In 1936 dredges began pumping sand from the bay floor onto Yerba Buena Shoals. Two years later, four hundred acres of new ground and two hundred wells drained the salt out so something could grow.
What was built there was a work of total design—Modern, unashamedly theatrical, drawn from across the Pacific. Arthur Brown Jr. and his architects raised windowless walls eighty feet high along the western edge, a height arrived at by testing a scale model in wind.
Color was what made it cohere. Jess Stanton, the Color Architect, held it to nineteen hues taken from the coloring of Pacific shores—Exposition ivory across most of it, Santa Clara apricot, Evening Star blue—and permitted no pure color to touch a wall. A. F. Dickerson of General Electric lit it to the same palette, with fluorescent lamps almost nobody had ever seen. The pure color Stanton withheld from the architecture, Julius Girod released into the planting: four thousand trees moved across the water, some forty tons, and twenty-five acres of ice plant—the Magic Carpet—at the gates. Four practices, one scheme.
It stood for two seasons. By 1942 the Navy had the island, and almost nothing survives.
Black-and-white recorded the fair thoroughly and missed the thing it was organized around. This lecture is built on Kodachrome, much of it unpublished—a film three years old when the gates opened, eleven weeks old in the form that finally held these colors.
Steven Keylon is an architectural historian in Palm Springs and the editor of Eden, the journal of the California Garden & Landscape History Society, where this research first appeared as a double issue on the 1939-1940 fair. He is the author of books on the architects Herbert W. Burns and Hugh Kaptur, and a contributor to California Eden: Heritage Landscapes of the Golden State.