The
Exposition is built almost entirely on filled ground, just reclaimed
from the bay; and it was a colossal task to set out the hundreds of
thousands of flowers, shrubs and trees which now make the gardens seem
permanent, and which set off the architecture so perfectly.
Lighting
When one's soul has been drenched all day in the beauty of courts and
palaces and statues and paintings, dusk is likely to bring welcome rest;
but when the lights begin to appear there comes a new experience-a
world made over, and yet quite as beautiful as the old. Walls are lost
where least interesting, bits of architecture are brought out in relief
against the velvet sky, and sculptures take on a new softness and
loveliness of form. Under the wonderfully developed system of indirect
illumination, no naked light is seen by the eye; only the soft reflected
glow, intense when desired, but never glaring. If this lighting is not
in itself an art, it is at least the informing spirit that turns prose
to poetry, or the instrumental accompaniment without which the voice of
the artist would be but half heard. Too much credit cannot be given to
the lighting wizard of the Exposition, W. D'Arcy Ryan.
The Court of Abundance
The Court of Abundance is the most original, and perhaps the most
consistently beautiful, of all the Exposition courts.
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