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."