The Palace of Fine Arts is a monumental structure located in the Marina District of San Francisco, California, United States, originally built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition to exhibit works of art. Completely rebuilt from 1964 to 1974, it is the only structure from the exposition that survives on site.
- Venue
- Palace of Fine Arts
- Address
- 88 5th St
- Town
- San Francisco, US
The Palace of Fine Arts is a monumental structure located in the Marina District of San Francisco, California, United States, originally built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition to exhibit works of art. Completely rebuilt from 1964 to 1974, it is the only structure from the exposition that survives on site. Conceived to evoke a decaying ruin of ancient Rome, the Palace of Fine Arts became one of San Francisco's most recognizable landmarks. The most prominent building of the complex, a 162-foot-high (49-meter) open rotunda, is enclosed by a lagoon on one side and adjoins a large, curved exhibition center on the other side, separated from the lagoon by colonnades. As of 2019, the exhibition center (one of San Francisco's largest single-story buildings) was in use as a venue for events such as weddings or trade fairs. Early 2009 marked the completion of a renovation of the lagoons and walkways and a seismic retrofit. The Palace of Fine Arts was one of ten palaces at the heart of the Panama-Pacific Exhibition. The exhibition also included the exhibit palaces of Education, Liberal Arts, Manufactures, Varied Industries, Agriculture, Food Products, Transportation, Mines, and Metallurgy, and the Palace of Machinery. The Palace of Fine Arts was designed by Bernard Maybeck. He was tasked with creating a building that would serve as a quiet zone where exhibition attendees could pass through between visiting the crowded fairgrounds and viewing the paintings and sculptures displayed in the building behind the rotunda. Maybeck designed what was essentially a fictional ruin from another time. He took his inspiration from Roman and Ancient Greek architecture (specifically Piranesi's etching of the remnants of the so-called Temple of Minerva Medica in Rome), and also from Böcklin's Symbolist painting Isle of the Dead. According to a metal plate at the rotunda, it was rebuilt under B.F. Modglin, local manager of MacDonald & Kahn, between 1964 and 1967. In the years