The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition

A kingdom without sleep rises beside the sea—and vanishes in its own radiance. Louis Christian Mullgardt calls the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition a “phantom kingdom,” its palaces and gardens like flamingoes unfurling their feathers against green hills.

In San Francisco, rebuilt after the 1906 fire, architects and gardeners shaped a temporary city of courts, colonnades, fountains, and tropical gardens beside the bay. Mullgardt, architect of the Court of Ages and a member of the Exposition’s Architectural Commission, sees more than ornament: architecture is a language in which a people’s hopes and progress become visible. Through night-lit towers, misty pools, and sweeping vistas, this pictorial survey asks what a shared act of creation can express. What might this vanished kingdom reveal about the people who built it?

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