The Palace of Fine Arts was built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and is the only structure from that exposition still standing in the city. Bernard Maybeck designed it as a meditation on ruins — a rotunda and colonnaded peristyle of Roman character, deliberately incomplete in elevation, intended to produce a feeling of melancholy grandeur rather than civic pride. The building reflected in its lagoon at dusk, when the columns are lit and the day visitors have departed, is one of the correctly atmospheric experiences in San Francisco: the architecture succeeds at what it intended, which is not common. The rotunda is 162 feet in diameter, and the walk around the lagoon at either end of the day — before the light arrives or after it leaves — earns the hour it takes.
Marina District, San Francisco, United States