Palace of Fine Arts

What you're looking at is a building that was designed to look like a ruin — and then actually became one.

Architect Bernard Maybeck created this for the nineteen fifteen Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a massive world's fair that celebrated San Francisco's recovery from the nineteen-oh-six earthquake. Maybeck's inspiration was deeply unusual. He based the design on Arnold Bocklin's painting "Isle of the Dead" — a haunting image of a cypress-covered island with a lone figure approaching by boat. Maybeck wanted visitors to feel a sense of beautiful sadness, of grandeur fading. He designed the Palace to look like an ancient Roman ruin, complete with crumbling columns and weeping figures atop the colonnade.

The trick was that the whole thing was built from temporary materials — plaster, burlap, and wood framing. Like every other building at the fair, it was meant to be torn down when the exposition ended. And every other building was demolished. But San Franciscans loved the Palace so much they couldn't bring themselves to destroy it. So they just left it standing.

For the next fifty years, Maybeck's fake ruin slowly became a real one. The plaster crumbled. The wooden frame rotted. Plants grew through the cracks. By the nineteen sixties, it was genuinely falling apart — a ruin of a ruin. That's when Caspar Weinberger, before he became Secretary of Defense, led a campaign to save it. Between nineteen sixty-four and nineteen seventy-four, the entire structure was rebuilt from scratch in permanent materials — poured concrete replacing the original plaster, steel replacing wood. What you see today is essentially a replica of a building that was designed to look like a ruin of something that never existed in the first place. It's copies all the way down.