California Tower - San Diego, CA, USA
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 32° 43.889 W 117° 09.137
11S E 485731 N 3621530
This building now serves as San Diego's History of Man and is located in Balboa Park.
Waymark Code: WMCM26
Location: California, United States
Date Posted: 09/19/2011
Views: 25
This building was designed for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition.
The architecture of this building adheres to the Fair's theme to extol San Diego's culture and Spanish heritage. The very ornate building is in Spanish Renaissance and Colonial styles. It was part of a complex of buildings (all of which still stand) known as the California Quadrangle- and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
As it did in 1915, the Museum still serves as a museum of anthropology...featuring exhibits which transport the visitor through millions of years of evolution. For more information about the buildings history, see (
visit link)
The architect, Bertram Goodhue (1869-1924) won the AIA Gold Medal in 1925. In addition to this building, he aslo designed the Nebraska State Capitol and the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago.
The Wikipedia (
visit link) entry for Goodhue adds:
" Goodhue is credited with creating a distinctive interpretation of Spanish Colonial architecture into the Spanish Colonial Revival Style as a dominant Californian regional vernacular.[6] He also directly influenced the dominance of the Spanish Colonial Revival style in major public and private architecture of 1920s Hawaii.[6]
Along with Paul Cret and others, Goodhue is sometimes credited with being part of popularizing the art deco style in America, as in his design for the Nebraska State Capitol building, by which some may retroactively classify him as an early American Modernist. However, his dedication to the integration of art and architecture was exactly contrary to the spirit of Modernism design, and at least partly accounts for the academic and critical neglect of his work."