Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915 : San Francisco, Calif.)
Even the open stops in this organ are of more than ordinary dimensions.
The usual limit in a pipe organ is the sixteen-foot open stop. But in
this organ there are several pipes, both of wood and of metal,
thirty-two feet or more in length.
Two small buildings, balanced on either side of the Scott-street
entrance, are the Press Building and the Exposition home of the National
Young Women's Christian Association. They are alike, French in style,
and fronted with caryatid porches.
The real glory of the South Gardens lies in their flowers, and in the
charming setting the landscape engineers have here given to the south
facade of the palace group. There is the air of Versailles in the
planned gayety of the scene. In this the pools and fountains, the formal
gardens, the massed trees and shrubbery, and the two palaces themselves,
play their part.
IV.
"The Walled City": It's Great Palaces and their Architecture,
Color and Material
The central group of Exposition structures really a single vast palace,
behind a rampart--Historical fitness of such architecture here--The
south facade--Spanish portals of Varied Industries and Education
Palaces--Italian Renaissance portals of Manufactures and Liberal Arts,
and of the Courts of Flowers and Palms--The Roman west wall--Ornate
doorway of north facade Interior courts and aisles--A balanced plan--
This the first exposition to adopt the colors of nature for its
structures--Jules Guerin's color scheme, designed for an artificial
travertine marble--Simplicity of his palette, from which he painted the
entire Exposition--Even the flowers and sanded walks conform.
Although there are eight buildings named in the central palace group,
these are so closely connected in design and structure that in reality
they make but one palace. Here is seen the unity with variety which
marks this Exposition above all others. Commemorating a great
international event, its architecture is purposely eclectic,
cosmopolitan. Under a dominating Moorish-Spanish general form, the
single architect of the group, W. B. Faville, of San Francisco, drawing
upon the famous styles of many lands and schools, has combined into an
ordered and vastly impressive whole not only the structural art of
Orient and of the great Spanish builders, but also the principles of the
Italian Renaissance and the architecture of Greece and Rome from which
it sprang. Thus the group is wholly Southern in its origin. There is no
suggestion here of the colder Gothic architecture of the North.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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