By Michael Good | HouseCalls

A hundred years ago, a magical city was rising in Balboa Park. But did the Spanish Colonial architecture of the 1915 Expo inspire the Spanish Colonial Revival of the 1920s?

Recently, a homeowner was showing me around his two-story Spanish on 28th St. when he announced, with great conviction, “The same guys that built the 1915 Expo built this house.”

We were sta

nding at the top of the stairs. Through the bedroom windows, past the undulating golf-course lawns and the swaying Eucalyptus trees, you could see the fountain in front of the Fleet Museum and, in the distance, the top of the California Tower. “That’s where it all began,” he said, “The Spanish Colonial style.”

It was a nice story. It would have been nicer if the house were built in 1915, rather than in 1925. Still, one can imagine those itinerant fair builders waiting around for ten years, through a World War, an economic crisis and a flu pandemic for the opportunity to finally put to use the lessons they’d learned about building in the Spanish Colonial style.

Okay, so one can’t imagine that. Still, to the 20th century observer, it seems that there must be some connection between all those nice Spanish buildings in Balboa Park and the thousands of Spanish-style houses lined up in neat rows on the winding streets of Kensington, Mission Hills and much of the rest of Southern California.

So let’s step into the Way Back Time Machine and spin the dial to 1914, where we’ll discover a fantastical white city rising on a dusty mesa high above the San Diego harbor. The Panama-California Exposition was like nothing seen before in America and, when all was said and done, it no doubt inspired millions of Americans to dream of a carefree life in the land of milk and honey and eternal sunshine. Compared to the soot and stink of the modern American industrial city, with its belching smokestacks and streets lined with horse manure, life on the Prado must have seemed like some kind of dream. And it was. But did it inspire the architectural style we now know as Spanish Revival?

As first conceived, the 1915 Expo was supposed to be in the mission style. But there were problems — for one, the real Missions were rather plain. Materials were scarce and funding was nonexistent. So architectural details, such as the altar reredos, were suggested by paint, rather than actual three-dimensional wood, stone or plaster. (In 1771, the Fathers at San Gabriel ordered a book called “How to Paint Without a Teacher.”)

But the real problem with the mission style is that the supervising architect of the Exposition, Bertram Goodhue, didn’t like it. Goodhue had something grander in mind. He had traveled in Mexico and was taken with the baroque Mexican style of architecture, which he used for some aspects of the California Quadrangle. But Goodhue wasn’t trying to copy anything, or recreate anything. He was trying to make something completely new using historic buildings for inspiration (historic buildings that had some connection, however tenuous, to San Diego’s past).

Further complicating things, Goodhue lost control of the project before it was completed, as Richard W. Amero describes in Balboa Park and the 1915 Exposition. The result, under the supervision of Director of Works Frank P. Allen, was a mish-mash: mission, Spanish renaissance, Spanish plateresque, Persian, Mexican Churrigueresque, baroque, neoclassical, Romanesque and Italian renaissance.

Carleton Winslow, Goodhue’s assistant and an influential architect of the Spanish Revival in his own right, listed the sources for many of the architectural elements he designed, including a building in Puebla, New Mexico, a sanctuary in Guadalajara, palaces in Mexico City and Salamanca, Spain, and a hospital in Toledo, Spain. Other ideas likely came from Winslow’s own grand tour of Italy.

What people trying to locate the fountainhead of the Spanish Colonial Revival style seem to miss is that architects borrow and adapt. It’s part of their creative process. This is true of the architects of the Panama-California Exposition, who couldn’t agree on much — other than that they disliked each other. It was true of the builders of the Missions, who may or may not have had some formal schooling. And it’s true of the designers and builders of Spanish style houses of the 1920s

Earlier this month, at the annual Mission Hills Heritage lecture, a panel of experts discussed whether Bertram Goodhue invented Spanish Colonial Revival architecture with his designs for the 1915 Expo. Some said yes, some no, but historian Ron May, who moderated the discussion, put things in perspective when he referred to the romantic revival styles of the 1920s as “California Fantasy Architecture.” Because what these houses were about — whether they were Spanish Colonial, Tudor or Storybook — was make-believe, fantasy and escape. They were fun, and they were fantastic.

Hollywood quickly recognized the evocative power of the Expo architecture. Before the fair had even opened, film crews were shooting on the Expo grounds. The Pollard Picture Play Co. had a studio on the Isthmus, which was the 1915 version of the fun zone, complete with gambling, an opium den and a mock naval battle. Hollywood designers soon learned to create their own Expo-styled sets. Some, such as Harry Oliver, who had been a laborer at the Seattle World’s Fair, later designed real houses, as well as the make-believe kind. The back and forth between Hollywood and home building was as fluid as the border between San Diego and Tijuana in the early part of the 20th century.

Attendance for the Expo was about 3.7 million during the two years it was open. But once the festivities drew to a close Americans continued to experience Balboa Park’s fantastical architecture. The Expo and its buildings were part of a larger marketing scheme by San Diego’s movers and shakers to promote their business activities, which included homebuilding. Newspaper and magazine articles, movies, books and postcards all spread the image of this new California style of building.

The postcards were particularly influential. As Rosanne Goodwin, who is writing a book on the subject, explains, “a single visitor might buy a dozen postcards of the Expo, which they would then keep in an album to show to others.” Postcards were printed in the millions. There was a store selling them on the Isthmus, and before camera phones, twitter and Instagram, postcards were a way of saving your memories, and indoctrinating others to the wonders of San Diego and the California style of architecture. Long after the festivities of 1915 and 1916 ended, images of the fantasyland in the park continued to circulate, and inspire.

So, yes, an architectural revolution started 100 years ago on The Prado. But what Goodhue, Winslow, Allen and San Diego’s City fathers of 1915 invented wasn’t just a new type of architecture. It was a new type of dream.