HOMES FOR SALE

Architextures

Mediterranean Revival

Mediterranean Revival Styles

Panama-California Exposition of 1915

In 1909 the city of San Diego, California decided to hold an exposition in City Park to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal and advertise the city as the first American port of call for westward bound ships. The Panama-California Exposition consumed the city's energy and attention (and a great deal of financial resources) for seven years. In line with the rising Hispanic romanticism of the period, City Park was renamed Balboa Park for the Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.

What made San Diego's fair so important and memorable was its architecture. In the early stages of planning it seemed a plain Mission Revival style was the right expression for the city and its new fascination with its Hispanic roots. As the exposition grew during early planning phases, an offer for a much grander architecture was advanced by New York architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. A leading exponent of the High Baroque style of Spanish Colonial architecture known as Churrigueresque, he offered this small fair a much grander vision of itself. Goodhue said he was trying to capture the region's past and, "to obtain ... something of the effect of the old Spanish and Mexican days and thus to link the spirit of the old seekers of the fabled El Dorado with that of the Twentieth Century." The buildings, he later said, "should provide ... illusion rather than reality."

The publicity this exposition received all across the United States helped to kindle a desire for Spanish Colonial Style homes in subdivisions all over the Southwest. The older Mission Style architecture was eclipsed by this newer expression of Spanish/Mediterranean stylistic motifs.