The signature shade of blue that gives the roof over Marin County’s iconic government headquarters its characteristic pop has been restored to its original vibrancy this year atop a large swath of the building, where crews are wrapping up restoration work.
Construction above the Civic Center’s administration wing and library dome is set to be complete by the end of the month, and workers are preparing to move their efforts to the Hall of Justice wing. The roof replacement on that portion of the building should be finished by late next year, officials said.
When the job is done, the historic Civic Center building in San Rafael will have a brand new covering, providing the roughly 1,000 employees inside with confidence that their workplace will remain dry.
The 220,000-square-foot roof has leaked often since the building’s construction in the early 1960s and, despite major repair work done in 1999 and 2000, it has required several patch jobs in recent years. In 2015, experts determined that repairs would no longer suffice and the roof needed to be replaced. The $17.8 million project, split into two phases, began late last year.
The effort is a boon for Marin County, said Mark Schatz, a local architect and member of a committee that advises the Board of Supervisors on maintenance of the Civic Center. The county, he said, was lucky to commission the fabled architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design its government headquarters and should do everything it can to sustain the historic building.
Schatz has served on the Frank Lloyd Wright Civic Center Conservancy Commission since 1996.
“I’m hugely thankful we’re able to do this,” he said. “It’s really going to help preserve the building into the future.”
The 470,168-square-foot Civic Center building, which cost about $14.6 million to build, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Workers preparing for the project took great care in matching the color of the new roof with the original hue, dubbed “Marin blue,” according to Julian Kaelon of the county’s public works department.
The story behind the blue roof is a legend that’s been muddled over time. Wright, who died before the building was constructed, had chosen a gold color for the crown of his creation to match the shade of the surrounding hills.
“The story I heard and loved was that Wright’s widow came in one day and said his ghost came to her in the middle of the night and told her the roof should be blue,” Schatz said. “So they had to change it.”
But the commonly accepted explanation is that gold paint made to withstand winter weather was unavailable when the building was being constructed, so designers pivoted to blue as an alternative.