York World's Fair Research Articles

Pedagogical prospection of the metaverse through curatorship. Case study of the 1964 IBM pavilion as an example of curatorial pedagogy

In an effort to explore the potential of the metaverse in the field of curatorship, as a space of convergence between education and communication, this article presents a descriptive case study of the IBM Pavilion designed by Eames and Saarinen for the 1964 New York World Fair. As an exhibition project that anticipated the possibilities of computers through an immersive experience in a changing historical moment, it opens up for the present new scenarios for imagining how to approach the metaverse. Conclusions are drawn according to the initial theoretical framework with an interdisciplinary focus on the context of uncertainty in the emergence of the metaverse and its pedagogical possibilities through the development of crosscutting capabilities in citizens.

Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train by Jessamyn R. Abel

Reviewed by: Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train by Jessamyn R. Abel Morris Low (bio) Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train By Jessamyn R. Abel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 289. Brad Pitt's latest film, Bullet Train (Sony, 2022), reinforces what Jessamyn Abel contends are the contradictory images of Japanese high-speed rail: futuristic but also hiding some of the social problems, power plays, and politics at work in the larger society. Pitt's film is based on Bullet Train: A Novel (2021) by Japanese author Kōtarō Isaka, who portrays the train as the thrilling site of intersecting stories. Abel in her [End Page 269] own way also examines how the idea of the bullet train was used by various actors to promote their own agendas and the affective power of the train in helping the Japanese to reimagine their sense of identity as individuals, as well as at the level of city and nation. Readers of this journal will likely know Takashi Nishiyama's Engineering War and Peace in Modern Japan, 1868–1964 (2014) and Christopher Hood's Shinkansen: From Bullet Train to Symbol of Modern Japan (2006) before it. Abel builds on these studies. Steering largely clear of the technical matters that Nishiyama and others have written about and going beyond the chronological history that Hood helps provide, she regards the bullet train not as representing a major technological leap; her interests lie elsewhere. While readers may be familiar with Abel's recent articles on the topic, versions of which are included in the book, the total is greater than the sum. Each chapter provides insights combined with thoughtful analysis and offers a range of perspectives backed up by careful archival research that provides us with some sense of official narratives and disputes. We are also introduced to the scholarly literature in both Japanese and English, as well as to relevant magazine and newspaper articles, films, novels, and art. The latter sources allow us to gain some insight into the popular imagination surrounding the train and all its social and political baggage. Those who are interested in the history of railways and know Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey (1986) will be familiar with some aspects of what Abel covers: the ways in which trains transform the landscape, changing ideas of time and space, and regional identity (ch. 2). But Abel goes beyond this. While cultural representations of the bullet train for both domestic and international audiences are part of what she examines, we also are privy to the policy-making process surrounding the bullet train in the planning stages, the fraught decision-making and politicking around the location of stations, and the displacement of residents to make way for the train (ch. 1). The train was linked to the future in terms of Japanese aspirations to become an information society (ch. 3). It also created a moment of nostalgia for Japan's former empire during the 1930s, when the Asia Express ran through Manchuria and there were hopes for a bullet train to be built in Japan itself (ch. 4). These hopes would later be realized, just in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, changing perceptions of trains and providing the Japanese government with a symbol of Japanese technological prowess that could be showcased at the 1964–65 New York World's Fair (ch. 5). While the prospect of a superconducting maglev train running between Tokyo and Osaka has been relegated to the distant future (conclusion), the Japanese people continue to embrace high-speed rail for the many reasons that Abel outlines. She makes the simple but profound statement that "people used physical infrastructures to build conceptual ones that would help them make sense of their world and reshape it in ways they hoped would make it better" (p. 19). I [End Page 270] recommend the book to all readers interested in the history of technology. It provides a useful framework for scholars to employ when considering other technologies. We need to pay close attention to how they emerged and were contested, while acknowledging the many meanings that can...

Motel Builders of the Modern West

Motel Builders of the Modern West

Ceci n'est pas une Mormon Studies Book

Ceci n'est pas une Mormon Studies Book

“Fashions of the Future”: Fashion, Gender, and the Professionalization of Industrial Design

Abstract In 1939, U.S. Vogue magazine dedicated its February issue to the promotion of the New York World's Fair, which would open in April 1939, giving significant editorial space to the subject of industrial design for the first time. The issue's leading fashion editorial feature, “Fashions of the Future,” invited nine industrial designers to dress the “woman of tomorrow.” The feature served as a promotional vehicle for the World's Fair and for the industrial designers who worked on it. Through a close examination of the issue's visual and textual content, this article explores the relationship between industrial design, fashion, consumption, and gender at a formative moment in the professionalization of design in the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War. It argues that fashion media served a discursive function in the elevation of the industrial designer's professional status, presenting a case for further consideration of the relationship between fashion and industrial design in the history of the design profession.

April in Paris: Theatricality, Modernism, and Politics at the 1925 Art Deco Expo by Irena R. Makaryk

Reviewed by: April in Paris: Theatricality, Modernism, and Politics at the 1925 Art Deco Expo by Irena R. Makaryk Catherine Gaughan Makaryk, Irena R. April in Paris: Theatricality, Modernism, and Politics at the 1925 Art Deco Expo. Toronto UP, 2018. ISBN 978-1-4875-0372-7. Pp. 298. Describing in fascinating detail the 1925 Art Deco Expo that put Russia on the map, April in Paris takes into account the enormous effort required to set the stage for more than fifteen million French and foreign visitors who attended the fair. The rich intellectual and artistic scene of Paris made it the perfect locale for the exhibition to present the spirit of the early twentieth century with all its scientific, economic, and [End Page 205] technological advances. Focusing mainly on Russia's contribution to the fair, the book considers the significance of the theater during this challenging political moment between the West and the USSR. Drawing from previously unexplored archival documents, the seven chapters delve into theater arts from a cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary perspective and examine the ways in which Russia showcased new and exciting representations of theatricalized spaces to the world. Both engaging and informative, April in Paris offers the reader the ultimate experience: to go back in time as if strolling through the Grand Palais and the numerous pavilions which presented their diverse national achievements and ambitions. The chapters dedicated to the impressive Soviet theater exhibits from models to maquettes emphasize Russia's treatment of the relations between space and time, and explore the country's remarkable contribution to the fair with new technologies at the fore, particularly the influence of electricity. Original and thought-provoking, the vivid descriptions along with stunning black-and-white and color illustrations highlight the new modern era, with the final chapter looking forward to the 1926 New York Exposition and the 1939 New York World's Fair. Overall, the book provides much food for thought and engages in a lively cultural debate for aesthetic change, pointing out how the fair exceeded all expectations by the more than two dozen participating countries. The extensive notes and bibliography provide a rich resource for further study in the field and offer a panorama of information for those who would like to delve further into the social, cultural, and political impact of the prestigious international 1925 exhibition. This book will not only tempt readers who have an appreciation for twentieth-century theater arts, costume design, and art exhibitions, but will also appeal to those readers with a keen interest in modernist art, history, and culture. Catherine Gaughan University of Toronto Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Elektro the Moto-Man - [Past Forward_by Allison Marsh

Convinced that every home would eventually have a robot—doing chores, minding the kids—engineers at Westinghouse pioneered a voice-controlled robot in the 1930s. They unveiled Elektro the Moto-Man at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The 2.1-meter-tall, 118-kilogram robot “walked” by rolling along a track with its left leg bent, and it “talked” by way of prerecorded snippets played back from 33⅓-rpm records. It could also smoke a cigarette. Voice commands from a human assistant were turned into electrical pulses, which were then transmitted through telephone relays to the robot's control unit, located offstage. One of Elektro's pet lines was, “My brain is bigger than yours.” At 25 kg, it certainly was.

Representing Korean architecture in the modern West: two Korean Pavilions from 1960s international expositions

The Korean Pavilions for the 1964 New York World's Fair and the 1967 Montreal International Exposition were designed by Chung-Up Kim (1922-88) and Swoo-Geun Kim (1931-86) respectively, two pioneers of modern architecture in Korea. Both pavilions’ designs raise a widespread architectural question about the modern representation of tradition. In contrast to earlier pavilions in Chicago (1893) and Paris (1900) that replicated poorly supposedly ‘authentic’ Korean architecture, these 1960s entries modernised traditional architecture from their architect's creative viewpoint. While Chung-Up Kim noted the formal qualities of the Korean sloped roof, especially its curvilinearity, Swoo-Geun Kim emphasised the traditional timber structure underneath the roof, exaggerating its horizontal layers. In other words, the former's pavilion was more expressive and sculptural, which reflected the architect's Corbusian and even Aaltoesque tendencies. Conversely, the latter pavilion was more logical and systematic. However, Swoo-Geun Kim's interpretation of tradition was also ultimately about the form, though he soon became more interested in space. With regard to the form, the two Kims shared the fundamental idea that the past must not be imitated as it was, but re-created in a modern sense. This underlying argument is reflected in the contemporary ‘debate on tradition’ ignited by the design competition for the National Museum of Korea in 1966. It also relates to to the ‘Japanese-Style Scandal’ of 1967 in which Swoo-Geun Kim suffered for his design of the Buyeo National Museum, 1965-68, due to the inclusion of Japanese nuances in the design of the Montreal Pavilion. Swoo-Geun Kim's later high-tech style pavilion for the 1970 Osaka Expo, alongside recent projects by Minsuk Cho in Yeosu (2010) and Venice (2014) has more recently suggested alternative ways to represent Korea in architecture. Therefore, these two pavilions from the 1960s can be understood as unique inflection points in Korean architectural history.

Lessons from Magic for the Field of Performance Improvement?

How do you introduce creativity into an organization that is built to be industrial, resilient, and prone to consistency and volume—one that is keen on preserving the spirit of its traditions and has barely changed since its debut in 1964 at the New York World's Fair? (Kuang, 2015).

Heard, but not seen

Hecht discusses why people should not believe the Skype. The screen in the futuristic Bell System pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair flickered into life. On it appeared the moving, talking, black-and-white image of the nation's first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, beamed from Washington DC more than 300 kilometers away. This was Picturephone, the world's first commercial video-calling service. For the American Telephone and Telegraph Company--the monopoly better known as the Bell System that provided most US telephone services--Picturephone was the keystone of a massive expansion. Limited in what it was allowed to charge for existing services, the company planned to use expected demand for the new technology to justify higher prices.

Philip Johnson

In the late 1950s and 1960s, before it became a norm to situate contemporary art in public spaces, Philip Johnson employed a model for relating contemporary architecture and art, proposing mutual enhancement based on juxtaposition and contrast over independence or integration. In Philip Johnson: The Whence and Whither of Art in Architecture, Cécile Whiting examines two examples of Johnson's use of contemporary art: the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center and the New York State Pavilion at the 1964–65 New York World's Fair. Whiting discusses the ways in which the commissioned art contrasted with the structures and orchestrated the movement of visitors. Johnson's use of painting and sculpture in and on these two buildings blurred lines—not only the line between art and architecture but also that between high art and popular commerce. As demonstrated in these works, modern art and architecture could engage in a rapprochement without effacing the creative tension between them.

Yesterday's Freeway Network of Tomorrow

In 1939, the Futurama exhibit at the New York World's Fair amazed visitors with its diorama showing futuristic freeways crossing the countryside and reshaping cities. After the fair, the exhibit's designer, Norman Bel Geddes, elaborated the model into a proposal for a national freeway network. This paper examines the network structure and geographic dimensions of Bel Geddes's vision and compares it to the Interstate Highway System, created several years later. Despite the futuristic trappings inherited from the Futurama model, the two networks are surprisingly similar except in their relation to cities, which Bel Geddes's network avoids. The majority of elements in Bel Geddes's system have been incorporated into actual routes and networks, and it can be expected that his system would have gone through many of the same adaptations to changing economic, environmental, and political circumstances as the Interstate Highway System.

Temples and Turnpikes in “The World of Tomorrow”: Religious Assemblage and Automobility at the 1939 New York World's Fair

Temples and Turnpikes in “The World of Tomorrow”: Religious Assemblage and Automobility at the 1939 New York World's Fair

Aerial Homesteading: Aerofuturism in Interwar America

Aviation . . . operates in a medium which knows no frontiers but touches alike all countries of the earth.-Franklin D. Roosevelt, Letter to the National Aviation Forum (1939)1The airplane indicts the city.-Le Corbusier, Aircraft (1935)2Fantastic sky cities and streamlined aerial dwellings prominently marked the American popular culture of the 1930s. Colorfully populated by aviators, scientists, and villains, and attracting high-altitude skirmishes, odd hermitages, and thinly wrought romances, the futuristic technological utopias of the interwar aerial imaginary did not rise in a vacuum. Rather, they were the most current addition to a long-standing Western discourse network of speculative aerial literature and culture, or aerofuturism} Or so imagined Hugo Gernsback, prominent figure of 1930s speculative fiction.4 He mused that the contemporary air stories like those he edited and published in Air Wonder Stories (1929-30) channeled an aerofuturist transgenerational dialogue that put works such as Edgar Allan Poe's Hoax (1844), Jules Verne's African intrigue in Five Weeks in a Balloon (1869), and H. G. Wells's belligerent European tale The War in the Air (1908) in conversation.5 In addition to being part of an enduring discourse of aerial fantasy, however, the fantastic air dwellings of the 1930s also underscored a technological utopianism specific to the American interwar imaginary. These air cities consolidated the public interest in the newest aviation technologies and the changing idea of the Western frontier, and they became a way to mediate public fears regarding global cityscapes increasingly threatened by aerial warfare.At first glance, the homesteads and cities of 1930s aerofuturism that fascinated and discursively linked authors, designers, engineers, and policymakers during the interwar period overtly use air space as America's next variant of the Western frontier. Of these aerial dwellings, two vibrant and seemingly oppositional collections stand out.6 On the one hand is the collective air pulp fiction of the early 1930s, where air becomes a place for imagined homesteading atop striking sky cities. Appearing often and prominently in publications such as Hugo Gernsback's Air Wonder Stories, these aerial built environments offered an array of different lodgings: a house in the clouds, myriad floating islands, massive sky cities, and even, once, the airborne remnants of Atlantis (see figures 1 and 2). The pulps reveal complex aerial lineages to historic architectures but consistently discard utopian facades as their plots devolve into chaos and cities in flames.Seemingly in contrast to such Byzantine integrations with the preexisting city and exuding hyperutopian aesthetics, on the other hand, were the remarkable aerofuturist conurbations at the 1939 New York World's Fair, which include Democracity, Focal Exhibit No. 5, and Futurama. Their building faces, cloaked in the architecture of pristine optimism, were quite removed from the heady fatalism of the air pulp fiction. Tomorrow's cities viewed through aerial perspectives at the World's Fair offered radical utopian spaces abstracted from existing historical built environments. Equally built upon the geographic idea of the American frontier, with massive, detailed cities viewed from the air or lifted into the sky, these aerial structures were built upon broad expanses of undeveloped earth that, unlike the air pulp fiction earlier in the decade, ignored an air-war analog and radically erased the references to cities of the past.Existing scholarship tends to mirror this perceived difference between the two air-city collections, with many critics noting that the pulp fiction of the early 1920s offers the simple, earnest, purely utopian tradition that is noticeably on the decline by the 1930s/ which fits with the wary use of it in the air pulps whose sky utopias quickly and consistently move to dystopian ruin. Regarding the World's Fair, in contrast, even the sharpest critics who examine its aerocities tend to attribute the city functions to an earnest, naive utopianism of the time and place of the exhibition. …

Selling Spirituality and Spectacle: Religious Pavilions at the New York World's Fair of 1964–65

Selling Spirituality and Spectacle: Religious Pavilions at the New York World's Fair of 1964–65

Obsolescing Analog Africa: A Re-reading of the “Digital” in Digital Art

A promotional film by General Motors made for the 1964 New York World's Fair, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2013, hails a (fictional) roadway built through the equatorial lands by a ...

A "Bovine Glamour Girl": Borden Milk, Elsie the Cow, and the Convergence of Technology, Animals, and Gender at the 1939 New York World's Fair

This essay examines the introduction of the Borden Company’s brand mascot “Elsie the Borden Cow” at the 1939 World’s Fair. Through an extensive visual analysis of Borden’s fair time publicity stills and advertisements, it argues that the creatively conceived “spokes-cow” functioned as a much needed public relations ambassador for an industry in turmoil and as a highly gendered symbol of agrarian nostalgia at a time when new technologies upended traditional methods of dairy farming and revolutionized the consumer marketplace. Most celebrated among these technologies was the Rotolactor, a mechanical milking system that was the Borden Pavilion’s centerpiece at the fair. Elsie’s considerable popularity demonstrates that Borden’s success also depended on the cultivation of nostalgic, pastoral visions of American farming as the nation stood at the threshold of a new era in industrialized agriculture.

Catherine Littlefield's Bicycle Ballet and the 1940 World's Fair

“My Bicycle Girl” was a ballet for cyclists choreographed by Catherine Littlefield and performed as part of the American Jubilee spectacle at the New York World's Fair of 1940. In the context of the Fair, on the eve of World War II, the ballet was an experimental manifestation of the contradictory desires for novelty and nostalgia in mass culture and performing arts. The ballet illuminates the historical relationships between dance, technology, and militarism in mid-century American modernism.

The British Council and cultural propaganda in the United States, 1938–1945

This article examines the role played by the British Council in the United States during the Second World War. The Council was excluded from the US, first by the Foreign Office (FO) and then by the Ministry of Information (MoI). The Council did, however, participate in the New York World's Fair and pursued some activities through the British Library of Information (BLI). The MoI and the Council were effectively rivals, particularly in the area of periodicals and films. Despite its ties to the Council, the FO decided to maintain the ‘ban’ on its presence after the war, thus limiting the effectiveness of the Council in shaping Anglo-American cultural relations and as a weapon of the cultural cold war.

Tribute to a Gamble of Survivalist Defiance

The equestrian bronze of Polish-Lithuanian king Wladyslaw II Jagiello in Central Park, New York, is a replica for the Polish New York World Fair Pavilion of 1939 of a statue of the victor over the Teutonic Order in the battle of Grunwald 1410 that was melted into bullets by Nazi German occupants only two months later. The bronze portrays the creator of the unified Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the most significant moment in his life and reign, giving the signal to attack the army of Teutonic invaders in a desperate battle for the soul of the Polish nation. Critical analysis shows that the artist took considerable liberties with the historical accuracy of his subject in the military realities of 1410 but he nonetheless created an emotionally gripping and compelling rendition perfectly suited for its present location reminiscent of the wooded hill at Grunwald.