San Francisco's City Hall is a world-class architectural masterpiece.  The design is by Arthur Brown Jr. who was a student of Bernard Maybeck and a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  He took his ideas from the Church of Les Invalides in Paris,  which was built in the seventeenth century and later became Napoleon's tomb. The 308-foot-high dome (the fifth largest in the world) was designed so that it would be taller by about a dozen feet than the capitol dome in Washington D.C.  The building suffered considerable damage on  October 17, 1989 during the Loma Preita Earthquake.  Text by Ron Henggeler  

"To restore City Hall after the ‘89 earthquake,  architects and engineers embarked on one of the most ambitious retrofit and restoration projects ever undertaken.  First,  the 171 million pound structure had to be jacked up and braced while its 530 steel columns were sawed off at the base and then set down on base isolators,  shock absorbing devices that look like giant motor mounts,  made of steel and rubber.  New foundations were poured,  thousands of pounds of new steel and concrete were added,  and the building was restored at the cost of $293 million.  Mayor Willie Brown insisted on restoring the building to its original splendor,  which meant removing a rabbit warren of offices from two grand sky lit assembly rooms on the main floor.”  NATIONAL TRUST GUIDE San Francisco by Peter Booth Wiley

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