California Pacific Exposition

California Pacific Exposition
San Diego 1935-1936

Arch of the FutureRichard Requa
directed the new
Exposition architecture

The House of Pacific Relations
and Spanish Village
Modern Buildings
were added on the Palisades

Requa remodeled both the
Foreign Arts Building
& the
New Mexico Building

Most of the 1935 buildings were not in Requa's trademark vernacular style. He wrote that they were extensions of Goodhue's work for the first exposition. Since Goodhue had concentrated on seventeenth-century Spanish-Colonial architecture, Requa would relate pre-Columbian Indian buildings and temples in the Southwest and Mexico to the modern era. A model existed in the earth colors, rounded contours, projecting vigas, and flat roof of the 1915 New Mexico Building. Requa, or his assistant Louis Bodmer, adapted features from this Pueblo-style building to the Hollywood Hall of Fame (today Palisades Building) and the Palisades Cafe (today no more). Since these buildings were a few steps from the New Mexico Building, it seemed appropriate to group them together in an identical style.

Requa did not leave the New Mexico Building unscathed for, to adapt it to the purposes of a Palace of Education, he added an exhibit room in the back, closed and roofed an open-air patio, and affixed an awkward gable to the skylight above the enclosed patio. Looking at the remodeled Palace of Education sometime after the 1935-36 California Pacific International Exposition, architecture historian Carl Sheppard ruefully concluded, "the New Mexico Building has lost its early distinction."

Exposition tours / Expo Map / Postcards / History / Acknowledgements

SDHS


	Arch of the FutureRichard Requa directed the new Exposition architecture
The House of Pacific Relations and Spanish Village		Modern Buildings were added on the Palisades
	Requa remodeled both the Foreign Arts Building & the New Mexico Building