Time to Build the Golden Dome

Why won't county officials honor Frank Lloyd Wright and paint the Marin County Civic Center roof gold?

The once celebrated blue roof of the Marin County Civic Center has faded to a dismal off-white shell of what architect Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned when he designed the famous building more than six decades ago.

The roof on the historic compound looks more like a snake’s underbelly than the “synthesis of ground and building” that Wright foresaw. The architect, who was notoriously insistent about the colors and features of his designs, would surely disapprove.

Wright, in fact, designed the roof to be metallic gold so that it would blend in with the surrounding hills during the summer and fall, but he died before his masterpiece was built. His wife and colleagues settled for blue when they could not find a gold paint that would survive the elements, but its hard to imagine a color fading as fast as the brilliant “Marin Blue” color they chose.

Despite this, county officials have repeatedly approved expensive blue paint restoration projects, including a $1.5 million re-coating in 2020 that was supposed to last at least two decades. That garish blue polyurethane membrane, which was supposedly imbued with “significant color stability,” lasted less than five years.

The official story is that dirt, wildfire smoke and pollution accumulated on the roof, covering the paint. The county plans to power wash the roof this summer, but one look at the pallid dome makes one wonder whether a mere cleaning will work. And for how long?

And why, given the color stability problems with blue, isn’t the county looking into gold, the color Frank Lloyd Wright wanted? The issue was raised back in 2000, when the county embarked on another restoration project — that one costing $1.3 million. The county, at that time, did not even discuss the possibility of granting Wright's wish.

“It never came up,” said Mike Bianchi, the roof restoration project manager at the time. “It was built this way, so we kept it this way. We weren't going to change the look of the building.”

Sara Briggs, then the executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, in Chicago, told me 25 years ago that Marin County’s dilemma is a relatively common problem because Wright's designs often required the use of expensive materials. Sometimes the material wasn't available or the owner couldn't afford it, so an alternative was used.

She said many owners in the midst of a restoration project simply stuck with the alternative to Wright's original design, but usually the decision was made after considerable research and an exploration of the options, including the architect’s specifications.

“It's something that probably should have been investigated,” Briggs said of the idea of painting the roof gold.

Wright, famous for his “organic architecture,” was hired to design the Marin County Civic Center in 1957. The concrete roof, which included domes, arches and hundreds of circular ornaments, was apparently designed to look like it was made out of metal, which would explain his insistence on a metallic color.

The building was 90 percent built when Wright died in 1959. The 470,168-square-foot Civic Center — the largest completed public project that Frank Lloyd Wright designed — was completed in 1962. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

“The bid documents put out in late 1959 called specifically for a fluid applied roof membrane — clear plastic with suspended bronze dust in it,” architectural historian Bill Schwarz told the North Bay Business Journal in 2019.

“He loved metallic gold,” Aaron Green, Wright's long-time associate, told me in 2000. “The hills become gold through most of the year and he thought it would be spectacular and interesting.”

But besides being expensive, contractors worried that the golden-bronze color would fade. The blue color was chosen by Wright’s widow to match a Greek Orthodox church in Wisconsin that her late husband had designed in 1956.

Wright, of course, wasn’t around to express an opinion about the new color scheme, but, given his predilections, it isn’t difficult to guess what he would have thought. For one, blue does not look metallic and it certainly doesn’t blend in to the surrounding hills. Secondly, Wright was a notorious stickler for details. He was so particular in his designs that he often specified interior colors, materials and types of furniture. He was so fastidious, in fact, that he would sometimes rearrange the furniture back to the way he had designed it in front of flabbergasted homeowners and tenants when he visited his buildings.

Wright’s drawings and the scale model for the Marin County Civic Center incorporated the gold roof and also specified the color of the walls. He assuredly would have insisted on that scheme, so maybe the public should do that for him.

Is it time for the county to finally paint the Civic Center roof gold, the color it was designed to be? I think so. Wright himself would think so too.