The interior treatment of the domes furnishes an effective background for the fountains. The vault of the ceiling is a richly colored conventionalized pattern in orange, pompeiian red and blue. The repeated Corinthian columns lining the curve are of Sienna marble. The doorways between them, with the Moorish grill above the doors, are in green, while back of the lattice work is set stained glass in deep amber.
Administration Avenue
The Fine Arts Laguna
The Baker Street Entrance to the Exposition leads directly into Administration Avenue. The Horticultural Gardens first attract attention by their kaleidoscopic patches of blooming flowers. Then the eye travels on past the Palace of Horticulture to the massive bulwark of the Palaces of Education and Food Products in the walls of which two great half-domed portals form the principal points of interest. Across the way lies the Laguna with its reflected image of the Palace of Fine Arts, perhaps the loveliest spot in the Exposition grounds. Plants grow in the pool and the shores are lined with iris, primroses, periwinkles, pampas grass and, overtopping these, weeping willows mingled with other lovely trees and shrubs.
Towards the end of the Avenue is the small but attractive Hawaiian pavilion. The tower of the California building is silhouetted against the background of the Marin hills. Administration Avenue receives its name from the fact that it leads directly to the administrative headquarters of the Exposition, located in the California building.
Palace of Fine Arts
The Rotunda and Laguna
The Palace of Fine Arts has the finest natural setting on the Exposition grounds. Consummate skill in planning the entire architectural ensemble gave it a commanding position, at the extreme west of the group of exhibit palaces. The architect, Bernard. R. Maybeck of San Francisco, found as an asset on beginning his work, a small natural lake and a fine group of Monterey cypress. With this foundation he has created a temple of supreme loveliness, thoroughly original in conception, yet classic in its elemental simplicity and in its appeal to the highest and noblest traditions of beauty and art, revealing the imagination of a poet, the fine sense of color and harmony of an artist, and the sure hand of a master-architect in his confident control of architectural forms, of decorative detail and of the contributing landscape elements. The conception of the rotunda is said to have been suggested to the architect by Becklin's painting "The Island of the Dead" and that of the peristyle by Gerome's "Chariot Race."
Across the Laguna from the Palace of Fine Arts runs Administration Avenue and the magnificent Roman wall which forms the western facade of the main group of palaces.
Palace of Fine Arts
The Rotunda and Peristyle
The Palace of Fine Arts is, in reality, not one complete building, but four separate and distinct elements. The rotunda, an octagonal structure, forms the center of the composition. On either side is a detached peristyle which follows the curve of the gallery itself, as it describes an arc about the western shore of the Laguna, yet so successfully are they all bound together by the encircling green wall and by the other landscape elements, that an impression of satisfying unity results.
The architecture, as a whole, is early Roman, with traces of the finer
Greek influences. In general treatment, there is a suggestion of the
Temple of the Sun at Athens, while much of the detail was inspired by
the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, also at Athens.