he intended it to convey. For the Palace of Fine Arts is a sermon in
itself. In it old Roman models have been used to elaborate a California
text. Its structure and setting are the demonstration of a theorem,--
the finished word of the preachment of a lifetime. The Exposition gave
the preacher his opportunity. Bernard Maybeck, the Berkeley architect,
had long been telling California that architecture here, to be
beautiful, needed only to be an effective background for landscape. His
theory is that as trees and plants grow so easily and so quickly here,
Californians are wasting their finest source of beauty if they do not
combine landscape with building.

When Maybeck was called upon to design a palace of fine arts at the
Exposition, one fact enabled him to exemplify his theory in the finest
way. The old Harbor View bog was found to have a bottom impervious
enough to hold water, and the trees of the demolished resort were still
standing. When the mud was scooped out, a lake was left. That gave not
only growing trees, in addition to the resources of the Exposition's
forestry, but also a real sheet of water, for the landscape. (See p.
112.)

Maybeck surprised me by saying that there is nothing specially
remarkable about the Palace itself. "What is it the people like?" he
asked, and himself replied, "it is the water and the trees." When I
reminded him of the beauty of the colonnade seen from points in the
enclosed passageway, where no water is in view, he answered: "The public
was bribed to like that. Leaving off the roof between the colonnade and
the gallery was a direct bribe. A few other simple devices give the
effect the people like. One of these is the absence of windows in the
walls, a device well known to the old Italians. Others are the water,
the trees, and the flower-covered pergolas on the roof."