Sacramento, California

Rudolph Herold was the go-to architect in Sacramento when you needed a substantial building erected in the first decades of the 20th century. He was born in San Francisco and taught architectural drawing as a young man before setting off to Europe in the 1890s to work and study. He returned to Sacramento in 1901 when he was 31 and opened his practice where he became known as a versatile designer. For City Hall in 1911 Herold taped the showy Beaux Arts style and based much of his terra-cotta ornamentation on the region’s fruit and vegetable farms. The curving five-story modern extension of the city government came along in 2005.

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