Reflections

reflection, originally uploaded by HUICHIEH.

reflection1, originally uploaded by HUICHIEH.

The Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco on a drizzly december day. As this website explains:

The task of creating a Palace of Fine Arts for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition fell to the architect Bernard R. Maybeck, then fifty years old and known for his innovative ideas. Setting to work on this new project, he chose as his theme a Roman ruin, mutilated and overgrown, in the mood of a Piranesi engraving. But this ruin was not to exist solely for itself to show "the mortality of grandeur and the vanity of human wishes .... "

Maybeck probably did not forsee that the present state of his creation would reflect his theme more than ever.