Building History

The Oakland architect John J. Donovan, Sr., (1876-1949) designed the Oakland Civic Auditorium during the Progressive Era, a time when many cities across the US (including neighboring San Francisco) were replanning ensembles of governmental and cultural buildings within master-planned civic centers. This practice became very popular as a result of the spread of planning principles developed at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the leading architectural school of the period between 1850 and 1940. Beaux-Arts architectural and planning concepts became predominant in the United States between the 1890s and the 1940s, particularly for large-scale governmental buildings. The building was timed to open before the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair, the Panama-Pacific Exposition, drew thousands of tourists to the Bay Area, and to match Beaux-Arts rebuilding efforts going on across the Bay.

During the early 1910s, the Pittsburgh and New York architect Henry Hornbostel (1867-1961) consulted on various projects for Oakland city government, including principal design work for the Oakland City Hall #5, for which his firm Palmer, Hornbostel and Jones, won a national design competition in 1911. Hornbostel also consulted with his former employee, John Donovan, on this project as well as that for the Oakland Technical High School (1912-1913).

Donovan created the original concept for the Oakland Civic Auditorium, but, due to lagging construction and rising costs, the Oakland's City Council replace him in 1913 by Walter J. Mathews (1850-1947).

Building Notes

The sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945) created the bas-relief sculptures located in the vaulted niches surrounding the north entry's main doors. Calder had worked in CA, before, most notably on sculptural commissions for Throop Polytechnic Institute, but also supervised sculptural production for San Francisco's Panama-Pacific Exposition. A.S. Calder came from a line of artists, his father having been Alexander Milne Calder, an accomplished Scottish-American sculptor of 37-foot-tall William Penn statue placed atop the Philadelphia City Hall in 1894. A.S. was the father of the Modern sculptor, Alexander Calder (1898-1976), the inventor of abstract, kinetic sculptures known as "mobiles."