Pasadena City Hall was finished in 1927 and is truly a beautiful building to experience, a lavish oddity, and contains an unphotographable moment of brilliant good humor. As Frank Lloyd Wright would sometimes call out to people photographing his buildings, "The machine eye can't take it in!", and that's true here too, the machine eye can't quite convey the moment here when you cross a certain threshold and you are played with.

The architects of this massive Beaux-Arts landmark were (John) Bakewell and (Arthur) Brown (Jr.) of San Francisco, both of them students of the Beaux-Arts and also of Bernard Maybeck. They'd designed the 1914 San Francisco City Hall, a quite imposing and serious structure, intimidating even.

 

The SF City Hall, the Pasadena City Hall, the San Diego Union Station also from Brown and Bakewell, along with Maybeck's 1915 Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco and Goodhue's suite of buildings in Balboa Park in San Diego, constitute a building genre unto themselves, sort of a California-Mediterranean-Beaux-Arts-Civic-Baroque that provided an untrue backstory and grounding formality for the affairs of this young and evanescent state. John Bakewell himself described the style as "a modern interpretation of sixteenth century Italian Renaissance" but it sure as hell looks French to me. Dunno. This City Hall was built as the centerpiece of a civic center plan that includes a plaza out front and the intriguing Pasadena Public Library just to the north, across the street.

Approach the enormous dome-tower here in Pasadena, and it takes awhile for it to sink in. The dome is six "stories" but that elongated fifth story is 41 feet tall, two or three stories in itself. That elongation is a magnificent trick of scale.

 

It's an imposing thing. (It's a shame about that relationship to the street.) Looking at it you're reminded of Pasadena's status as a rich supersuburb with its own money and history apart from Los Angeles, and its self-conscious artistic taste. The year 1927 was late in the day for this Beaux-Art style, and the Arts-and-Crafts Gamble House down the street was already twenty years old.

You're conscious, while being inevitably drawn towards the entrance, of Pasadena's solid seriousness. It's all east-coasty that way, like one of those stable Chicago suburbs or Connecticut college town. Walking through these surrounding Pasadena streets at night, past a quiet but insistent neighborhood cinema and a venerable bookstore and sturdy churches and various seats in corner windows for a beer or coffee, the urban fabric is as dense and wealthy as Zehlendorf.

There's only one way to proceed through this building, straight down the middle, through its Beaux-Art axiality (if that's a word) like a bowling ball. You can see a central fountain ahead of you, it draws you forward. You pass under the dome.

Keep going, expecting you don't know what, because some of these formal civic buildings with elaborate exteriors are very rectilinear and disappointing and chilly in their interior courtyards, or you might get a formal Greco rotunda, and you emerge into.....

Guadalajara!

Amazingly there's a generous sandy courtyard with an open arcade out the back. The change in social pressure is so dramatic you just have to sit down. Inside, it's like a relaxed convent, with flowerbeds of azaleas, hydrangeas, and rhododendron, and a beautiful fountain in the middle, 22 feet tall. Live oak trees - the ones with long-growing heavy branches suitable for climbing that remind me of San Antonio.

 

All this stately French Beaux-Art stuff resolves around you into a gentle dirt courtyard. The fountain looks handmade, there's tile all around. The French discipline rolls off your shoulders, you're left with a Mission-style tropical bureaucratic retreat with a surrounding arcade and cast-iron benches. Outside, it's all Parisian inefficiency, and inside it's all Mexican inefficiency. It's a surprise every time.

In one step you travel several hundred miles south, and I don't know any other building that can do that.