Architecture, Artifacts, Urban Landscapes
Image by pamelaspeight1
Palace of Fine Arts, with pond and seagulls, San Francisco, CA
The Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina District of San Francisco, California, is a monumental structure with elaborate ornamentation, originally created for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition to exhibit works of art. One of only a few surviving structures from the Exposition, it is still situated on its original site. It was originally intended as a temporary structure, thus not built of durable materials, framed in wood and then covered with a mixture of plaster and burlap-like fiber. With the exception of the large exhibit hall, it was demolished and re-built in the 1960’s in permanent, light-weight, poured-in-place concrete, with steel I-beams to reinforce the dome of the rotunda. All the decorations and relief sculpture were re-constructed. A seismic retrofit was completed in 2009.
