1939 World's Fair
Trylon and Perisphere
Inside big sphere -- exhibit called "Democracity" -- a vision of the city of tomorrow
GM Exhibit "Futurama" -- scale diorama of the USA of the future (1960s)
all about highways
includes a Radiant City redesign of NYC (diorama)
MUST FIND PICTURES etc
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/DISPLAY/39wf/frame.htm (THIS IS THE BEST!)
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~abh9h/Real/Audio/39wf/futuramahighres200.ram (streaming 3 min video about the Futurama exhibit!)
http://historyproject.ucdavis.edu/imageapp.php?Major=GP&Minor=W (2ND BEST! lots of pictures)
http://websyte.com/alan/nywf.htm (lots of links to other pages)
http://www.pmphoto.to/Theme.htm (some basic b&w photos)
http://park.org/Pavilions/WorldExpositions/new_york.html (has bibliography, could be interesting)
http://www2.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/39fair.html (great collection of postcards and ads for the Fair)
"Michael Robertson emphasizes that critics underscored the controlling power which the exhibits held over the visitors’ minds, carefully pouring into their eyes and ears a packaged message of consumption, as displayed in the Futurama exhibit in which viewers were positioned to marvel at "highway engineering at its most spectacular." Unpacking that controlling power to its extreme, Robertson cites historian Francis V. O’Connor, who declared the fair’s exhibits as an exercise in "latent fascism . . . : The Fair was a carefully contrived conditioning experiment (Germany was another at the time) and few among the multitudes entering its gates were ready in 1939-40 – or subsequently – to ‘psyche out’ the reasons they suddenly yearned for television sets, superhighways, foreign foods, and a streamlined life" (36). Late twentieth-century critics echo many of the Fair's contemporary critics. Jeffrey Meikle even argues that the streamlined motif repeated throughout the fair is a paradoxical mixture of an emphasis on forward thrust paired with control, order, balance, and stability (Cooney, 22)."
Model of the city of the future, designed by Norman Bel Geddes for a Shell Oil advertising campaign, J. Walter Thompson Agency, ca. 1939.
[J. Walter Thompson Collection, Duke University.]
Norman Bel Geddes' model of a futuristic city as part of a Shell Oil advertising campaign, J. Walter Thompson agency, ca. 1937.
[J. Walter Thompson Collection, Duke University.]