Palace of Fine Arts

Listen first. Water laps softly against the edge of the lagoon. A swan glides past the reeds, and somewhere a duck complains to no one in particular. Above you, a great domed rotunda rises out of the trees, the colour of warm sand, ringed by columns that seem to curve away into the mist. Few places in San Francisco feel this still. It looks old, almost ancient, like a ruin left behind by a vanished empire. And yet, in a way, that is exactly the effect it was built to create.

This is the Palace of Fine Arts. It was never meant to last. It was built for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, a world's fair that filled this stretch of the northern waterfront. The fair had two official reasons to celebrate. One was the opening of the Panama Canal, which shortened the sea route between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The other was closer to home. San Francisco wanted to show the world that it had risen again after the earthquake and fire of 1906.

Picture this ground a little over a century ago. Much of it was shallow bay and marshland, filled in to make room for the fair. Across that new land rose a temporary city of grand halls, courtyards, gardens and towers. Millions of visitors came through the gates during the year the exposition ran. They saw machines, paintings, food and inventions from around the world. Then the fair closed, and almost all of it was torn down. This palace is one of the very few pieces that remain.

The architect was Bernard Maybeck, a Californian designer known for buildings that felt personal and a little dreamlike. He did not want a cheerful, polished monument. He wanted something closer to a memory. Maybeck is often said to have drawn on romantic images of classical ruins, including the moody paintings and engravings that were popular in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The goal was a sense of gentle melancholy. Art, in his view, should make a visitor feel the passing of time.

Look up at the colonnade that curves around the lagoon. Along the top you will see large box-like planters, and on their corners stand female figures. Here is a detail many visitors miss. These women face inward, toward the planters, with their backs turned to you. Their heads are bowed and their arms rest on the stone. They are often called the weeping women. The design suggests mourning, or quiet contemplation, as if they too are thinking about something that has been lost.

Now the first surprise. The palace you see today is not the building that stood here in 1915. The original was made of a material called staff, a mix of plaster and fibre shaped over a wooden frame. It looked like carved stone, but it was designed to survive only for the length of the fair. Instead, San Franciscans grew so fond of the palace that they campaigned to keep it. For decades it slowly crumbled. Plaster fell away, and the structure became a genuine ruin.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the palace was in serious danger. The city faced a choice. Let it fall, or rebuild it properly. Supporters raised money, and in the 1960s the structure was carefully reconstructed in permanent materials, largely concrete, following the original design. So when you touch these columns, you are touching a faithful copy of a temporary dream. It is a strange idea. A building designed to look like a ruin became a real ruin, and was then rebuilt to look like a ruin again.

Walk beneath the rotunda if you can. The dome is open on its sides, supported by tall columns, so the air moves freely through it. Stand in the centre and speak quietly. The curved ceiling plays tricks with sound, and voices can bounce back in unexpected ways. Look at the bands of relief sculpture high on the structure. They show allegorical figures, symbols of art and human effort, the kind of classical imagery that grand fairs loved in this period.

Behind the colonnade stands a long, curving hall. During the fair it held paintings and sculpture, which is how the palace earned its name. In later years the hall took on many roles. Here is the second surprise. From 1969, this hall became the home of the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum that inspired similar museums around the world. Generations of local children learned about light, sound and motion right here. The Exploratorium moved to a new site on the Embarcadero waterfront in 2013.

The lagoon in front of you is a remnant of the fair's landscaping too. Today it is a small world of its own. Swans, ducks and geese live here, and turtles sometimes sun themselves on the rocks near the edge. Willows and cypress trees soften the shoreline. On calm mornings the rotunda appears twice, once in the air and once upside down on the water. That reflection is a big part of why this is one of the most photographed spots in the city.

The neighbourhood around you is the Marina District, and much of it also stands on filled land. That history mattered in 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the Bay Area. Loose fill can behave badly in an earthquake, and the Marina suffered heavy damage. As you walk away from the palace, you will pass rows of pastel houses and apartment buildings with bay windows. Many are from the 1920s and 1930s, built after the fair had gone.

The palace has also become a stage for ordinary life. On weekends you will often see wedding parties posing under the dome. Families come for quinceañera portraits, a coming-of-age celebration for fifteen-year-old girls in many Latin American cultures. Joggers pass on their way to the bay. Painters sometimes set up easels by the water. In a sense, the building is still doing what Maybeck hoped. It gives people a place to pause, look and feel something they cannot quite name.

Before you leave, find a quiet spot near the edge of the lagoon. Look at the rotunda once more, and then at the bowed figures above the colonnade. Notice how the stone changes colour as clouds move across the sun, from pale gold to grey and back again. Listen to the water and the birds. This place was built for a single year of celebration, and it has outlived nearly everything around it. Take that thought with you as you walk on toward the bay.