Ford Building

About this property

The Ford Building is a Streamline Moderne structure in Balboa Park in San Diego, California, that serves as the home of the San Diego Air & Space Museum. The building was built by the Ford Motor Company for the California Pacific International Exposition, which was held in 1935 and 1936. The Ford Motor Company built a total of five exposition buildings for the world's fairs. This is the last remaining structure. The building's architect was noted American industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague. The building was styled to resemble a V8 engine. Overall, it consists of two different-sized circles in the shape of an "8", and in the courtyard of the larger circle, a large fountain is shaped like the Ford V8 logo. The lights in the courtyard ("Pavilion of Flight") are shaped like valves. Along the interior wall of the outer ring is a mural depicting the history of transportation from the times of hunter-gatherers to 1935. The last panel of the mural was left open for the artist to depict his vision of the future of transportation after 1935, which is still visible today. Initially, Ford wanted the building to be a 200-foot tower, but with the building near the flight path of arriving planes at San Diego International Airport, it was lowered to 90 feet. The size of the building was also decreased to 60,000 square feet from the initially proposed 113,000 square feet. The site for the building was initially going to be near the Spreckels Organ Pavilion, but was later decided to be built in the Palisades area of the park. Construction took 11 months to complete. The main exhibit hall was a concrete plaster structure framed by steel. Ford was the exposition's principal exhibitor and invested $2 million in the 45,000-square-foot (4,200 m2), 296-foot (90 m) diameter building to showcase its vehicles and other forms of transportation. Throughout the exposition, Ford was assembling autos along the outer rings and used the courtyard area to display the latest-model automobiles. The newly assembled vehicles were rolled out the large doors on the west side. Also, a test track was set up down the hill behind the building where visitors could take one of the model autos for a test drive. By the end of the exhibition, 2.5 million people had toured the building and its exhibits. Ford donated the building to the city of San Diego at the exhibition's completion in November 1935. The city decided to extend the exhibition into 1936 and renamed the building "The Palace of Transportation" to showcase exhibits related to transportation. When the 1936 exhibition concluded, the building was closed and was not available to the public until 1980, when the San Diego Air & Space Museum opened.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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