Art: Pacific Pageant

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For San Francisco's present exposition, subtitled "A Pageant of the Pacific," the board of architects was an all-Western team. Chairman was George William Kel-ham, who had also been chief architect for the 1915 show. When he died two years ago he was succeeded by Arthur Brown Jr., another Panama-Pacific architect. Outstanding characteristic of the rest of the Fair architects, as of the exposition they designed, was their collaborative harmony. Fellow members of the Bohemian Club, august sanctuary of San Francisco tradition, most of them shared a mellow view of architecture and were damned if they would kill themselves advancing the modern cause in new materials and organic form. New York City's 1939 Fair already had a lien on the World of Tomorrow. Chairman Kelham and crew therefore plumped for a pleasuredom on "Treasure Island," an imaginative. quasi-Oriental "Never-Never Land."

Conceivably, nothing could have been worse. Fortunately, the Fair architects had taste in using their natural site. By laying out their timber and plaster buildings as a windowless "walled city," completely enclosing an L-shaped set of avenues and courts, they made a sheer 80-foot bulwark a quarter-of-a-mile long against the trade wind that blows off the Pacific. To keep the wind out at the west entrances, blue-eyed, sandy-haired Architect Ernest Weihe, fussing around with an electric fan, feathers and a cardboard model, devised "wind baffles"—a series of 80-foot vertical slabs placed like converging flys on a stage, with open passages to left and right between them. The clean monumentality of this effect was also used to set off Sculptor Ralph Stackpole's heroic-sized statue, Pacifica.

Basically nothing but enormous sheds, the main exposition buildings, stuccoed in "warm ivory" and unobtrusive pastel shades, owe much of their exoticism to "elephant towers," whose angles of light and shadow are softened by the Bay's hazy atmosphere. Mercifully softened also is the 400-foot Tower of the Sun, a nondescript steeple which serves to carry a 44-bell carillon. Last week San Francisco critics bore down hard on the Tower. Said Sculptor Beniamino Bufano: "It should have been a mosque or a minaret." Said Sculptor Ralph Stackpole: "The thing is up. What can you do about it?"

Modern Colonnade. Restrained as its glamor mostly is, and unified by a compact and accessible plan, the Fair may well weary its visitors less, refresh them more than if it had serious pretensions. From a structural standpoint it is preeminently stage design, fakery. Two big hangar buildings of steel and concrete and an administration building, all permanent fixtures of the new airport, are exceptions to this rule, and greatest exception of all is the Federal Building, separated from the rest by a lagoon and a parade ground. This is the work of San Francisco's genial, hardbitten, unpredictable Timothy Ludwig Pflueger.