Built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition as the Varied Industries and Food Products Building, Casa del Prado rose under the direction of Carleton Winslow in the Spanish Colonial and Churrigueresque idiom Bertram Goodhue had established for the fair. By the 1960s the building had deteriorated beyond repair, its temporary construction never intended to last half a century. Rather than lose the structure entirely, the City of San Diego demolished it and rebuilt it between 1968 and 1971 in reinforced concrete, casting replacement ornament from molds taken directly off the original plaster. That decision, driven substantially by the Committee of 100 founded in 1967 by Bea Evenson to preserve the park's Spanish Colonial architecture, established the precedent for every reconstruction that followed: the Old Globe and Casa de Balboa after the 1978 arson fires, and the House of Hospitality between 1995 and 1997.
The most ornamented building on El Prado presents elaborate cast ornament at its entrances, twisted Solomonic columns, tile domes, and a long arcaded facade running the north side of the promenade. The reconstruction is dimensionally faithful and the ornament cast from the originals, making the visual experience close to accurate even as the material itself, reinforced concrete rather than staff plaster, differs fundamentally from what stood before.
