Bernard Cahill (1866-1944)

Bernard Joseph Stanislaus Cahill was born in England and moved to the United States in 1888. At the start of his professional career in 1896, Cahill participated in the Phoebe Hearst competition for the design of the University of California, Berkeley campus. Cahill helped to define the concept of a “civic center” with his 1904 design of the San Francisco Civic Center. A specialist in mausoleum design and mortuary architecture, Cahill is best known for his Bay Area cemetery architecture. In addition to designing buildings, Cahill invented the butterfly map, an octahedral system of projection for meteorology, geography, and geophysics, and founded “The Cahill World Map Co.”

The bulk of the collection consists of Cahill’s office records which include photographs, clippings and scrapbooks that illustrate his completed projects. Project records primarily relate to funerary commissions, but letters and clippings about the San Francisco Civic Center are also included. The collection also contains a small number of records from the Cahill World Map Company, and personal and professional writings by Cahill.