Our art director @AtalantaArdenM and our editor @RuxandraTeslo paired up to visit the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, on an exceedingly fine Saturday afternoon. In the soft October light, the building looked exquisitely beautiful, and it brought to mind lessons from some of our favorite Works in Progress pieces on architecture. Its story is also relevant to some debates happening now in San Francisco around whether today's rich are funding enough beautiful buildings that delight the human eye. Concrete and modern materials can give rise to beautiful buildings, as our editor @SCP_Hughes highlighted in his piece "The Beauty of Concrete"! A common misconception is that modern buildings are ugly because of the intrinsic features of the materials they are built from. But the Palace of Fine Arts is entirely made of concrete and steel, perfectly illustrating that is not the case. The key is that the concrete and steel building (funded by a rich philantropist and made in the 60s), was following entirely the design of an earlier replica of this building, from the beginning of the 20th century. Bernard Maybeck first designed the palace for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Like most of the fair’s buildings, it was meant to be temporary, so the materials it was made of were not meant for long term endurance. It was made of a wood frame covered in “staff,” a mix of plaster and burlap fiber that was shaped to look like stone. But those materials crumbled over the following decades. In the 1960s, funded largely by philanthropist Walter Johnson, it was torn down and rebuilt in concrete and steel, following Maybeck’s design almost exactly, with ornament cast from the original. The lesson is that materials or "modernity" itself were never the problem. We could have kept building beautiful things after the 1960s, but we chose not to, as we fell under the thrall of minimalist designs lacking ornament (among many other bad aesthetic choices.) Armed with this knowledge, the philantropists of today can make a conscious choice to fund that which delights the human eye and soul. Aesthetic decline is a choice!

Our editors are busy improving the world, when they are not writing articles. Today, Saloni Dattani, known as @salonium, gave a talk about the importance of making clinical trials more efficient for @wellcometrust. She also presented her bottlenecks game, showing how the clinical trials constraint can limit an entire system’s performance and why addressing this crucial bottleneck is key to improving the efficiency of medical innovation.