Into the Void Pacific: Building the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair by Andrew M. Shanken (review)

The 1939–40 Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) is usually regarded as the “other” world’s fair—the, smaller, poorer, West Coast cousin of the grander, sleeker 1939–40 New York World’s Fair. In this beautifully illustrated and printed book produced on the occasion of the GGIE’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Andrew Shanken rejects this standard perception of the fair’s otherness and challenges another viewpoint as well—namely, the argument that the fairs of the 1930s are best regarded as modernistic extravaganzas of imperialism and mass consumerism informed by East Coast architects and their European counterparts. For Shanken what makes the San Francisco fair so interesting and important is that it showcased the work of a number of West Coast architects who embraced regionalism as the core of their design ethos, not European and East Coast modernist aesthetics.

Imaginatively titled (drawing on a clever phrase coined by D. H. Lawrence to describe California’s idiosyncratic relationship to the rest of the world), Shanken’s book moves through the fair’s contested planning and design phases and offers marvelously detailed chapters about some of the fair’s major buildings: the Federal Building (Timothy Pflueger), the Yerba Buena Club (William Wurster), and the Tower of the Sun (Arthur Brown, Jr.). Many structures were clustered into thematic zones—for instance, Ernest Wiehe’s Portals of the Pacific, which featured the two massive, cubistic Elephant Towers designed by sculptor Donald Macky that the author wryly describes as “Californian in their own way” (91). As with any good history of world’s fair designs, Shanken also addresses some of the ideas not implemented, including a colossal sculpture appropriately named Colossus that sprang from Bernard Maybeck’s fertile mind—one that combined with William Merchant’s to produce the Redwood Empire Building, one of many buildings dedicated to representing multiple regions of California. Also noted are several structures designed by architects who remain anonymous (for instance, the loosely Internationalist-style buildings dedicated to the U.S. Coast Guard and the state of Illinois).

So much happens in this book. We learn about the siting of the fair on the human-built Treasure Island, annexed to Yerba Buena Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay and originally intended as the site of San Francisco’s new airport. We learn about the debates among architects and designers about how the fair should be designed. In addition, Shanken masterfully discusses the color schemes of the fair, contrasting GGIE colorist Jesse Stanton’s ideas with those of Joseph Urban for the 1933–34 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, noting that Urban’s schematics “resembled a Mondrian painting, while Stanton’s looked like paint samples in a Benjamin Moore catalog” (83). Shanken also does a superb job of situating Miguel Covarrubias’s famous Peoples of the Pacific mural in the complex mix of designers’ thinking about the relationship between regionalism and imperialism.

As good as it is, Shanken’s book has three gaps. First, only the briefest mention is made of the vernacular structures on the Gayway, the fair’s midway, which counted among its many shows Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch, a Chinese Village, and Billy Rose’s Aquacade featuring Johnny Weissmuller and Esther Williams. Were these shows designed in regionalist idioms as well, or did they reflect national and corporatist branding strategies? Second, greater attention to exhibit design within the interior spaces of exposition buildings would have made a fascinating addition to the book. For instance, in his monumental East Is East and West Is West (a book Shanken notes), Carlos E. Cummings, director of the Buffalo Science Museum, visited both the San Francisco and New York fairs and recorded his impressions of exhibits at both expositions, noting that displays generally had a “billboard” effect.¹ Did the exhibit areas within exposition buildings reflect...