The Air Palace, Nonetheless

Danuta's Flights

I have visited the place several times now. It amazes and unsettles me in the same breath. The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. I went the first time without Googling it, on purpose. After decades in the United States, I still expect things that do not exist here, and I never quite learn not to expect them. I arrived with palace in my mind and found, instead, air arranged into grandeur. A ring of art-deco columns rising beside a still body of water, an open-air dome, a façade with no interior. A palace whose sovereign is sky. The shock of it, its beauty and its absence, felt like a parable. I love it, but I don’t know why exactly. Perhaps because the missing is opening a space for questions, perhaps because the missing will never settle on one answer. Perhaps because the structure says what 2025 keeps insisting, that in America, the façade is often the fact.

The Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, California

I recognized the feeling from my first years here. Sometime in 1992 or 1993, driving past a construction site, I saw a house being raised near the road, a delicate wooden lattice wrapped in white paper stamped Tyvek in bold blue letters. My heart lifted! What an exquisite movie set, I thought. I wondered which film would be shot there. That evening I told my roommates. Their laughter arrived before their explanation. It is not a set, they said. It is a house. For people. To live in. How could that be? Where were the bricks, the cinder blocks, the concrete mixers? Where was the weight? In Poland, we would have made dollhouses from such materials. Here a family would move in and call it home. Paper and air.

The mind returns, as it always does, to the houses I knew. Bricks visible or stuccoed in cement. The building I grew up in, built before the war, carrying its history in its walls. Some Polish houses still wore the signatures of war violence. Cracks, pockmarks, small round mouths where bullets had entered and never fully left. When I transpose that image onto a light American frame, I see fragments fly into sunlit air like a house of cards. And then I understand. It is not merely warmer climates that permit flimsy houses. It is an unwavering knowledge that bombs and bullets are not coming. Different circumstances create different armor. Architecture is a reverberation of danger and survival.

America often feels like a country in its teenage years. Brilliant, impatient, improvisational, and where pretending can be enough. Make-believe as building code. Put a crown of columns in a meadow and call it a palace. And yet the laugh catches in my throat, because the teenager has been telling stories for a long time and now, with all the confidence of a growth spurt, believes them. Language becomes the scaffolding, for example, policing is renamed “protection;” the absence of health insurance becomes a principled fight against “entitlements;” a place without affordable, nutritious food is softened into a “food desert,” as if an oasis might appear any minute; sending the poor to fight for the interests of the privileged is polished into “serving your country with honors.” In such atmosphere, words harden faster than cement.

This is why the Palace-that-is-Air mesmerizes me. You can name the elements around a place “palace,” and suddenly the world complies. Columns plus water plus dome equals admiration. I fall in love as if I have forgotten what a palace is, as if Łazienki, or the Royal Baths Park, the summer residence in Warsaw, were not still shining over its lake, as if the Pałac Królewski did not still gather rooms around its gravity, as if memory could be erased clean by the bright American noon. The San Francisco structure is a façade, yes, but it is also a confession. It tells the truth about the stories we build with emptiness.

Łazienki Park, or the Royal Baths Park, Warsaw, Poland (photos from Wikipedia)

Once you notice, you cannot stop seeing it. Residential streets stitched with airy frames. Strip malls repeating themselves like photocopies of a single template. The architecture of impermanence. Meanwhile, in Poland, I have stepped into churches whose stone stairs have been polished by centuries of feet into the shape of a morning pillow, the precise softness your body makes right after you rise for coffee and before you smooth the bed. Weight makes time visible. You can stand in those stair-hollows and feel a thousand years stretching behind you.

Royal Castle, Warsaw (photos from Wikipedia)

Perhaps this is why the simplest Protestant sanctuaries here—white walls, clean lines, chairs that stack—leave my heart a little unlifted. I know their theology of plainness and I respect it. I also know something in me seeks the conversation between weight and light, between gravity and grace. Plain walls ask me to rise by will alone. Stone teaches me to rise by recognition. You are small, and therefore part of everything.

Still, I return to the Palace of Fine Arts again and again. I circle the colonnade, watch the dome hold the sky like a bowl, study the way geese move across the lake as if they owned the lease. I think—façade or not, this place works. It gathers strangers into hush. It reminds me that architecture is not only structure but a feeling, an atmosphere of the heart. A society speaks in its buildings. What it fears, what it can’t imagine, what it longs to convince itself of. Paper and air can be a lie, or a vow to keep the world light enough to move.

And so I accept the paradox. The Air Palace, nonetheless. A country young enough to improvise and old enough to insist. Flimsy where it assumes safety, armored where it anticipates harm. Fluent in euphemism, and yet capable of beauty that startles me into gratitude. I stand by the water and remember both kinds of stairs. The ones carved by centuries and the ones that will never be. Between them, I hold my love and my bewilderment, my laughter and my alarm. I was taught, back home, that truth is what stands when force arrives. Here I am learning a second lesson—sometimes truth is what gathers even when nothing stands at all.

Author’s Note:
This piece began with the shock of “air arranged into grandeur” at the Palace of Fine Arts and with a memory of the first Tyvek frame I saw in the 1990s. I’m thinking about architecture as a theory of danger and survival, where different histories require different armor. References to Łazienki and the Pałac Królewski evoke the weight and continuity I grew up with, and San Francisco’s colonnade lets me think about façade, story, and belief in America today. If you have examples—from the U.S. or elsewhere—that complicate or counter this, I’d love to hear them. If this resonated, you might also like Dispatch 13 (Sahara Dust and What Luck Looks Like) and Dispatch 15 (This Is How Your Eyes Deceive You). Thank you, as always, for reading.