The Exposition That Gave San Diego Its Look
Near La Jolla, California
Every city eventually chooses a look, consciously or not. San Diego chose its look in nineteen fifteen, at a world's fair, and has been living inside that choice for more than a century.
The occasion was the Panama-California Exposition, held in Balboa Park to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal and to attract attention to San Diego, a city of roughly forty thousand people that found itself competing with San Francisco, which was staging its own, larger fair to celebrate the same canal. San Diego needed something distinctive. The exposition committee hired a young architect named Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue.
Goodhue designed the exposition buildings in what he called Spanish Colonial Revival, a style that fused Baroque Spanish ecclesiastical architecture, Moorish ornamentation, the Mexican Churrigueresque tradition, and a generous helping of theatrical invention. It was a fantasy of the colonial past, a California that had never actually existed rendered in plaster and paint and bell towers. It was also, by most accounts, spectacularly beautiful. The millions of visitors who arrived in San Diego for a city of forty thousand came partly to see the exhibits and partly because photographs of Goodhue's buildings had made the fair look like something out of an illustrated novel.
The exposition ran from nineteen fifteen through nineteen seventeen. When it ended, nobody wanted to tear the buildings down. They stayed. They became the permanent character of Balboa Park. They also became the template, consciously imitated, for courthouses, libraries, city halls, and civic buildings across Southern California for the next three decades. The Spanish Colonial Revival style that defines public architecture from San Diego to Santa Barbara was not organic. It was designed for a two-year fair and inherited by a region.
The California Building at the center of the original exposition grounds now houses the Museum of Us, known for most of the twentieth century as the Museum of Man. Goodhue's tower, visible from much of the park, is still there. The style was a fiction. It is also the most persistent architectural fact in San Diego's history.
