in Rob Kroes, Robert W. Rydell, and D. F. J. Bosscher, eds., Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993), 50.

ABBREVIATIONS

Fresno Special Collections Research Center, California State University, Fresno Maybeck Bernard Maybeck Collection, 1897–1956 McLaughlin Emma (Moffat) McLaughlin Papers, 1927–1967 Merchant William G. Merchant Collection, 1934–1941 Morrow Irving F. and Gertrude Comfort Morrow Collection, 1914–1958 NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

NOTES TO PAGES 10–30

Pflueger Pflueger Architects Papers

214

1. David Gebhard and Harriette Von Breton, Architecture in California, 1868–1968 (Santa Barbara: Regents of the University of California, 1968), 6.

SFPL History Center, San Francisco Public Library WRCA Water Resources Center Archives, University of California, Riverside, and California State University, San Bernardino WWW William W. Wurster/Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons Collection, 1922–1974

6. Philadelphia hosted the Sesquicentennial Exposition in 1926, a relatively minor fair. Outside of the obvious idea that fairs tend to arise in times of conflict or scarcity, this hiatus has not been adequately explained. 7. Roland Marchand, “Corporate Imagery and Popular Education: World’s Fairs and Expositions in the United States, 1893–1940,” in David E. Nye and Carl Pedersen, eds., Consumption and American Culture (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1991), 18–33. 8. William L. Bird, Jr., “Better Living”: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935–1955 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 9. Howard F. Gillette, Jr., “White City, Capital City,” Chicago History 18 (1989–90), 26–45. 10. Gray Brechin, “Sailing to Byzantium: The Architecture of the Panama Pacific International Exposition,”

California History 62, no. 2 (Summer 1983), 106–121. 11. Neil Harris, “Great American Fairs and American Cities: The Role of the Chicago Columbian Exposition,” in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 113. 12. Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4 (Spring 1988), 73–102; Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 13. One notable exception is Patricia Morton’s work on the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris, where architecture was explicitly used to express and reinforce the cause of the colonies. See Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2000). 14. Neil Harris, “Great American Fairs,” 113. See also Burton Benedict, “Rituals of Representation: Ethnic Stereotypes and Colonized Peoples at World’s Fairs,” in Robert W. Rydell and Nancy Gwinn, eds., Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), 30. 15. Harris, “Great American Fairs,” 114. 16. Talbot Hamlin, “California Fair Houses,” Pencil Points 20 (May 1939), 293–296. 17. Pamela Lee Post, “East Meets West: The Model Homes Exhibits at the 1939–1940 New York and San Francisco World’s Fairs” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2000). 18. See Marchand, “Corporate Imagery and Popular Education”; Robert W. Rydell, “The 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition and the Empire of the West,” in Rob Kroes, ed., The American West as Seen by Europeans and Americans (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1989), 342–359; Neil Harris, “Museums, Merchandising, and Popular Taste: The Struggle for Influence,” in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes

in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 56–81; Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo, introduction to Rydell and Schiavo, eds., Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 9–10. 19. Rydell, “The 1939 San Francisco,” 342. 20. Ibid., 353. 21. David E. Nye, “European SelfRepresentation at the New York World’s Fair of 1939,” in Kroes, Rydell and Bosscher, Cultural Transmissions and Receptions, 47–64. 22. See also Robert González, who calls the buildings of the ggie “madeto-order American modernism,” in “Beyond the Midway: Pan-American Modernity in the 1930s,” in Rydell and Schiavo, Designing Tomorrow, 56–75. 23. Harris, “Great American Fairs,” 129. 24. Harris, “Museums,” 68. 25. The phrase “other fair” is borrowed from Richard Reinhardt, “The Other Fair,” American Heritage 40, no. 4 (May–June 1989), http://www. americanheritage.com/content/other-fair (accessed 8 July 2012). 26. William Wurster to San Francisco Chamber of Commerce (22 June 1936), WWW, EDA. 27. Ibid. 28. Harris, “Museums,” 68. 29. Ibid. 30. Neil Harris, “Great American Fairs,” 129. 31. Ibid., 114–115. 32. Ibid., 117. 33. Ibid., 118. 34. A similar observation has been made in James Gilbert, “World’s Fairs as Historical Events,” in Rydell and Gwinn, Fair Representations, 13–27. 35. Much as modern museums now route visitors through the museum store. 36. John E. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 37. The leading concessions in terms of money were: Aquacade, Folies Bergere, Hot Dogs, Owl Drug Company, Bay Auto Parts, Estonian Village, and the True Blue Cafeterias. The fair reopened in 1940, largely because the concessions

were unable to repay their obligations to creditors. H. C. Bottorff, Closing Report, San Francisco Bay Exposition, sponsor for the Golden Gate International Exposition, 18–22, Bancroft. 38. This reading relies indirectly on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. See Peter I. Barta et al., eds., Carnivalizing Difference: Bakhtin and the Other (London: Routledge, 2001). 39. Marco Duranti, “Utopia, Nostalgia, and World War at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (October 2006): 663–683. CHAPTER 1 1. The idea first emerged in 1929. See “Air Base Not Ladies’ Aid Job Club Told,” San Francisco Chronicle (1 November 1929), 11. 2. Roger W. Lotchin, “The Darwinian City: The Politics of Urbanization in San Francisco between the World Wars,” Pacific Historical Review 48, no. 3 (August 1979): 365. 3. Ibid., 364. 4. Paolo Polledri, ed., Visionary San Francisco (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Prestel, 1990). 5. Mills Field, on the site of the present airport south of San Francisco, had opened in 1927 as a temporary site, but it was far from downtown by the standards of the day, had little room to grow, was bounded by privately held land, and lay outside of San Francisco County. From the outset, it was beset with troubles. Airport Committee of the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco Airport: A Report (San Francisco: Airport Committee, Board of Supervisors, 1931), 25. 6. The most astounding is Fred Dohrmann, “The Future of the Waterfront—Aviation Landing and Elevated Highway,” Pacific Commerce (5 January 1927), 22–23. 7. “Yerba Buena Airport Plan to Be Pressed,” San Francisco Chronicle (12 October 1931), 16; “Yerba Buena Airport Site Urged on Rossi,” San Francisco Chronicle (20 August 1932), 17; and “Yerba Buena Selected for Air Terminal,” San Francisco Chronicle (17 May 1932), 8. Engineers had already worked out the basic shape of the island by 1931. Architect Mario F. Corbett drew the first maps at the same time. An image of the rough plan for the

“Golden Gate Air Terminal” survives in the SFO Museum. On the back, the Junior Chamber of Commerce endorsed it “for the purpose of solidifying San Francisco’s paramount position as the focal point for every air line operating in the Pacific Empire.” See “1932 Concept of Golden Gate Air Terminal on Shoals,” sfo Museum. 8. Henry V. Hubbard, Miller McClintock, and Frank B. Williams, Airports: Their Location, Administration and Legal Basis (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1930), 20–36. See also sae Journal 22 (1928) and Aviation 24 (1928); and U.S. Department of Commerce, Aeronautics Branch, Report of Committee on Airport Zoning and Eminent Domain (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 18 December 1930), 2. 9. Proceedings (San Francisco: San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 1933), 215. 10. They included the Columbus Civic Club, Haight-Ashbury Improvement Association, Property Owners’ Association of North Beach, Eureka Valley Promotion Association, and the California Court. “Civic Groups Boost Yerba Buena Air Site,” San Francisco Chronicle (28 December 1932), 17. Rossi prevailed upon Governor James Rolph, previously San Francisco’s mayor, who granted 720 acres of submerged land to the city in June 1933. In fact, Rolph had set up Mills Field as a temporary site and had been a prominent booster of finding a permanent site for the airport. 11. “Fair to Mark Completion of Spans Planned,” San Francisco Chronicle (13 July 1933), 5. The first proposal for a bridge celebration came in March 1933, but it was not geographically specific. It was first published in September 1933. See J. E. Dixon to Alfred Cleary (1 March 1933); and J. E. Dixon to Editor, SF News (18 September 1933), both in ggie Correspondence, 1934, SFPL. 12. The most ambitious counterproposal was the South Basin. See “Synopsis of the South Basin Site,” by the South Basin World’s Fair Association, Vertical File, ggie, sfpl. 13. Report to J. W. Mailliard, Jr., from Advisory Planning Committee for the Bridge Celebration Founding Committee [1934], p. 4, William G. Merchant Collection, 1934–1941 (hereafter Merchant), EDA. 14. Ibid.

215

15. “Site Proposed for 1937 Bridge Fair,” San Francisco Chronicle (27 May 1934), 11.

mation Project (manuscript, 1937), Bancroft. See also the lively account in James and Weller, Treasure Island.

16. W. P. Day and George Kelham, “Report on Investigation of Sites for a Proposed Exposition to Commemorate the Completion of the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco–Oakland Bridge” (5 July 1934), 2–3, Merchant, eda.

27. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Yerba Buena Shoal Reclamation Project, 3. Unless otherwise specified, details of the island’s construction come from this source.

17. Ibid., 3. 18. Ibid., 3–8. 19. For some of the political wrangling that went on alongside the Day-Kelham report, see Board of Supervisors, Proceedings (1935), 399, 1099–1100. 20. The Great Depression stalled the construction of the airport, but Meigs Field was eventually built there in the late 1940s. 21. While little more than a rectangular landing field at first, one of the corners was chamfered like Treasure Island. 22. In 1927, D. R. Lane, one of the Chamber’s members, flew the western airmail route and wrote a series of articles about the airports he saw for San Francisco Business. He found Portland’s airport “most striking,” in part because its financial situation resembled that of San Francisco’s. Lane was especially enamored of the creative and spectacular reclamation of land so near the downtown. D. R. Lane, “The Airport Problems of Other Cities,” San Francisco Business (9 February 1927), 8, 18, 21.

NOTES TO PAGES 31–83

23. The Public Works Administration considered supporting Armstrong’s research in 1933, when he built a scale model of the project. “Transatlantic Seadrome Design by E. R. Armstrong,” Architectural Record 76 (November 1934), 344.

216

24. For example, see “Plan for a Floating Airport by Henri Defrasse,” Architecture (Société centrale des architectes, France), 41 (15 June 1928), 185–186; P. W. White, “Bridging the Ocean with Man-Made Islands,” American Magazine 208 (November 1929), 46–49; and L. Salamanca, “Way Stations on the Ocean,” National Republic 18 (November 1930), 16–17. 25. “Working for Peaceful Commerce in the Pacific,” San Francisco Business (14 September 1927), 6. 26. For a detailed history of the building of the island, see U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Yerba Buena Shoal Recla-

28. Ibid., 11.

on the south side of the island because the “prevailing west wind,” as Frick explained, “would carry the deafening noise of the motors tuning up, etc., away from the terminal—which would be very desirable.” 5. James and Weller, 28–29. 6. Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. “zone” (accessed 5 July 2011).

29. John Stehlin, “Green Urbanism on Shifting Ground: Stubbornly Material Traces and the Utopianism of the Blank Slate on San Francisco’s Treasure Island,” p. 5, paper presented at the 2010 International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments conference, Beirut, Lebanon. Thanks to John Stehlin for sharing his paper with me.

7. See Neil Harris, “Great American Fairs,” 111–131.

30. John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 14. See also Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), xi.

11. World War I broke the string of fairs. In the 1920s, American cities mysteriously neglected to stage a single international exposition.

31. Findlay, Magic Lands, 14. 32. Lotchin, “The Darwinian City,” 360–362. 33. Ibid., 369. 34. Ibid. 35. Others have detailed the legacy of the fair. See, especially, Anne Schnoebelen, Treasures: Splendid Survivors of the Golden Gate International Exposition (Berkeley: ggie Research Associates, 1991). On Treasure Island, see Jason Pipes, San Francisco’s Treasure Island (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2007). 36. Lotchin, “The Darwinian City,” 375.

CHAPTER 2 1. Robert J. Clark, “Louis Christian Mullgardt and the Court of the Ages,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 21, no. 4 (December 1962), 171. 2. Ibid. 3. Brechin, “Sailing to Byzantium.”� 4. Edward Frick, Arthur Brown, Jr.’s partner (and his chief draftsman for the fair), sent him an early sketch plan in December 1935 on which the prevailing winds were prominently drawn with an arrow and labeled. Frick to Brown (26 December 1935), abj, Bancroft. Frick and Brown’s considerations went beyond the fair. They chose to place the terminal

8. Ibid., 115. 9. Gillette, “White City, Capital City.” 10. Kelham was not alone. Arthur Brown, Jr., recalled the image of a city rebuilt out of the ashes of destruction by placing a Phoenix atop his Tower of the Sun.

12. Harris, “Great American Fairs,” 129. 13. Ibid., 115. 14. James and Weller, Treasure Island, 46. The far-flung model homes tour is the counterpoint to the fair’s main thrust. 15. Many of the architects of the earlier fair had died or were inactive, including Louis Mullgardt; Willis Polk; John Galen Howard; McKim, Mead, and White; Carrère and Hastings; and Henry Bacon. A mix of local and national architects, most of them had played important roles in the major American expositions since the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. 16. Pflueger and Edward Frick had been trained at the San Francisco Architecture Club, where Arthur Brown, Jr., was the patron of one of the ateliers. 17. In fact, the image is undated, but its early date is assured by the fact that a “village” and amphitheater sit where the terminal and hangars would be. By late 1935, these would become fixed parts of the plan around which the rest would have to be fitted. 18. Jeffrey Tilman, Arthur Brown, Jr.: Progressive Classicist (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 156–159. 19. Howard F. Gillette has shown the fertile relationship between the Chicago exposition of 1893 and the development of the City Beautiful Movement in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Brown’s formative training came in these years, and his first great built work enacted City Beautiful ideals in San Francisco’s Civic Center, where he built the City Hall. Gillette, “White City, Capital City.”

20. These quotes come from Pflueger’s private memoranda from the meetings. See Memorandum, 5 August 1935, Pflueger (courtesy John Pflueger). 21. Memorandum, 24 July 1935, Pflueger. He apparently borrowed indiscreetly and without credit and recorded only those minutes that supported his position, which is why Pflueger kept careful notes. Memorandum, 5 August 1935, Pflueger. 22. Memorandum, 5 August 1935, Pflueger. Brown’s trip to Europe remains a mystery. He had no official business there and stayed on for weeks while the commission was left to its work without him. 23. Ibid. 24. Memorandum, 6 August 1935, Pflueger. 25. The account is taken from Lisa D. Schrenk, Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago’s 1933–34 World’s Fair (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 69–70. 26. Ibid. 27. Memorandum, 6 August 1935, Pflueger. 28. Arthur Brown, Jr., “The Architectural Planning of the Exposition,” manuscript, abj, Bancroft. See also Edward Frick’s letters to Brown, abj, Bancroft. 29. Frick to Brown (26 August 1935), ABJ, Bancroft. 30. See the letters from Frick to Brown in August, September, and November of 1935, abj, Bancroft. 31. Frick to Brown (19 November 1935), abj, Bancroft.

scape architects. Thomas Church worked both with Brown and Weihe, Bella Worm with Kelham, Mark Daniels with Hobart and Pflueger, and Sturtevant with Merchant. Julius Girod worked on the vast planting scheme under John McLaren, who was best known for his work at Golden Gate Park. 40. Danilo Udovicki-Selb, “Le Corbusier and the Paris Exhibition of 1937: The Temps Nouveaux Pavilion,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56, no. 1 (March 1997), 42–63. 41. Timothy Pflueger, Memorandum (4 March 1936), Pflueger. 42. Waverly Lowell suggested this comparison.

38. The architects’ fees were settled, as well. They would each received fifteen thousand dollars. Frick to Brown (19 December 1935), abj, Bancroft. 39. While the architects had authority over the landscape of their areas, they each were paired with consulting land-

12. Talbot F. Hamlin, “World’s Fairs, 1939 Model,” Pencil Points 19 (November 1938), 683. 13. Ibid.

16. Talbot F. Hamlin, “Some Fair Comparisons,” Pencil Points 20 (1 October 1939): 647.

45. See his sketch of 19 November 1937, abj, Bancroft. 46. W. G. Pigeon, a draftsman in Kelham’s office, was in charge. In Chicago, Raymond Hood had introduced the idea of creating a twenty-eight-foot clay model so that the architects could easily experiment with changes. Schrenk, Building a Century of Progress, 70. 47. To my knowledge, the originals are all lost. 48. Trained as an architect, Bonestell worked in Willis Polk’s office and then in various firms on the East Coast. He returned to the Bay Area in 1938, worked on the fair, and then moved to Hollywood to become a matte artist.

CHAPTER 3

3. Schrenk, Building a Century of Progress, 82.

37. Ibid.

11. The reference was to Caen’s own description of San Francisco as Baghdad-by-the-Bay. Herb Caen, “Baghdad-by-the-Bay,” reprinted in Baghdad-by-the-Bay (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1949).

44. Carrére quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 132.

33. Fremdling to Brown (15 November 1935), abj, Bancroft.

36. Frick to Brown (6 December 1935), abj, Bancroft.

10. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 65.

1. Frick to Brown (19 December 1935), abj, Bancroft.

35. Ibid.

9. Harris, “Museums,” 68.

43. Timothy Pflueger, Memorandum (4 March 1936), Pflueger.

32. The sketch was widely published. See Architect and Engineer (January 1936), 34.

34. Timothy Pflueger, Memorandum (17 February 1936), Pflueger.

8. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, introduction; and Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex.”

2. Tilman, Arthur Brown, Jr., 183–186.

4. F. A. Gutheim, “The Buildings and the Plan,” Magazine of Art 32 (March 1939), 135. 5. Ibid., 4. 6. Neil Harris, “Great American Fairs,” 129. David Gebhard and Harriette Von Breton called the ggie part of the “ ‘veneer refrigerator’ phase of the Moderne,” in Architecture in California, 1868–1968 (Santa Barbara: Regents of the University of California, 1968). 7. Harris, “Museums,” 68.

15. Ibid., 66.

17. Ibid., 642, 643. 18. Kelham quoted posthumously in Paul Conant, “Never-Never Land in San Francisco,” Pencil Points 18 (June 1937): 377. 19. Ibid. 20. Joseph Henry Jackson, A Trip to the San Francisco Exposition with Bobby and Betty (New York: McBride and Co., 1939), 16. 21. Reinhardt, Treasure Island, 42. 22. Ibid. The original description comes from “Pacific Pageant,” Time 33 (2 January 1939), http:// content.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,760554,00.html (accessed 13 July 2012). 23. Irving F. Morrow, “Exposition Ode—San Francisco, 1939,” Architect and Engineer (October 1939): 51. 24. Hamlin, “Some Fair Comparisons,” 646. 25. Tom White, “Light Glorifies the Golden Gate Exposition,” manuscript, abj, Bancroft. Glyptal is a synthetic resin. 26. Ibid., 2. 27. Schrenk, Building a Century of Progress, 103. Stanton was an architect who trained under both Bernard Maybeck and Louis Hobart. 28. Ibid, 103–104. 29. In fact, Kelham worked out the initial scheme with Dickerson and informed the commission after the fact. Timothy Pflueger chaffed at the “queer” idea: “How a man can plan a court and not plan the lighting is beyond me,”

217

but the lighting lent the fair continuity. Timothy Pflueger, Memorandum (22 July 1936), Pflueger Papers. 30. A. F. Dickerson, “Color, Light and Structure at the Golden Gate Exposition,” New York, 1939, unpaginated, Bancroft. 31. David Nye, “Electrifying Expositions: 1880–1939,” in Rydell and Gwinn, Fair Representations, 141. 32. Ibid., 151–52. 33. Ibid., 152. 34. Ibid., 154. 35. Ibid., 155. 36. White, “Light Glorifies the Golden Gate Exposition,” 2. 37. Dickerson, “Color, Light, and Structure.” 38. “World’s Fair Builders—Ernest E. Weihe,” Architect and Engineer 133 (June 1938), 47. 39. Reinhardt, Treasure Island, 81–82. Howdahs are large seats with canopies that allow people to ride on the backs of elephants. 40. Myra A. Gates Scrapbooks, chs. 41. See sketch, 15 December 1936, abj, Bancroft. 42. Conant, “Never-Never Land,” 390. A veteran of the ppie, Weihe won the Paris prize and took a diploma from the École in 1919. 43. Etienne-Louis Boullée (1728–1799) was a French visionary architect of the late eighteenth century. 44. Weihe, quoted in Conant, “NeverNever Land,” 390. 45. Hamlin wrote of the freedom enjoyed by the California architect in “Some Fair Comparisons,” 642; the quote is from Weihe, quoted in Conant, “Never-Never Land,” 390. 46. Conant, “Never-Never Land,” 381.

NOTES TO PAGES 83–131

47. Jo Ann Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1990), xv–xvi.

218

48. See the entry for “Elephant” in B. A. Botkin, ed., A Treasure of American Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the People (New York: Crown, 1944). Gerald Conti has written about the much older roots of the phrase in ancient war. See Conti, “Seeing the Elephant,” Civil War Times Illustrated (June 1984), available at JonahWorld!, http://wesclark.com/jw/elephant.html (accessed May 25, 2010).

49. Levy, They Saw the Elephant, xv–xvi. 50. Conant, “Never-Never Land,” 390. 51. David Gebhard, The Elusive Image: Regionalism in Twentieth Century Architecture (Christchurch, N.Z.: University of Canterbury, 1993); Vincent B. Canizaro, ed., Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).

65. Timothy Pflueger, Memorandum (6 May 1936), Pflueger. 66. “Island of Palaces, Parks May Have Magic Look but Hard Work Built It,” World’s Fair Edition, San Francisco News (6 July 1938), 14. 67. See abj, folder 240, Bancroft. 68. See Jeff Tilman’s fine description and analysis of the tower Arthur Brown, Jr., 195–196.

52. Such an approach would come under scholarly scrutiny in the following generation. See Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

69. abj, folder 254, Bancroft.

53. Pflueger was a member of the San Francisco Architectural Club, having served as its director in 1914.

72. Hamlin, “Some Fair Comparisons,” 647.

54. Therese Poletti, Art Deco San Francisco: The Architecture of Timothy Pflueger (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). 55. James and Weller, Treasure Island, 35. Weihe’s great western wall blocked the wind too well, and the “prayer curtain” had to be motorized to achieve the effect. Reinhardt, Treasure Island, 83; Juliet James, The Meaning of the Courts of the Golden Gate Exposition 1939 (Berkeley: Professional Press, 1939), 8. 56. Timothy Pflueger, Memorandum (22 July 1936), Pflueger. 57. B. J. S. Cahill, “Architect Visualizes the San Francisco of Tomorrow,” Architect and Engineer (April 1939), 46. 58. The Brutons could have read about the dig in any number of periodicals, including Erich Schmidt, “Persepolis: Two New Reliefs Come to Light,” Magazine of Art 30 (January 1937), 13–16. 59. These include the Spanish mission at Tucumcari, the Mayan temple at Chichén Itzá, the Incan “Gateway of the Sun” at Tiahuanaco, an Alaskan totem pole, an Aztec calendar, and the Golden Gate Bridge giving way to the modern city. 60. The specific figures and buildings are drawn from James, Meaning of the Courts. 61. Ibid., 13. 62. Letter to Pflueger (23 February 1939; signature illegible), Pflueger. 63. James, Meaning of the Courts, 10. 64. Timothy Pflueger, Memorandum (17 February 1936), Pflueger.

70. abj, box 52, folder 12, Bancroft. 71. Harris C. Allen, “Adolescence of an Exposition; a Compromise Becomes Conquest,” Architect and Engineer 128 (February 1937), 15.

73. Walter Dorwin Teague, “Unofficial and Confidential Comments on the San Francisco Exposition for Mr. Whalen, Commander Flanigan, Members of the Committee on Architecture and Physical Planning, the Members of the Board of Design and Certain Others, None of Whom May Be Interested,” typescript (1 March 1939), Roger K. Larson Papers, Fresno. 74. Timothy Pflueger, Memorandum (4 March 1936), Pflueger. 75. James, Meaning of the Courts, 19. 76. Myra A. Gates Scrapbooks, chs. 77. Ghats are ritual stairs built on the banks of the Ganges and other holy rivers in South Asia that pilgrims use as they prepare to take ablutions in the river. 78. David Gebhard, Roger Montgomery, et al., A Guide to Architecture in San Francisco, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1976), 17. 79. Leslie Mandelson Freudenheim and Elisabeth Susman, Building with Nature: Roots of the San Francisco Bay Region Tradition (Santa Barbara, ca: Peregrine Smith, 1974); Richard Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Gebhard et al., Guide to Architecture. 80. Gebhard and Von Breton, Architecture in California, 15. 81. Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present (New York: Princeton Architectural Press; Zwemmer, 1994), 149.

82. Ibid., 156, 211. 83. See John F. Harbeson, The Study of Architectural Design (New York: Pencil Points Press, 1927), 91–102.

3. George Creel, Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1947), 309. 4. Ibid.

84. Timothy Pflueger, Memorandum (4 March 1936), Pflueger.

5. Timothy Pflueger, Memorandum (4 March 1936), Pflueger.

85. Stephen C. Pepper, “The Architecture of the Fair,” San Francisco Art Association Bulletin 5 (May 1939), 4.

6. Leslie Van Ness Denman to Mr. Welles (16 May 1936), General Records of the Department of State, nara.

86. Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

7. George Creel to Leslie Van Nest Denman (24 May 1937), Pflueger.

87. See, for example, Francisco Mujica, The History of the Skyscraper (New York: Archaeology and Architecture Press, 1930). 88. James and Weller, Treasure Island, 26. 89. Esther Born, The New Architecture of Mexico (New York: Architectural Record, W. Morrow and Company, 1937). 90. Robert Alexander Gonzalez, Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). The myth of a shared architectural heritage based on a common genius loci would continue through Vincent Scully’s American Architecture and Urbanism (1969). He opened the book with an apology for excluding South America and Mesoamerica as an “artificial” restriction “foolishly sanctioned by historical custom” because “all the architectures of this hemisphere can be shown to exhibit common hemispherical traits.” These included “a vast landscape,” violent encounter with indigenous populations, racial crimes, colonialism, and remoteness from “the centers of high civilization,” as well as feelings of “liberation and of loss.” All of this amounted to “uneasiness” and “restlessness,” a “distrust of place,” which he saw most intensely exhibited in the United States. Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (1969; repr., New York: Praeger, 1976), 12.

8. Hamlin, “Some Fair Comparisons,” 646. 9. Ibid., 647. 10. Hamlin to Pflueger, undated meeting notes, Pflueger. 11. Gutheim, “The Buildings and the Plan,” 135–136.

1. F. A. Gutheim, “The Buildings and the Plan,” Magazine of Art 32 (March 1939), 135. 2. Ibid. Art historian Alfred Frankenstein agreed: “The Pacific Basin area is, from the architectural point of view, the soundest unit at the Fair.” Alfred Frankenstein, “Pageant of the Pacific,” Magazine of Art 32 (March 1939), 134.

21. Frederick A. Gutheim, “Federal Participation in Two World’s Fairs,” Public Opinion Quarterly 3, no. 4 (October 1939), 618. 22. Gebhard et al., Guide to Architecture, 17. 23. Marc Treib and Dorothée Imbert, Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 174, note 9.

12. Richard Amaro, “History of the Federal Building in Balboa Park,” San Diego History Center, http://www. sandiegohistory.org/bpbuildings/federal. htm (accessed 18 July 2012).

24. James and Weller, Treasure Island, 74.

13. Pflueger had tried similar things before. He turned the front of his Paramount Theater (1931) in Oakland into a gigantic mural. And he had worked out the basic composition at Washington High School in San Francisco (ca. 1934), where a long mural runs along the wall of a sunken field in front of the building. It would be just one more step to splash the mural across the building’s entire façade. But the Federal Building demanded complete integration of the building and murals with its public space.

27. Carlos Emmons Cummings, East Is East and West Is West: Some Observations on the World’s Fairs of 1939 by One Whose Main Interest Is in Museums (East Aurora, N.Y.: Buffalo Museum of Science, 1940), 126.

14. They were painted by Herman Volz, a thirty-six-year old WPA artist. The quote is from Hamlin, “Some Fair Comparisons,” 646.

1. The regional groupings were Shasta Cascade (Otto A. Deichmann), Redwood Empire (Maybeck and Merchant), Sacramento and Lake Tahoe (Henry Howard), San Joaquin Valley (Ernest Born), Alta California (Ernest Born), Alameda and Contra Costa Counties (Irving F. Morrow), Mission Trails (Harold Edmonson and Robert Stanton), and San Francisco (Clarence Tantau). Working blueprints for these buildings remain in Sacramento; the original drawings and correspondence are missing.

15. “Design for World’s Fair Federal Building,” Architect and Engineer (March 1938), 32. 16. Fred Jones, “Architect’s Day at the Golden Gate Exposition,” Architect and Engineer (October 1939): 51. 17. Pflueger. 18. Ibid.

CHAPTER 4

on the former’s Stanford Hospital. Pflueger’s basic scheme for the Federal Building—light colonnades and deep overhangs as screens for a monumental pile broken with internal courts—can be found in a number of Stone’s later works, most prominently his U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and the State University of New York, Albany.

19. Stone specifically mentioned the Bay Area Style in his autobiography, The Evolution of an Architect (New York: Horizon Press, 1962), 68, 91. 20. Howard Myers to Pflueger (24 April 1940), Pflueger. Myers, the publisher of Architectural Forum, helped organize the 1940 architectural exhibit with “a half dozen in our office plus Ed Stone and a half-dozen of his geniuses.” Stone would later be associated with Pflueger

25. Ibid. 74. 26. Gutheim, “Federal Participation,” 620.

28. Wurster to Henderson (3 June 1935), www, eda. 29. Conant, “Never-Never Land,” 390.

CHAPTER 5

2. See Tilman, Arthur Brown, Jr. Bakewell & Brown dissolved in 1927 into two firms: Bakewell & Weihe and Brown & Frick. 3. For commentary on the uses of these styles in California, see Gebhard, et al., Guide to Architecture, 18–19. 4. Memo, C. E. Seage to Irving Morrow (10 February 1938), Morrow, EDA. 5. Ibid.

219

6. Both Ernest and Esther Born (née Baum) graduated from the architecture program at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1922 and 1926, respectively. 7. Gutheim, “The Buildings and the Plan,” 135. 8. Architect and Engineer (February 1939), 52. 9. Gutheim, “The Buildings and the Plan,” 139.

2. Ibid., 23. 3. Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 7. 4. Ibid., 180. 5. Ibid., 315. 6. Rydell, “The 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition,” 342.

11. San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, San Francisco (undated), Larson/ Kaeck Collection, Fresno.

7. Ray Lyman Wilbur, essay in Miguel Covarrubias, “Pageant of the Pacific by Miguel Covarrubias” (Pacific House, 1940), Fairs and Expositions Collection, 1893–1967, EDA.

13. Isotypes are now ubiquitous and have been so thoroughly detached from their roots in quantitative information that we have lost touch with how they were transformed into the lingua franca of pictorial communication in public places like airports, highways, and bathrooms. More recently, architects such as Rem Koolhaas have rediscovered and deployed them as references to an earlier period of modernism. 14. Irving F. Morrow, untitled typescript, p. 2, Morrow, EDA. 15. Ibid., 3. 16. Ibid. 17. Irving F. Morrow, “The Alameda– Contra Costa Counties Building,” typescript, Morrow, EDA. 18. Ibid. 19. Morrow, untitled typescript, 3. 20. Marian Simpson to Mrs. Kelley (16 February 1939). Morrow, EDA. 21. Clifford E. Wolfe, “The Golden Gate International Exposition, 1939–40,” typescript, n.p., Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library. 22. Ibid., 60. NOTES TO PAGES 131–184

1. Edward N. Kaufman, “The Architectural Museum from World’s Fair to Restoration Village,” Assemblage 9 (June 1989), 21–39.

10. California at the Golden Gate International Exposition (California Commission for the GGIE, 1941), 31, 58.

12. Nader Vossoughian, Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers; London: Art Data, 2008).

220

CHAPTER 6

23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 56. 25. San Diego, in particular, promoted the idea of California living with dioramas about sports, swimming, fishing, and yachting. California at the Golden Gate International Exposition, 70. 26. Gebhard and Von Breton, Architecture in California, 6.

25. “Pavilion of French Indo-China,” Ephemera Collection, CHS. 26. Ibid. 27. Records of the Department of Anthropology, U.C. Berkeley, Bancroft. I have yet to find an image of Frick’s design for this building. 28. Rydell, “The 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition,” 349.

8. Nye, “European Self-Representation,” 55.

29. As late as the 1920s, “there were no mechanisms for the systematic study of either Asia or the Pacific—no graduate programs, no research centers, no professional associations, no regular conferences, and no substantial library collections.” Paul F. Hooper, “The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies,” Pacific Affairs 61, no. 1 (1988), 98.

9. Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 147.

30. Ibid.

10. Wilbur essay, “Pageant of the Pacific.”

31. Its origins date to 1919, when the YMCA proposed a conference in Honolulu on the contribution that Christianity had made to a “common basis of understanding” among the Pacific peoples. From these roots in missionary imperialism, the idea of a unified field of study of Pacific culture languished for some years, but was revived in the 1920s when the conference became a regular event and a permanent institute was organized in 1925. Ibid.

11. The Japan Pavilion Welcomes World Visitors to Treasure Island, imprint (s.1.: s.n., 1939?), Bancroft. 12. Sakurai immigrated to the United States after the war. Ibid. 13. Neil Harris, “All the World a Melting Pot? Japan at American Fairs, 1876–1904,” in Cultural Excursions, 29–55. 14. Ibid., 35. 15. Ibid., 39. 16. The Japan Pavilion Welcomes World Visitors. 17. James and Weller, Treasure Island, 110. 18. Ibid. 19. The Netherlands had nationalized the colonies of the Dutch East Indies in 1800. It would lose the colony to Japan in 1942. 20. James and Weller, Treasure Island, 113. 21. Kaufman, “The Architectural Museum,” 24. 22. James and Weller, Treasure Island, 113. 23. “Johore’s Pavilion at the Golden Gate Exposition,” Straits Times (2 August 1939), 20. 24. The two French architects designed the French pavilion, as well. Spencer was park architect at Yosemite National Park and later campus architect at Stanford University.

32. Ibid., 108. 33. Among its Bay Area members the ipr counted Jean McDuffie, Hazel Pedlar Faulkner, Leslie Van Ness Denman, and Emma L. McLaughlin, all activists who were part of San Francisco’s social and cultural elite. “Working for Peaceful Commerce in the Pacific,” San Francisco Business (14 September 1927), 6. 34. The theme dominated the IPR conference held in Yosemite in 1936, which Bay Area members of the ipr helped organize. See the conference proceedings, W. L. Holland and Kate L. Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936). 35. Hooper, “Institute of Pacific Relations,” 112–113. 36. Wilbur essay in “Pageant of the Pacific.” 37. Ibid. 38. John H. Oakie, Memorandum to Women’s Committee ggie—Mrs. Faulkner, Mrs. McDuffie, Mrs. Denman (June 1937), McLaughlin, Bancroft.

39. Women’s General Committee, typescript, McLaughlin, Bancroft. 40. Ibid. See also Minutes of the Women’s Central Committee, 26 May 1937, McLaughlin, Bancroft. In fact, the idea for a Pacific House predates the fair. See “Proposed ‘China House,’ or ‘House of the Orient’ for Pacific Coast Ports” (29 September 1934), and Ray Lyman Wilbur to President Mailliard (21 November 1934), in Ray Lyman Wilbur Papers, Hoover Institution. Some of its organizers spent years trying to make the Pacific House into a permanent institution. 41. John H. Oakie to Mrs. Duncan McDuffie, 27 July 1939, McLaughlin, Bancroft. By the end of the first season, Emma McLaughlin could write: “Pacific House is really but a visual presentation of what the Institute started to do eleven years ago under you, Doctor Wilbur.” Minutes, Committee on the Pacific Area (4 October 1939), McLaughlin, Bancroft. 42. “The Coming Era of the Pacific,” typescript, McLaughlin, Bancroft. 43. At the 1936 Yosemite conference (see note 34), talks by pioneering geographer Carl Sauer, anthropologist A. L. Kroeber, economist Theodore Kreps, and others followed. Leading figures in their fields spoke about science, technology, food, housing, demographics, travel, communications, language, literature, art, and public relations. 44. The platform of a quasi-Asian building in one of Merchant and Maybeck’s early paintings for the fair suggests that they had been playing with the plan for some time. See Maybeck, Roll 30, EDA. 45. “S. F. Fair Theme Building Will Link Pacific Nations,” Records of the Works Projects Administration, NARA. 46. Roland Marchand, “Corporate Imagery and Popular Education: World’s Fairs and Expositions in the United States, 1893–1940,” in David E. Nye and Carl Pedersen, eds., Consumption and American Culture (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1991), 18–33. 47. James and Weller, Treasure Island, 102. 48. Minutes of Meeting, Committee on Pacific Area, 4 October 1939, William Denman Papers, Bancroft. 49. Drawn by Adrienne Egenhoff, it is called the Aitoff Projection. 50. Thanks to Patricia Morton and Katherine Papineau for pointing me to the tradition of the tableau des races.

51. If parts of inland Asia and Australia appear sparser, they do so on account of their relative population or their distance from the Pacific. 52. Covarrubias was chosen in part because of his vast experience in Bali and China, including his extensive study Island of Bali (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), which had just the sort of drawings and paintings that made his work interesting to the fair. See also Minutes, Meeting of the Committee on Pacific Area (15 December 1938), Records of the Department of Anthropology, Bancroft. 53. Wilbur essay in “A Pageant of the Pacific.” 54. Knight made endless lists of plants for the fair, checked them frequently, and updated the horticultural exhibit throughout the two seasons. Geraldine Knight Scott Collection, 1914–1988, EDA. 55. Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, all fearful for their future, presented interior exhibits in 1939. Belgium, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, Norway, Russia, and Switzerland added exhibits in 1940. 56. Nye, “European Self-Representation,” 46. 57. Ibid., 61. 58. I thank anthropologist Nelson Graburn for pointing out the new importance of the colonies after May 1940. 59. Nye, “European Self-Representation,” 61. 60. Ibid., 63. 61. It is unknown why a Brazilian architect didn’t design the building. It pales in comparison to Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa’s cutting-edge Brazil Building at the New York fair. 62. See Philip L. Goodwin, Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652–1942 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943). 63. Medina Lasansky, “Urban Editing, Historic Preservation, and Political Rhetoric: The Fascist Redesign of San Gimignano,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63, no. 3 (September 2004): 320–353. 64. Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

CHAPTER 7 1. The high praise it won in its own day, its unusual nature and site, and the extensive documentation on the building make the club worthy of a full chapter. 2. Gutheim, “The Buildings and the Plan,” 138. 3. Marc Treib, ed., An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and in the same volume, David Gebhard, “William Wurster and His California Contemporaries: The Idea of Regionalism and Soft Modernism,” 164–183. 4. See Marc Treib, “The Feeling of Function,” in Treib, An Everyday Modernism, 12–83. 5. Wurster promoted an equitable and open process for including the younger architectural talent of the Bay Area. He wrote civic leaders and businesspeople who he thought could influence the fair. William Wurster to Charles B. Henderson (3 June 1935), WWW, EDA. 6. William Wurster to Leland Cutler (20 May 1935), WWW, EDA. 7. Karen J. Blair, “The Limits of Sisterhood: The Woman’s Building in Seattle, 1908–1921,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 8, no. 1 (1984): 45. 8. Ibid. 9. Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 261–67; Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: mit Press, 1981), 176. 10. Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” Feminist Studies 5 (Fall 1979), 514–515. 11. Karen Ann McNeill, “Building the California Women’s Movement: Architecture, Space, and Gender in the Life and Work of Julia Morgan” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2006), 239. 12. Ibid., 236. 13. Mary Pepchinski, “The Woman’s Building and the World Exhibitions: Exhibition Architecture and Conflicting Feminine Ideals at European and American World Exhibitions, 1873–1915,” 9, http://www.tucottbus.de/theoriederarchitektur/wolke/eng/Subjects/001/

221

Pepchinski/pepchinski.htm (accessed 21 March 2011). See also Jeanne Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981). 14. Cheryl R. Ganz, The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: A Century of Progress (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 100. 15. The New York World’s Fair Bulletin 1, no. 8 (December 1937), 20–21, quoted in Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy,” 522. 16. By the 1930s, this tack followed a century of using the house as the model for women’s institutions of all varieties, an architectural default that spoke to fears of women in the public sphere. 17. McLaughlin was active in the American Association of University Women, California League of Business and Professional Women, Chinese Farming Relief Committee of California, Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement, and Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, as well as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Institute of Pacific Relations (ipr).

30. William Wurster to Lockwood and Elizabeth de Forest (20 January 1939), WWW, EDA.

50. José Luis Sert, Fernand Léger, and Sigfried Giedion, “Nine Points on Monumentality,” in Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993), 29–30.

31. The two would immediately collaborate again on Stern Hall at UC Berkeley, commissioned by Rosalie Meyer Stern, another of the Bay Area’s civic leaders. The widow of Sigmund Stern, the president of Levi Strauss and Company, Stern served on the Entertainment Committee at the ggie, where she could have come to know Wurster. 32. Hamlin, “Some Fair Comparisons,” 647. 33. Meeting notes of the Architectural Committee of the Women’s Club House Association (28 January 1938), WWW, EDA. 34. Meeting notes of the Architectural Committee of the Women’s Club House Association (7 February 1938), WWW, EDA. 35. Ibid.

18. Minutes of the Women’s Central Committee (19 May 1937), McLaughlin, Bancroft. 19. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

38. William Wurster to Helen Russell (telegram, 4 February 1938), WWW, EDA.

22. Architectural Forum 67 (December 1937), 513. 23. In 1939 alone, Wurster designed alterations to the E. H. Heller house in Atherton and the Denman house in San Francisco, additions to the Russell ranch in Carmel Valley for Helen Crocker Russell, the Sugar Bowl Ski cabins for Evelyn Haas; and he also planned Park Hills, a subdivision in Berkeley for Jean McDuffie’s husband, Duncan McDuffie, who ran the development firm MasonMcDuffie.

NOTES TO PAGES 184–210

49. Gutheim, “The Buildings and the Plan,” 138.

36. Meeting notes of the Architectural Committee of the Women’s Club House Association (3 February 1938), WWW, EDA.

21. Minutes of the Women’s Central Committee (10 and 17 June 1937), McLaughlin, Bancroft.

222

29. Office note (23 February 1938), WWW, EDA.

24. Meeting notes of the Architectural Committee of the Women’s Club House Association (25 April 1938), WWW, EDA.

39. Meeting notes of the Architectural Committee of the Women’s Club House Association (7 February 1938), WWW, EDA. 40. Meeting notes of the Architectural Committee of the Women’s Club House Association (3 February 1938), WWW, EDA 41. Ibid. 42. Wurster, Notes on Meeting with Mr. Day (3 March 1938), WWW, EDA. 43. Meeting notes of the Architectural Committee of the Women’s Club (11 February 1938), WWW, EDA. 44. Gebhard and Von Breton, Architecture in California, 15.

25. Ibid.

45. Myra A. Gates Scrapbooks, CHS.

26. Ibid.

46. Treib, “The Feeling of Function,” 63.

27. Meeting notes of the Architectural Committee of the Women’s Club House Association (3 February 1938), WWW, EDA.

47. Udovicki-Selb, “Le Corbusier and the Paris Exhibition of 1937.”

28. Office note (24 February 1938) WWW, EDA.

48. “Yerba Buena Club Interiors Accent Gold, Silver Tones” (27 December 1938), Records of the Works Projects Administration, NARA.

CONCLUSION 1. National Garden Show: Golden Gate International Exposition 1940 (no publication information), p. 41, Fresno. 2. Mark Daniels, “Chinese Art for Golden Gate Fair,” Pencil Points 19 (January 1938): 16. 3. Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 115. 4. The scientific basis of racial categories is a major theme in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 137–142, 160–163. 5. Andrew M. Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), chapter 3. 6. Warren Susman, “The Culture of the Thirties,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 153. 7. Ibid., 154. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 155.

Works Cited

Records for the fair are abundant; records of its architecture are less so. Aside from its official reports and publicity, the fair corporation left no formal archive. Neither did the Architectural Commission, although some of the meeting notes, sparse as they are, can be found strewn through various collections. The fullest set of architectural documents from the fair belongs to the California Commission that built the California County buildings. Aside from hundreds of blueprints, most of which are technical in nature, little is known about the architects, the design process, or how this area was planned and designed. Both the Environmental Design Archives and The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, are rich sources for individual architects. Photographs and plans of the buildings, as well as sketches of unbuilt designs, form the main body of evidence.

Abbott, Carl. The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993. Airport Committee of the Board of Supervisors. San Francisco Airport: A Report. San Francisco: Airport Committee, Board of Supervisors, 1931. Allen, Harris C. “Adolescence of an Exposition: A Compromise Becomes Conquest.” Architect and Engineer 128 (February 1937). Barta, Peter I., Paul Allen Miller, Charles Platter, and David Shepherd, eds. Carnivalizing Difference: Bakhtin and the Other. London: Routledge, 2001. Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4 (Spring 1988). Bird, William Larry, Jr. “Better Living”: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935–1955. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Blair, Karen J. “The Limits of Sisterhood: The Woman’s Building in Seattle, 1908–1921.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 8, no. 1 (1984). 223

Born, Esther. The New Architecture of Mexico. New York: Architectural Record, W. Morrow and Company, 1937.

Creel, George. Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1947.

Botkin, B. A., ed. A Treasure of American Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the People. New York: Crown, 1944.

Cummings, Carlos Emmons. East Is East and West Is West: Some Observations on the World’s Fairs of 1939 by One Whose Main Interest Is in Museums. East Aurora, N.Y.: Buffalo Museum of Science, 1940.

Brechin, Gray. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. ———. “Sailing to Byzantium: The Architecture of the Panama Pacific International Exposition.” California History 62, no. 2 (Summer 1983). Brilliant, Mark. The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Caen, Herb. Baghdad-by-the-Bay. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1949. Cahill, B. J. S. “Architect Visualizes the San Francisco of Tomorrow.” Architect and Engineer (April 1939). The California Commission. California at the Golden Gate International Exposition. San Francisco: California Commission for the ggie, 1941. Canizaro, Vincent B., ed. Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007. Çelik, Zeynep. Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. “Civic Groups Boost Yerba Buena Air Site.” San Francisco Chronicle, December 28, 1932. Clark, Robert J. “Louis Christian Mullgardt and the Court of the Ages.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 21, no. 4 (December 1962).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conant, Paul. “Never-Never Land in San Francisco.” Pencil Points 18 (June 1937).

224

Conti, Gerald. “Seeing the Elephant.” Civil War Times Illustrated (June 1984). Covarrubias, Miguel. Island of Bali. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938.

Daniels, Mark. “Chinese Art for Golden Gate Fair.” Pencil Points 19 (January 1938). “Design for World’s Fair Federal Building.” Architect and Engineer (March 1938). Dohrmann, Fred. “The Future of the Waterfront—Aviation Landing and Elevated Highway.” Pacific Commerce (January 5, 1927). Duranti, Marco. “Utopia, Nostalgia, and World War at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair.” Journal of Contemporary History 41 no. 4 (October 2006). “Fair to Mark Completion of Spans Planned.” San Francisco Chronicle (July 13, 1933). Findlay, John M. Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Frankenstein, Alfred. “Pageant of the Pacific.” Magazine of Art 32 (March 1939). Freedman, Estelle. “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930.” Feminist Studies 5 (Fall 1979). Freudenheim, Leslie Mandelson, and Elisabeth Susman. Building with Nature: Roots of the San Francisco Bay Region Tradition. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1974. Ganz, Cheryl R. The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: A Century of Progress. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Gebhard, David. The Elusive Image: Regionalism in Twentieth Century Architecture. Christchurch, N.Z.: University of Canterbury, 1993. Gebhard, David, and Harriette Von Breton. Architecture in California, 1868–1968. Santa Barbara: Regents of the University of California, 1968. Gebhard, David, et al. A Guide to Architecture in San Francisco and Northern California. 2nd ed. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1976.

Gillette, Howard F., Jr. “White City, Capital City.” Chicago History 18 (1989–90). Gonzalez, Robert Alexander. Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Goodwin, Philip L. Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652–1942. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943. Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Groth, Paul. Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Gutheim, F. A. “The Buildings and the Plan,” Magazine of Art 32 (March 1939). ———. “Federal Participation in Two World’s Fairs.” Public Opinion Quarterly 3, no. 4 (October 1939). Hamlin, Talbot F. “California Fair Houses.” Pencil Points 20 (May 1939). ———. “Some Fair Comparisons.” Pencil Points 20, no. 1 (October 1939). ———. “World’s Fairs, 1939 Model.” Pencil Points 19 (November 1938). Harbeson, John F. The Study of Architectural Design. New York: Pencil Points Press, 1927. Harris, Neil. Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Hayden, Dolores. The Grand Domestic Revolution: History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. Cambridge: mit Press, 1981. Holland, W. L., and Kate L. Mitchell, eds. Problems of the Pacific, 1936. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936. Hooper, Paul F. “The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies.” Pacific Affairs 61, no. 1 (1988). Hubbard, Henry V., Miller McClintock, and Frank B. Williams. Airports: Their Location, Administration and Legal Basis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930.

“The International Exhibition: Its Purpose and Prospects.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (April 1862). Jackson, Joseph Henry. A Trip to the San Francisco Exposition with Bobby and Betty. New York: McBride and Co., 1939. James, Jack, and Earle Weller. Treasure Island: “The Magic City,” 1939–1940; The Story of the Golden Gate International Exposition. San Francisco: Pisani Printing and Publishing Co., 1941. James, Juliet. The Meaning of the Courts of the Golden Gate Exposition 1939. Berkeley: Professional Press, 1939. “Johore’s Pavilion at the Golden Gate Exposition.” Straits Times (August 2, 1939). Jones, Fred. “Architect’s Day at the Golden Gate Exposition.” Architect and Engineer (October 1939). Kasson, John E. Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Kaufman, Edward N. “The Architectural Museum from World’s Fair to Restoration Village.” Assemblage 9 (June 1989). Kroes, Rob, ed. The American West as Seen by Europeans and Americans. Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1989. Kroes, Rob, Robert Rydell, and D. F. J. Boscher, eds. Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993. Kruft, Hanno-Walter. A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present. New York: Princeton Architectural Press; Zwemmer, 1994. Lane, D. R. “The Airport Problems of Other Cities.” San Francisco Business (February 9 1927). Lasansky, Medina. “Urban Editing, Historic Preservation, and Political Rhetoric: The Fascist Redesign of San Gimignano.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63, no. 3 (September 2004). Levy, Jo Ann. They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1990. 225

Lotchin, Roger W. “The Darwinian City: The Politics of Urbanization in San Francisco between the World Wars.” Pacific Historical Review 48 no. 3 (August 1979). McNeill, Karen Ann. “Building the California Women’s Movement: Architecture, Space, and Gender in the Life and Work of Julia Morgan.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2006. Morrow, Irving F. “Exposition Ode—San Francisco, 1939.” Architect and Engineer (October 1939). Morton, Patricia A. Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris. Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2000. Mujica, Francisco. The History of the Skyscraper. New York: Archaeology and Architecture Press, 1930.

National Garden Show: Golden Gate International Exposition 1940 (no publication information). Nye, David E., and Carl Pedersen, eds. Consumption and American Culture. Amsterdam: vu University Press, 1991. Ockman, Joan, ed. Architecture Culture, 1943– 1968: A Documentary Anthology. New York: Columbia Books on Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993. Otero-Pailos, Jorge. Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. “Pacific Pageant.” Time 33 (January 1939). Pepchinski, Mary. “The Woman’s Building and the World Exhibitions: Exhibition Architecture and Conflicting Feminine Ideals at European and American World Exhibitions, 1873–1915.” http://www.tucottbus.de/theoriederarchitektur/ wolke/eng/Subjects/001/Pepchinski/pepchinski. htm (accessed 21 March 2011).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pepper, Stephen C. “The Architecture of the Fair.” San Francisco Art Association Bulletin (May 5, 1939).

226

“Plan for a Floating Airport by Henri Defrasse.” Architecture (Société centrale des architectes, France) 41 (June 15, 1928).

Poletti, Therese. Art Deco San Francisco: The Architecture of Timothy Pflueger. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Polledri, Paolo. Visionary San Francisco. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Prestel, 1990. Post, Pamela Lee. “East Meets West: The Model Homes Exhibits at the 1939–1940 New York and San Francisco World’s Fairs.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2000. Reinhard, Richard. “The Other Fair.” American Heritage 40, no. 4 (May–June 1989). ———. Treasure Island: San Francisco’s Exposition Years. San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1973. Rubens, Lisa. “The 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair: The New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Pacific Basin.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2004. Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Rydell, Robert W., and Laura Burd Schiavo, eds. Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Rydell, Robert W., and Nancy Gwinn, eds. Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994. Salamanca, L. “Way Stations on the Ocean.” National Republic (November 18, 1930). Schmidt, Erich. “Persepolis: Two New Reliefs Come to Light.” Magazine of Art 30 (January 1937). Schnoebelen, Anne. Treasures: Splendid Survivors of the Golden Gate International Exposition. Berkeley: ggie Research Associates, 1991. Schrenk, Lisa D. Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago’s 1933–34 World’s Fair. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Scully, Vincent. American Architecture and Urbanism. 1969. Reprint, New York: Praeger, 1976. Shanken, Andrew M. 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Stone, Edward Durell. The Evolution of an Architect. New York: Horizon Press, 1962. Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Tilman, Jeffrey. Arthur Brown, Jr.: Progressive Classicist. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. “Transatlantic Seadrome Design by E. R. Armstrong.” Architectural Record 76 (November 1934). Treib, Marc, and Dorothée Imbert. Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Treib, Marc, ed. An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Udovicki-Selb, Danilo. “Le Corbusier and the Paris Exhibition of 1937: The Temps Nouveaux Pavilion.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56, no. 1 (March 1997). U.S. Department of Commerce, Aeronautics Branch. Report of Committee on Airport Zoning and Eminent Domain. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 18, 1930. Vossoughian, Nader. Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers; London: Art Data, 2008. Weimann, Jeanne Madeline. The Fair Women. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981. White, P. W. “Bridging the Ocean with Man-Made Islands.” American Magazine 208 (November 1929). “Working for Peaceful Commerce in the Pacific.” San Francisco Business (September 14, 1927). “World’s Fair Builders—Ernest E. Weihe.” Architect and Engineer 133 (June 1938). Wright, Gwendolyn. Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. “Yerba Buena Airport Plan to Be Pressed.” San Francisco Chronicle (October 12, 1931). “Yerba Buena Airport Site Urged on Rossi.” San Francisco Chronicle (August 20 1932).

227

Acknowledgments

Invisible hands write books. This one had many. At Berkeley: Steven Brooks, Elizabeth Byrne, Paul Groth, Miranda Hambro, Carrie McDade, Jason Miller, Kathy Moran, Josephine O’Shaughnessy, and Chris Williams; Helaine Prentice, who spirited up a stash of amazing slides of the fair from her attic; Lisa Rubens, who shared her extensive knowledge of the fair with me; David Eifler, Susan Snyder, and Linda Vida. My extraordinary research assistants: Yael Allweil, William Coleman, Huey Ying Hsu, Rebecca Wallace, and Pablo Zunzunegui. Many colleagues made valuable suggestions: Robert Bruegmann, Jeffrey Cody, Michael Corbett, J. Michael Frease, Craig Hartman, Lynne Horiuchi, Ocean Howell, Kah Wee Lee, Yishi Lui, Seth Lunine, Pamela Lee Post, Jeff Tilman, Paul Totah, and, Ipek Tureli. The book would have been impossible without the enlightened work of archivists at the San Francisco Public Library, the Bancroft Library, the California Historical Society, the Oakland Museum of California, ucla Special Collections, the Sacramento Historical Society, the Center for Sacramento History, the National Archives at San Bruno, the California State Library, sfo Museum, the San Francisco Housing Authority, the Chamber of Commerce, the History Room at the Oakland Public Library, and the California State Archives 228

and Library. Glen Nelson of Naval History and Heritage Command and

Peter Summerville of the Treasure Island Development Authority went out of their way to let me into otherwise inaccessible naval records. Tammy Lau at California State University, Fresno, graciously shared her knowledge of this wonderful collection. Special thanks to John Pflueger, who opened his personal archives on the Pflueger firm. Both the materials and his insights made invaluable contributions to the book. Finally, my co-conspirators: enduring gratitude to Waverly Lowell, who first proposed I write a book for this series. Her encyclopedic knowledge of the Environmental Design Archives, as well as other California archives, made vital contributions; her generosity in sharing materials, exchanging ideas, and reading closely shepherded the project through. And Marc Treib, whose enlightened mentorship has made the book possible. His vision as series editor, sharp design sensibility, deep knowledge of California architecture, and unflagging support have been transformative.

229

Holdings Related to the Golden Gate International Exposition in the Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley

ERNEST BORN (1898-1992) AND ESTHER BORN (1895-1967) The Ernest and Esther Born collection (1924-1982) contains architectural photographs by Esther Born and material documenting the design practice of her husband Ernest Born. The collection is arranged into six series: Personal Papers, drawings from Tunisia and travel slides from Europe, limited Professional Papers, and Project Records that document Ernest’s proposals for developing San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island, Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Embarcadero Crescent. These are complemented by the North Beach Place Housing project and designs for private residences, fountains, showrooms, plaques, exhibits, and publications. Three series are devoted to large commissions for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART), the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, and the University of California Greek Theater Reconstruction. The BART series consists of office files, research for signage, construction photographs, and drawings for the Balboa, Glen Park, and Lake Merritt stations. The Golden Gate International Exposition series contains Esther Born’s photographs of the design, construction, and opening events of the Exposition. The Greek Theater Reconstruction files are quite extensive and include historical material about the theater and its performances. 230

GARDNER A. DAILEY (1895–1967) The Gardner A. Dailey Collection (1923-1979) is organized into three series: Office Records includes portfolios, presentation photographs, tear sheets from architectural publications, and a scrapbook from the dedication of the Pacific War Memorial at Fort McKinley in Manila, Philippines. The Projects Records collect Dailey’s early residential work, the Brazil Pavilion at the Golden Gate International Exposition, the Pacific War Memorial, three hotels in Hawaii for the Matson Navigation Company, the American Red Cross Building in San Francisco, and work on the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University campuses. Additional Donations contains project tear sheets, correspondence, and personal and professional news clippings. The collection also includes the files of the successor firm Yuill-Thornton, Warner & Levikow that finished commissions begun by Dailey.

GARRETT ECKBO (1910–2000) The Garrett Eckbo papers (which spans the years from 1933 to 1995) contain a wide range of materials documenting the landscape architect’s long, innovative, and productive career as a designer, planner, and author. The collection is organized in eight series: Personal Papers, Professional Papers, Faculty Papers, Office Records, Project Records 1939-1969,

231

Project Records 1970-1995, FSA/National Housing Authority/Defense Housing Records, and Additional Donations. The Personal Papers contain biographical material, personal correspondence, personal and travel photographs, and student work. The Professional Papers reflect Eckbot’s active commitment to his profession, while the Faculty Papers gather materials related to Eckbo’s teaching experiences at a number of educational institutions including the University of Southern California, the University of California, Berkeley, Osaka Prefectural University, and the University of Virginia. Office Records comprise promotional literature for Eckbo’s firms, project slides, photographs, and scrapbooks of magazine and newspaper clippings. The voluminous Project Records assemble the files generated by Eckbo’s several firms, beginning with his San Francisco office in 1939 and continuing until retirement in 1990. They document a wide spectrum of large- and small-scale projects, including pedestrian malls, civic centers, waterfronts, public parks, churches, playgrounds, freeway systems, botanic gardens, cemeteries, office buildings, resorts, residences, and corporate campuses throughout the West and other areas of the United States. Particularly well documented is his work for the Farm Security Administration and the National Housing Authority. The Additional Donations include a number of drawings, photographs, and artifacts given to the archives by another donor several years after the primary collection had been accessioned.

BERNARD MAYBECK (1862-1957) Organized as nine series, the Bernard Maybeck collection (1897-1956) documents the architect’s unique vision and fruitful career. The Personal Papers contain autobiographical information, correspondence, photographs, and writings; Professional Papers include correspondence, speeches, awards and files on associations and committees. Administrative materials, correspondence, financial records and an array of product literature comprise the Office Records. Files, photographs and drawings of residential, commercial, recreational, and religious projects, as well as projects and proposals for town planning, are collected in the Project Records. Subsequent series contain documentation for projects undertaken under the umbrella of a larger organization, for example Maybeck’s projects for the University of California, Berkeley, and Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. Also included is a series documenting Maybeck’s work on the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition and the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. The Art and Artifacts series includes a table designed by Maybeck and a sample of Bubblestone, an experimental building material favored by the architect. Material donated to the Environmental Design Archives subsequent to the original 232

gift from Bernard Maybeck is found in the Additional Donations series,

which includes project records, a carved mantel, and radio interviews from Berkeley public radio’s KPFA.

WILLIAM MERCHANT (1889-1962) William Merchant partnered with Bernard Maybeck and became his professional successor. The William G. Merchant Records (1934-1941) are arranged into four series: Personal Papers, Golden Gate International Exposition, Project Records, and Additional Donations. The collection contains materials primarily related to the Golden Gate International Exposition undertaken with Maybeck, as well as several projects for private residences, a mausoleum, and St. Mary’s Square in San Francisco.

WILLIAM G. MERCHANT / HANS U. GERSON (1915-2000) This collection (1897-1993) contains records of the architectural firms of William G. Merchant and William G. Merchant & Associates, and the successor firm Gerson/Overstreet. The collection is organized into eight series: Personal Papers, Professional Papers, Office Records, Project Records, Maybeck Projects, Palace of Fine Arts, World Trade Center, and San Francisco Recreation and Parks Dept. The Personal Papers contain a small amount of correspondence between Merchant and Maybeck and student drawings by Gerson made at the Architectural Association. The Professional Papers consist primarily of writings by Hans Gerson., while the Office Records contain administrative and financial records and firm brochures. Commissions from the architectural careers of William G. Merchant and Hans U. Gerson, including the Golden Gate International Exposition, appear in the project records. The fifth series contains primarily photographs of projects completed by Maybeck. The Palace of Fine Arts series documents the building’s 1960s reconstruction, while the seventh series contains material for Merchant’s proposal for a World Trade Center in San Francisco (1951-1957). The final series contains files, drawings, and photographs of various projects for the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department.

IRVING F. MORROW (1884-1952) AND GERTRUDE COMFORT MORROW (1888-1983) The Morrow collection features three series: Professional Papers (resumes, awards, student works and clippings relating to both Irving and Gertrude Morrow, as well as Irving’s involvement in professional organizations); the Project Records of Irving F. Morrow, Morrow & Garren, Gertrude Morrow, and Morrow & Morrow—including numerous designs related to their work on the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge; and records resulting from Irving Morrow’s involvement with the Historical American Buildings Survey (HABS). 233

GERALDINE KNIGHT SCOTT (1910-2000) The Geraldine Knight Scott Collection (1914-1988) has six series: Personal Papers, Professional Papers, Faculty Papers, Office Records, Project Records and Additional Donations. The Personal Papers include biographical information, travel journals, photographs and writings, the Professional Papers contain correspondence, writings, speeches, involvement with exhibitions, professional organizations and committees, reference material, and her oral history. Documents related to teaching, academic issues, course materials and examples of her students’ work form her Faculty Papers. A list of office personnel and typical details used in her designs are found in the Office Records. The Project Records document Scott’s numerous landscape projects, the most noted are the Pacific Area in the Pacific House at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, the Oakland Museum (1963-1987), and her long range plan for the Blake Estate in Kensington (1968). The collection also documents private gardens, exhibitions, professional parks, commercial, and educational projects. An Additional Donation includes six sketchbooks/ scrapbooks that document Scott’s 1939 travels through Europe.

HARRY W. SHEPHERD (1890-1965) The Harry W. Shepherd collection (1923-1966) is arranged in four series: Personal Papers, Professional Papers, Faculty Papers, and Project Records. Personal Papers include Shepherd’s curriculum vitae, however, the bulk of the collection are the Professional Papers consisting of writings, reference material for his courses, plant photographs, and photographs of European gardens collected during his sabbatical leave from the University of California, Berkeley. Faculty Papers contain course materials and photographs of students and student work. Shepherd’s Project Records are limited and document his work for the University of California, both Berkeley and Davis campuses.

WILLIAM W. WURSTER AND WURSTER, BERNARDI, AND EMMONS (wbe) The architectural records of William Wurster and the firm WBE (19221974) fall into six series: Professional Papers, Office Records, Project Records 1922-1944, Project Records 1945-1974, United States Housing Agency Projects, and Additional Donations. The Professional Papers document Wurster’s collaborative relationships and professional friendships; Office Records consist primarily of photographs, presentation boards, scrapbooks, and promotional tear-sheets. The bulk of the collection, the Project Records, documents the work of Wurster and his partners Theodore Bernardi and Donn Emmons: more than 2300 residential, commercial, governmental, and educational 234

commissions executed between 1922 and 1978. Projects for the United

States government, the University of California, and Safeway Stores are especially well-represented.

WILLIAM W. WURSTER (1895-1973) AND CATHERINE BAUER WURSTER (1905-1964) The papers of William and Catherine Wurster (1914 to 1979) begin with William Wurster’s student work and end with post-mortem material regarding both husband and wife. There are two series: Personal and Professional Papers. The majority of the collection contains photographs and slides from various trips abroad, beginning with William’s 1922 trip to Europe and ending with the couple’s world tours in 1957 and 1959. Accompanying these photographs are William’s travel journals and their joint notes and publications. This series also contains William’s early student work and his personal diaries spanning the years 1922–1965. The Professional Papers comprise correspondence, visual material related to Catherine’s book Modern Housing, lectures, urban planning pamphlets, material related to the development of Greenwood Common, and a portfolio of William’s early projects. Additional Donations consist of personal and professional material collected or written by Richard Peters as part of his research for a W.W. Wurster biography.

FAIRS AND EXPOSITIONS The Fairs and Expositions Collection is an artificial compilation assembled from small donations and unattached materials—such as drawings, photographs, postcards and publications—that document several fairs and expositions nationwide. The collection is organized into five series: I. Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco 1915, II. Panama-California Exposition, San Diego, 1915, III. Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, 1939-1940, IV. Other California Fairs and V. Non-California Fairs. The finding aids for all of these collections may be accessed at the Online Archive of California: http//www.oac.cdlib.org/

Mailing Address: Environmental Design Archives University of California 230 Wurster Hall #1820 Berkeley, CA 94720-1820

Telephone: 510.642.5124 Email: [email protected] Website: http://archives.ced.berkeley.edu/ The Timothy Pflueger Papers formerly held by John Pflueger are now held by The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

235

Index

airports, 32-36, 139, 155: Golden Gate Air Terminal, 28, 30–39; Los Angeles (Allen Field), 33; Mills Field, 28, 37, 39, 205n10; Portland, 33; San Diego, 33 allegory, 14, 21, 53, 73, 77-79, 97, 104, 116, 211 Allen, Harris C., 102 amusement zone (also see “Gayway”), 19, 24, 42, 154, 207

bridge celebration, 28, 30, 32, 56, 215n11

Australia, 151, 158, 221n51

bridges, 27-28, 32, 36-37, 39, 46, 48, 56, 67, 78, 94, 95, 98, 109, 111, 116, 135, 158, 194, 199, 210: Golden Gate Bridge, 26, 30, 139; San Francisco Bay Toll-Bridge (San Mateo Bridge), 26; San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, 26, 28, 30, 53, 69

Bakewell and Brown, 48, 131, 219n2 Bennett, Edward, 112 Benton, Thomas Hart, 211 Besse, George, 155

boosterism, 13, 24, 37, 209, 214n5, 215n10

Brown, Arthur, Jr., 32, 35, 39, 40–41, 46, 48, 51, 53, 56-58, 63, 65, 67, 70–71, 98, 102, 111–112, 126, 130–131, 183, 186, 190, 194–195: Coit Tower, 53, 69, 98; Department of Labor, 51; Federal Triangle, 51; Interstate Commerce Commission, 51

Architectural Forum, 139, 186, 219 n20

Born, Ernest, 106, 120, 133, 135, 139, 171

Bruton, Margaret, Helen, and Esther, 95, 97, 218n58

Argentina, 167, 170, 176

Born, Esther, 106, 133, 220n6

Armstrong, Edward Robert, 33

Boullée, Etienne-Louis, 91, 218n43

Army Corps of Engineers, 36

Brazil, 120, 167, 170, 171, 176, 221n61

buildings (ggie): Administration Building, 17, 53, 60, 183; AlamedaContra Costa Building, 139, 144; Alta California Building, 133; Argentina Pavilion, 167, 170, 176; Australia Pavilion, 151, 158; Aviation,

Angkor Wat, 78, 97 Architectural Commission, 14, 17, 40–41, 48–51, 56–71, 77, 81–82, 94, 103-104, 126, 130–133, 150, 160, 176-177, 183, 189, 200, 207, 223

236

94, 95, 98, 102, 103, 112, 116, 120, 135, 202

Art Deco (see also “moderne”), 21, 31, 48, 56, 60, 70–71, 77, 79,

Bliss and Fairweather, 126 Bohemian Club, 95 Bonestell, Chesley, 65, 67, 69, 95, 217n48

Brechin, Gray, 106

17; Bank of America Building, 202; Brazil Pavilion, 120, 167, 170, 171, 176, 221n61; California Auditorium, 19, 108, 133; California Building, 19, 65, 108, 133, 134, 144; California Coliseum, 19; Chile Pavilion, 155; Christian Science Building, 167, 202; Coast Guard, 19, 202; Colombia, 155, 158; Costa Rica, 155, 158; Dairy Products Building (Dairy Council), 19, 167, 202; Ecuador Pavilion, 157; Elephant Towers, 67, 82, 90-91, 94, 106; El Salvador Pavilion, 155, 158; Federal Building, 19, 60-63, 67, 69, 95, 102, 107, 108–113, 115–117, 122–123; Fine Arts, 17, 95, 158; Ford Building, 95; France Pavilion, 167; French Indo-China Pavilion, 150–151, 155; Ghirardelli Chocolate Building, 202; Guatemala Pavilion, 155, 158; Hall of Transportation, 183; Hall of Western States, 17, 69, 154, 158; Hawaii Pavilion, 150–151; Horticultural Hall, 19; Illinois State Building, 202; Italy Pavilion, 167, 170-171,

176; Japan Pavilion, 111, 151154, 176; Javanese Restaurant, 151; Johore Pavilion, 109, 151, 154–155; Mexico Pavilion, 155, 158; Mission Trails Building, 135, 146; National Cash Register Building, 167; Netherlands East Indies, 109, 150–151, 154, 170, 220n19; New Zealand Pavilion, 151, 158, 161; Norway Pavilion, 167, 170; Pacific House, 17, 67, 108, 112, 150–151, 158–167, 177, 185; Panama Pavilion, 155, 158; Peru Pavilion, 155, 158; Philippines Pavilion, 150–151; Portals of the Pacific, 82-83; Press Building, 167; Recreation Building, 19; Redwood Empire Building, 135; Sacramento and Lake Tahoe Building, 133, 146; San Francisco Building, 69, 116, 133, 135, 139, (exhibits) 144; San Joaquin Valley Building, 133, 135, 146; Southern Counties Building, 146; Temple Compound, 67, 69, 78, 102, 108, 133, 158; Temple of Music (unbuilt), 67, 160; Temple of Youth (unbuilt), 63, 160; theater

(unbuilt), 60-63, 104; Tower of Peace, 171, 176; Tower of the Sun, 48, 57, 82, 98, 102, 108, 112, 160, 209, 216n10; Towers of the East, 78-79; Towers of the South, 73; Triumphal Arch, 98, 102, 112, 209; Western Gateway, 82; Yerba Buena Club, 180-201 Burnham, Daniel, Chicago Plan, 33 Butler, Harmon S., 30 Cadorin, Ettore, 183 Caen, Herb, 79 Caldecott Tunnel, 26, 39 California Commission, 63, 130–131, 144, 146 California Federation of Women’s Clubs, 185–186 California Group, 69, 95, 106, 108–109, 130, 144 Canali, Peter, 171 Carrère, John M., 65, 216n15 Central Valley Water Project, 146

237

Chambers, Harold C., 147

Frick), 130, 155, 158

Chapman, Fred, 130

Dutch East Indies, 109, 150–151, 154, 220n19

Cheney, Howard Lovewell, 116

Fascist architecture, 171, 176 Federal Writer’s Project, 211

China, 176, 209; Moon Gate, 144 China Clipper, 106

Eckbo, Garrett, 123

Findlay, Michael M., 37

Chinese Village, 202–203

École des Beaux-Arts, 14, 21, 31, 41, 48, 51, 53, 56, 67, 70, 77, 79, 91, 94, 102, 103, 133, 135, 170, 180, 183, 186, 200

Forbes, Helen K., 185–186

Elkins, Frances, 181, 187, 189, 199

France, 51, 103–104, 149–151, 155, 157, 167, 170

Church, Thomas, 202 city planning (urban planning) 33, 42, 46, 209 Clark, Robert J., 42

l’Enfant, Pierre, 51

classicism, 31, 48, 70–71, 77, 79, 91, 98, 102–103, 111, 120, 190, 195, 202

exhibitions, see “fairs”

The Cloisters (New York City), 211 color, 14, 58, 73, 82–83, 90, 116, 139, 166, courts: Court of the Moon, 53, 69, 73; Court of the Nation (also called Court of Nations), 67, 108, 170; Court of Pacifica, 53, 60, 63, 73, 95, 97–98, 123; Court of Reflections, 72; Court of Seals, 133; Court of the Seven Seas, 53, 73; Latin American Court, 151, 155, 158, 176–177 Covarrubias, Miguel, 158, 166–167, 221n52 Cutler, Leland, 183

Dailey, Gardner, 120, 171 Daniels, Mark, 102, 202–203, 209, 217n39 d’Ans, Armando, 170–171 Day, W. P., 30–32, 39, 53, 98, 126 de la Cruz, Pablo, 157 Democracity (New York World’s Fair, 1939), 46, 162, 166, 211 Denman, Leslie Van Ness, 112, 185–187, 220n33, 222n23 Department of the Pacific Area, 166 Deppe, Robert, 154 Depression, see “Great Depression” Dickerson, A. F., 83, 94, 217n29 Disney, Walt, 69

238

of Jewels) 144, 218n42; Shanghai (2010) 12

Division of Architecture (see Edward

exhibits: Architecture, 123, 219n20; Czechoslovakia, 62; Del Monte, 16; Department of Social Welfare, 95; Fuller-Pittsburgh Paints, 208; Homes and Gardens, 73; Los Angeles County, 146; Mines, Metals, and Machinery, 73; Native American (Indian Court), 95, 109, 112, 123, 167; New Deal, 109, 112, 123; San Francisco Airport, 139; San Francisco Public Utilities, 149; Vacationland, 95 expositions, see “fairs”

fairs: Atlanta (1895) 13; Buffalo (1901) 13, 65; Chicago (1893) 13, 14, 22, 42, 46, 73, 77, 78, 209; Chicago (1933-1934) 11, 13, 21–22, 32-33, 40–41, 53, 56-58, 60, (Hall of Transportation) 70–71, 77–79, 83, 112, (Federal Building), 180, 183, 184, 210, 216n15; Cleveland (1936) 13; Dallas (1936) 13, 116; London (1851) 12, 14 (Crystal Palace) 151; London (1862) 12; New York (1939–1940) 11, 13, 19, 21–22, 25, 41, 46, 58, 69, 78, 79, 81, 94, 104, 111, (Federal Building) 116, 150, 160, 162, 170, 185, 210–211; Omaha (1898) 13; Paris (1867) 148, 154; Paris (1931) 148–149, 176; Paris (1937) 60, 180, 199; Philadelphia (1876) 13, 152, 184; Philadelphia (1926) 214n6; Saint Louis (1904) 13; San Diego (1935–1936) 13; 116; San Francisco (1915) 13, 14, 16, 17, 22, 31, 32, 40, 41–42, 46, 48, 51, 58, 63, 71, 73, 83, 98, (Tower

Ford Motor Company, 21, 78, 95 Fountain of Western Waters, 73, 97

Frick, Edward, 56–57, 70, 102, 130–131, 155, 158, 216n4 frontier, 10, 91, 94, 209–210 Futurama, see “General Motors” Gates, Myra, 195 Gayway, 19, 21, 24, 202–203, 207, 209 Gebhard, David, 10, 103, 195 General Electric, 21, 78 General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 184 General Motors, 11, 21, 46, 78, 104

Gesamtkunstwerk, 17, 73 Gill, Irving, 185 Gold Rush, 35, 91, 146 Great Depression, 11, 12, 13, 22, 33, 36, 39, 46, 82, 120, 184, 209–210, 216n20 Gutheim, Frederick, 77, 108, 112, 123, 135, 180, 200 Gutierrez, Gregorio, 150

Haas, Evelyn Danzig, 185-186, 222n23 Hamlin, Talbot, 79-82, 91-94, 102, 112, 187–189 Harris, Neil, 17, 19, 22, 46, 78, 79, 152 Heller, Elinor Raas, 186, 222n23 Henderson, Charles B., 126 Hobart, Louis, 48, 53, 65, 83, 98, 102, 112, 126, 217n39 Hood, Raymond, 56, 217n46

Howard, Henry Temple, 133 Howard, John Galen, 98, 183

infrastructure, 22, 32, 37, 39, 69, 209 Institute of Pacific Relations, 34, 158, 160–161, 177, 185, 211, 220n34, 221n41, 222n17 International Style, 171, 201 Isotype, 139, 220n13 Italy, 167, 170–171, 176

James, Juliet, 97 Japan, 97, 109, 111, 150–152, 154, 160, (and China) 176, 209 Johore, 109, 151, 154–155, Johnson, Sargent, 144 Jones, Fred, 116

Mayan Architecture, 79, 90–91, 95, 106–107, 218n59 Maybeck, Bernard (see also “Merchant”), 48, 63, 78, 83, 103, 112, 135, 144, 160, 217n27, 221n44; Maybeck and Merchant, 67, 98, 111, 135, 160

Keck, George Fred, 70 Kelham, George, 30–32, 39, 41–42, 46, 48, 53, 56-57, 60, 63, 71, 73, 78, 81–82, 90, 95, 98, 102, 104, 107, 126, 183, 190 Knight, Geraldine, 167 Larringa, Juan, 116

Pacific Area, 65, 67, 69, 97, 107, 109, 147, 148–177, 203 Pacific Civilization, 11, 39, 40, 160, 177, 209

McDuffie, Jean, 185–187, 222n23

Pacific Rim, 25, 34

McLaughlin, Emma, 185–186, 220n33, 222n17

Pacifica, 16

Merchant, William (see also “Maybeck”), 46, 48–49, 53, 67, 69, 78-79, 98, 102, 111, 135, 137, 151, 158, 160, 162 Meso-America, 106, 116, 219n90 Mexico, 106, 155 Meyer-Levy, Claude, 155 Model Homes Tour, 19, 216n14 Modern Movement (see also “modernism”), 21, 77, 79, 94, 181, 183 moderne, 17, 31, 116, 176, 202

Kastner (Alfred) and Berla (Julian E.), 123

Oakie, John, 161

modernism (see also “International Style” and “Modern Movement”), 21, 56, 71, 77–79, 94, 98, 103– 104, 116, 120, 123, 133–135, 139, 166, 167, 170–171, 176, 180-181, 183, 186, 189–190, 195, 200–202; and Beaux-Arts, 98, 104; and character, 104; and graphic art, 167, 170, 171

Pageant of the Pacific, 19, 25, 33, 56, 158, 160 Palace of Fine Art (ppie), 40, 144 Pan-American, 106, 176 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, see “fairs, San Francisco” Paramount Theater, 123 parking lot, 17, 24, 48, 51, 60

The Peacemakers, see “Bruton, Margaret, Helen, and Esther” Pearl Harbor, 35 Pflueger, Timothy, 19, 41, 48, 53, 56–59, 63, 77, 94–98, 102, 104, 108–113, 116, 120, 123, 126, 130, 133 Pigeon, W. G., 217n46 plywood, 108, 120, 123, 200 publicity, 12, 32, 41, 63, 67, 98, 111, 160, 199, 210 Publicity Department, 67, 160

Latin America, 10, 106, 109, 150–151, 155, 158, 171, 176, 177, 207

monumentality, 201; “Nine Points on Monumentality” (José Luis Sert, Fernand Léger, and Sigfried Giedion), 201

Lawrence, D.H., 7, 10, 25, 126

Morgan, Julia, 103

Progressive Era, 22, 41, 46, 77, 78, 184, 209

Le Corbusier, 60, 199–200

Morrow, Irving F., 82, 139, 144

Purcell, Charles H., 28

Lee, Charles H., 42

Moulin, Gabriel, 95

J4

lighting, 14, 22, 82–83, 90, 94, 102, 104, 144, 162, 217n29

Mullgardt, Louis, 40

Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 126

Lotchin, Roger, 27, 37, 39

Mumford, Lewis, 94; The City (film), 46

Pont, Henri Maclaine, 154

Popular Mechanics, 33

New Zealand, 151, 158, 161

regionalism (see also “Bay Region Tradition”), 10, 12, 13, 19-22, 28; (and airports), 33, 37 69, 70–71, 77, 83, 91, 94, 97–98, 103-107, 120, 135, 146, 151, 166–167, 177, 180–181, 186, 200–201, 209–211

Magazine of Art, 77

Northerly Island (Chicago), 32–33

Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 211

Manifest Destiny, 10

Nye, David E., 19, 90, 170, 214n5

Roosevelt, Franklin, 210

Lynch, Robert Newton, 34 National Garden Show, 202 MacKaye, Benton, 94 Macky, Donald (see also “Elephant Towers”), 90–91

Maori, 158, 161

New Deal, 13, 109, 112, 120, 123, 177, 184, 202, 209

Rossi, Angelo, 28, 30, 215n10

239

Ruiz, Rafael, 157

25, 26–39, 58, 91, 106, 126, 180

Rural Resettlement Administration, 123

Trylon and Perisphere (New York World’s Fair, 1939–1940), 162, 166, 211

Russell, Helen, 186, 190 Rydell, Robert, 69

Sakurai, Nagao, 152, 220n12 Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch, 207 San Francisco: Chamber of Commerce, 33, 34, 39, 215n7, 228; Chronicle, 31; Earthquake and Fire (1906), 31, 46, 126; Public Utilities Commission, 28, 39; Recreation and Park Department, 48; Waterfront Strike (1934), 36 Schinkel, Friedrich, 116 Scott, Geraldine Knight (see “Knight, Geraldine”) Sheets, Millard, 146 Shepherd, Harry W., 144 Simpson, Marian, 144 Social Realism, 116

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 209

University of California, Berkeley, 31, 183; Campanile, 69, 98 Urban, Joseph, 83 urban planning, see “city planning” vernacular architecture, 19, 203, 120, 135, 139, 155, 181, 195 Von Breton, Harriette, 10, 103, 195 Volz, Herman, 119

Weihe, Ernest, 48, 53, 58, 63, 82, 90–91, 94, 98, 126, 131 Wilbur, Ray Lyman, 161, 167 Williamsburg, Virginia, 211 Wolfe, Clifford E., 144, 146

Sotomayor, Antonio, 166

Woman’s Clubhouse Association, 190

Spanish-American War, 13

women’s clubs, 178–201

Spanish-Colonial Revival, 139, 144

Women’s General Committee, 161

Spenser, Eldridge T., 155 Stackpole, Ralph, 95, 97

Works Progress Administration, 35, 39, 123, 126, 186, 219n14

Stanford University, 57, 130, 160, 219n20, 220n24

World War II, 21, 25, 35, 36, 39, 147, 155, 161, 167, 207, 209

Stanton, Jesse, 83, 166, 217n27

Wurster, William W., 21, 126, 171; Yerba Buena Club, 180–181, 183–190, 194–195,

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 91 Stiehl, Claude Albun, 150 streamlining, 21, 79 Sultan Ibrahim, 154–155

Yerba Buena Island (and Shoals), 11, 26, 28, 32–33, 199, 271n39

Susini, Alfio, 171 Susman, Warren, 210

Tantau, Clarence, 135, 139 Teague, Walter Dorwin, 102 Thompson, William Hale, 33 Todhunter, Francis, 57 Tognelli, Pio, 57 Toki, T., 153

240

Treasure Island, San Francisco, 21,

zoning, 24, 42, 154, 207–209