Notice how this structure evokes the melancholy beauty of ancient ruins, rebuilt to last forever. The Palace of Fine Arts was created by architect Bernard Maybeck for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world's fair San Francisco staged to announce to the world that it had fully recovered from the 1906 earthquake. The Exposition covered the entire Marina District, which had been bay mud and rubble fill until the fair transformed it.
Most of the fair's buildings were designed to be temporary and demolished afterward. The Palace of Fine Arts was so beloved that the city kept it. It was constructed of plaster and wood — temporary materials — and slowly crumbled for decades.
In the 1960s, a local philanthropist funded a complete reconstruction in permanent concrete. Maybeck based the design on Piranesi's etchings of Roman ruins and on the painting by Böcklin called Isle of the Dead. The weeping female figures on the colonnade represent the sadness of art imprisoned in materialism.
The lagoon, populated by swans and ducks, reflects the rotunda perfectly on calm mornings. Walk the full colonnade and look at the detail Maybeck put into a building meant to be temporary.