Palace of Fine Arts

The Palace of Fine Arts is a deliberate ruin. When Bernard Maybeck designed it for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition — the world's fair San Francisco threw to announce it had rebuilt itself after the 1906 earthquake — he wanted something melancholy rather than triumphant: a Greco-Roman rotunda decaying gracefully beside a lagoon, half-swallowed by planting, evoking, in his words, 'an old Roman ruin, away from civilization.' It's the only structure of the fair's grand palaces still standing, and the strangest and most beautiful thing in the Marina District.

The rotunda rises 162 feet, ringed by a colonnade whose capitals are topped by weeping female figures who face inward, backs to the visitor — a detail that unsettles people once they notice it. Maybeck intended them to express 'the melancholy of life without art.' The whole thing was originally built to last only the fair's ten-month run, framed in wood and clad in staff, a mix of plaster and burlap fibre. It was never demolished, simply because San Franciscans refused to let it go.

By the 1950s it was genuinely crumbling. A reconstruction beginning in 1964 recast the entire structure in poured concrete from moulds of the originals, and a further seismic retrofit and lagoon restoration finished in 2009. What you see today is faithful to Maybeck's design down to the urns and the frieze, just built to survive earthquakes.

The lagoon is the other half of the experience. Swans, ducks, turtles and the occasional heron work the water, and on a windless morning the reflection of the rotunda is close to perfect — which is why this is the most booked wedding-photography site in the city. The surrounding lawns are a genuine neighbourhood park rather than a tourist enclosure, and the Marina Green waterfront path starts a block away, running flat along the shoreline through Crissy Field to the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. That three-mile walk is the best introduction to San Francisco's waterfront there is.