Pacific Area

Japan, like Italy, spent lavishly on its pavilion and gardens. A Japanese pamphlet described it as a “Feudal Castle” combined with a “Samurai House” with “kaiyu style” gardens. “Built with all the care and detail of the Japanese artisans, the structure could stand for centuries”—a permanent building for a temporary event that would be razed because no one wanted it after the fair.

Covarrubias’s celebrated murals of Pacific cultures were intentionally cartoonish tableaux de races that spared no one and thus put the peoples of the Pacific on the same level. They bedecked the walls of Pacific House, William Merchant’s eleventh-hour theme building. In contrast to the Tower of Youth that it displaced, Pacific House was nearly blank, even a bit bare, rather like a lobby grown into a building. It allowed full expression to the many architectural languages of its neighbors, until it was painted “Imperial Red” for the 1940 fair. Landscape architect, Geraldine Knight (later Scott) installed plantings from all four continents of the Pacific creating an encyclopedia of Pacific Flora that served as an exhibit in its own right.