Brian Smith's Photos

A Valentine’s Day wander to a local classic building — the Marin County Civic Center is right here in San Rafael, and it’s the only public building Frank Lloyd Wright ever built that you can properly walk through (his other government commission, the nearby post office, is a much smaller affair across the road). It was his last commission and the largest project of his career, though he never saw it finished — he died in 1959, and the Administration Building didn’t break ground until 1960, completed by his protégé Aaron Green. The Hall of Justice followed in the late ’60s.

Wright was famously particular about his sites, and he wasn’t shy about it here — he called Marin “one of the most beautiful landscapes I have seen,” and the building really does try to lie into the hills rather than sit on top of them, with those long, low, arched wings bridging the valleys instead of cutting through them.

The pink stucco and that pale blue roof are the building’s calling cards, but the blue wasn’t actually Wright’s choice — he died before the roof colour was decided, and it was his wife Olgivanna who picked it, betting that it would weather gracefully against the sky. Little gold accents turn up throughout on doors and details.

Everything circles back to the domed rotunda in the middle, an 80-foot circle topped by a slender gold spire that was originally meant to double as a furnace exhaust and a radio mast — neither of which it ended up needing. It’s where the county library and the Board of Supervisors both sit, which feels very on-brand for a building Wright wanted to be an open, democratic space rather than a fortress.

It’s also, apparently, a favourite backdrop for sci-fi directors — both THX 1138 and Gattaca were filmed here, which makes a lot of sense once you’re standing in one of those long, curved, sunlit corridors.

A National Historic Landmark hiding in plain sight, and one I’m glad I finally got round to properly photographing rather than just driving past on the freeway.