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.

Differing from each other in many details, the eight palaces are alike
in their outer walls, their domes and gables, and similar in their
entrances. These portals give a distinctive character to each palace.
While the palaces differ widely in details of decoration, they all have
a common source; they are all Mediterranean,--not all Byzantine, or
Roman, or Italian, or Spanish, or Moorish, but some thing of each. The
manner in which these forms are carried over from one palace to another,
and the almost constant recurrence of some of them, like the Moorish
domes at the corners, blends them without jar or break. The great wall,
almost blank, except for the entrances, encloses the palaces like a
walled city of the Mediterranean or the nearer Orient. Such a walled
city it is, with its courts, its avenues, its fountains and pools, all
placed in a setting of landscape, sea and sky, that might belong to
Spain, or Southern Italy, or the lands of the Moslem.

The broad, unbroken spaces that mark each face of this vast block
greatly heighten the illusion. They lend an Old-World aspect, the
historical fitness of which must not be overlooked. For these plain
surfaces are indeed significant in the celebration of an event which was
predicted by the Spanish conquistadors a century before the English
Cavaliers and Puritans laid the foundations of our American