Pacific Pageant

The two biggest shows in the land of the free this year will be at Flushing, L. I. and on San Francisco Bay. To stage them businessmen have dug down for millions of dollars, politicians have played their cards, engineers have sweated, architects have dreamed, press agents have run wild, artists have cried aloud. Located smack in the centres of the two greatest metropolitan areas in the U. .S., each will choke its already surfeited neighborhood with milling millions of citizens out for a good time. To each will come travelers seeking knowledge of the world and its wonders. So runs the half-meretricious, half-genuine promise of World's Fairs.

In the East this converging flood of population is still four months away, but San Francisco has only six weeks before the great visitation begins.* Last week curious and critical San Franciscans took a last look around their Exposition's "Treasure Island," probably about to be closed to visitors while 3,000 workmen go on double shift to polish it off for opening day.

Ocean City. The reclaimers of Flushing dump could be reasonably sure that any exposition erected there would be a delightful improvement on the scene, but San Francisco's exposition builders were far from such a certainty. For the city and harbor of San Francisco constitute one of the great urban beauties of North America. San Francisco Bay is not only vast--48 miles long, embracing 450 square miles of roadstead--but magnificently visible, cupped by the steeply carved mountains of the coast range. San Francisco rises in clean, pale tiers of buildings on the hilly peninsula between this shining water and the Pacific Ocean.

The site chosen for the "Golden Gate International Exposition" placed it in isolated contrast to these surroundings, had a decisive influence on its builders. San Francisco needed an airport before it needed a Fair, and the best place for an airport was determined as early as 1931 by the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Credit for putting two & two together is given to Air-enthusiast Henry Eickhoff Jr., who began thumping in 1933 for an exposition along with the airport, on the ground that each would help build the other. Three years more and a fleet of dredges appeared off the wooded hump of Yerba Buena Island between San Francisco and Oakland and began pumping black sand from the Bay bottom, slopping it over Yerba Buena shoals. With the help of Army engineers, WPA labor and a grant of $6,250,000 from the Federal Government, a mile-long island was sucked from the Bay to serve as San Francisco's fairground in 1939 and its airport forever after.

Pleasuredom. Local precedent for the Fair builders was San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, a glittering tour de jorce by the smartest Beaux-Arts architects of the day. Held to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. it appropriately linked East Coast and West Coast on its board of architects. Tenderly remembered in San Francisco, the Panama-Pacific Exposition had no influence for the good on U. S. architecture.

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.

A self-made architect who got his schooling in offices, Timothy Pflueger is all for "Pacific Architecture" as a reality, believes "it's too damned bad we didn't have the Oriental influence on the coast instead of the European.'' As President of the San Francisco Art Association, he staged, from 1934 to 1937, the hugest. most exotic super-de Mille costume balls in San Francisco's history. For the Federal Building, however, he produced a fine, occidental job of economy, stateliness and rational planning.

At its centre in an open court, a colonnade of 48 timberwork columns, four abreast and twelve in a row, rises 100 feet to symbolize the States of the Union. At once simple, honest, impressive and cheap, this stunt utilizes the sky and water of the Bay. On each side of the columns Architect Pflueger designed other open courts, surrounded by a light and trimly built structure of four-by-eight-foot plywood panels, a strong, beautiful surface, more native than stucco to forested California. About 20 nations of the Pacific, from Peru to Japan, are building more or less authentic pavilions along the Pacific lagoon. None is a saner expression of national character than Pflueger's for the U. S. A.

*The FORTUNE Survey for November deduced that 24.3%, or 31,590,000 of the nation's 130,000,000 people expect to go to New York, 6.9% or 8,970,000 to San Francisco.

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