York World's Fair Research Articles

“I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE”: Home Movies of the 1939 New York World's Fair

“I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE”: Home Movies of the 1939 New York World's Fair

Oscar Niemeyer, 1907-2012

Modern master Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012) was the most important Brazilian architect. Graduated in the Escola Nacional de Belas–Artes in 1934, he soon became world–known for his role, together with Lúcio Costa (1902–1998), with the design of the Brazilian Ministry of Education (1937) in Rio de Janeiro; or for their Brazilian Pavillion in New York World Fair in 1939. His solo work in the Pampulha buildings was immediately published in the catalogue of the “Brazil Builds” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943.

Aalto and America

The internationally renowned Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) created several landmarks of modern design in the United States. The first, the Finland Pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1939, introduced his pioneering style to the country and established his reputation among his American peers. Subsequent designs produced in the United States marked major turning points in his evolving position as an architect. His commissioned project for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Baker House dormitory (completed 1949) features an undulating facade of red brick, a material that references the building's Boston surroundings. Aalto's fan-shaped plan for the Mount Angel Abbey Library (completed 1970) in St. Benedict, Oregon, his consummate exploration of the library type, capitalizes on the local terrain and the use of natural light. Aalto's designs had a lasting impact on American modernism, but his experiences in America also profoundly influenced his own stylistic development. Aalto and America is a detailed survey of this beneficial relationship, with contributions by fifteen international experts who explore these key designs in relation to larger themes in international politics, architectural culture, housing research, and modern criticism and design.

Designed for Impact: Widescreen and 360-degree Cinematic Interiors at the Postwar World's Fair

ABSTRACTThis article examines the design of widescreen and 360-degree cinematic interiors, both in independent cinemas and at world's fairs, in the context of ideas about sensorial experience particular to postwar American technological culture. Based on primary research in the Cinerama Corporation Collection and the New York World's Fair 1964–5 Corporation Records, this article shows how these hybrid sites were shaped by a complex web of actors and interests representing the entertainment industry, corporations, government, inventors, architects, world's fair planners, and the latest thinking in science. Through their design and promotional rhetoric these cinematic interiors actively sought to establish new physical and conceptual relationships between the visitor's body and the technology on display. As a specific design concern, the act of viewing was given a new kind of experiential and participatory logic. These spectacular interiors were thus ultimately performative spaces, whose intended meaning and effect was shaped by the institutional, cultural, and political agendas of those who commissioned and promoted these sites.

Delayed Discovery or Willful Forgetting? The Reception of Polish Classical Modernism in America

Polish modern art was collected by leading figures within America's cultural vanguard. Most prized the art's stylistic innovation; they were likely unaware of the ideological charge that animated modernism's makers. By the end of the 1930s, numerous exhibitions of Polish art had been mounted in the United States; however, few concentrated on strikingly innovative works, preferring instead traditional themes, genres, and styles. Nonetheless, Poland's modernist efforts garnered popular success at the New York World's Fair of 1939. The modern art from other central and eastern European nations was actively promoted by its makers, who had immigrated to the United States. Poland's modern art did not benefit from a similar presence, its modernists having mostly elected to remain in their native land. The paucity of Polish artists in 1930s America compromised their chance to exercise an influential role just as the United States was consolidating an international canon of modern art.

Our Cities and The City: incompatible classics?

At the end of the 1930s, Americans interested in the fates and futures of their cities had the opportunity to consider two new efforts to summarize urban problems and propose solutions. The first was Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy, published in 1937 under the auspices of the National Resources Board. The second was The City, a film sponsored by the American Institute of Planners for showing at the New York world's fair in 1939. The report and the film arose out of different analytical traditions, the first from the approach that embedded urban planning within a larger field of social science and policy making and the second from the physical planning and design tradition that had marked planning practice in the first third of the twentieth century. This article considers the origins of the two texts, compares their topical coverage and prescriptions for change, and argues that their differences encapsulated a deep tension that has continued to be manifest within urban planning in the USA into the present century.

Review: Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s

Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s . National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. 2 October 2010–5 September 2011 The American world's fairs of the Depression years were over-the-top, optimistic projects that made future-gazing a cultural staple. According to the fairs' organizers and promoters, such looking ahead could bolster people's sagging faith in the country's economic and political systems. These fairs decanted a messy decade into neat packages of hope, dramatized the shape of things to come, and distorted or denied social reality to accommodate corporate America's consumerist utopias. Creating a museum exhibition decades later, out of such extravagantly hopeful projects, poses a robust intellectual challenge. How does one recreate the particular mood of the fairs in their historic times without overinvesting in their seductive messages? Balancing an authentic representation of past events with the unavoidable lessons of hindsight is a daunting task. The exhibition at the National Building Museum titled Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s deftly negotiated this challenge. It rendered momentarily irrelevant the question of whether or not one left the show with a deep and nuanced knowledge of 1930s America by presenting a visually pleasurable array of artifacts from six Depression-era fairs: the Century of Progress International Exposition, held in Chicago in 1933–34; the California Pacific International Exposition, staged in San Diego in 1935–36; the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas of 1936; the Great Lakes Exposition in Cleveland of 1936–37; the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco of 1939–40; and the New York World's Fair of 1939–40. Bringing together original objects, drawings, posters, souvenirs, multimedia, reproductions, and even a replica of Westinghouse's Electro robot from the 1939 New …

Art Out of Place: International Art Exhibits at the New York World's Fair of 1964-1965

Set against the backdrop of the cold war, the New York World's Fair of 1964-1965 emphasized capitalism and commercialization while it downplayed art as an element that should be elevated above other exhibits. This emphasis placed art in settings that seemed populist, even vulgar to some critics, in order to attract as many visitors as possible. Adding to this perception that the fair lacked high culture, officials did not sponsor any exhibits showcasing art despite the fact that most earlier fairs had at least one pavilion dedicated to art. The two most distinctive features of the 1964-1965 fair—no separate fine arts pavilion and being the first to feature a number of newly independent nations emerging from colonialism—provide an opportunity to examine the place of the arts in this new global commercial context. This article examines art displays found in selected official international pavilions to show that fair organizers sought out great works of art not simply to create a culturally edifying fair, but to use art as spectacle to enhance the commercial aspects of the event. The fair served as a venue where both exhibitors and fair officials used art, high and low, to serve multiple ends, among them economic development, religious proselytizing, and cultural prestige.

Constructing National Identity: The Image of the Medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania in Lithuanian Art from the 1920s to the 1990s

This article provides an overview of the ways in which the image of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania, intended to awaken the national pride and contribute to the building of the national identity, was constructed by artistic means in the Republic of Lithuania during the 1920s and 1930s. It contains a brief discussion on the genesis of the image of the Grand Duchy, including the selection of appropriate historical heroes and events, and the main aspects of their interpretation. The article analyses some of the most striking and influential examples of the image of medieval Lithuania, such as the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the death of Grand Duke Vytautas the Great in 1930 and art works created for that purpose, the decoration of public buildings (for example, the Museum of War and the Officers’ Club in Kaunas, and Lithuania’s pavilion in the New York World Fair of 1939). It also looks briefly at the dissemination of the image of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in popular culture. The article also touches on isolated efforts by a number of intellectuals to warn of the dangers inherent in the extreme glorification of the past. The image of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania, created in interwar Lithuania, was preserved during the period of Soviet occupation. After the restoration of Lithuanian independence in 1990, this image had a significant influence on the mentality and culture of Lithuanian society at the turn of the millennium. In this respect the situation in Lithuania could be treated as a case study, for a similar relation to the past can be encountered in other European post-Communist countries faced with the problem of creating a new identity.

Sarah Hunter Kelly: Designing the House of Good Taste

ABSTRACTThrough discourse analysis, the researcher tracks the lifelong career of New-York-based interior designer Sarah Hunter Kelly (1896–1982) in three distinct phases: traditional projects featuring French antiques, a middle phase blending contemporary and traditional furnishings within mitigated Modern interiors in North Carolina, and a more clearly observed and articulated Modern expression in the New York World's Fair “House of Good Taste” exhibition. Material and visual analysis here suggest a hybrid approach to the interior design profession during its infancy and early development, peeling away distinctions later suggested between interior design and interior decoration. Kelly's career intertwines with her clients across a social network and with other design professionals as she articulates a clear vision for good taste based on Elsie de Wolfe's seminal work on interiors, extending and expanding that vision across a sixty-year practice.

High-Voltage Testing: man-made lightning at the 1939 World's Fair [History

It is obvious that the GE Company was not about to spend the huge sums of money for the construction of the high voltage equipment in Steinmetz Hall without seeing the possibility of the future use of this equipment for other purposes. As described, this did occur with both the impulse generators and the 60-Hz transformers. The motor generator set was probably reused as well, but there are no known records documenting its actual fate. Today, the high-voltage testing of electric power system components utilizes equipment exactly the same, in operating principle, as the devices built for use at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Alas, however, the tremendous cost of such demonstrations at expositions has caused them to become only a fond memory.

Dancing in the dark: a cultural history of the Great Depression

Only yesterday Great Depression seemed like a bad memory, receding into hazy distance with little relevance to our own flush times. Economists assured us that calamities that befell our grandparents could not happen again, yet recent economic meltdown has once again riveted world's attention on 1930s. Now, in this timely and long-awaited cultural history, Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called of our best and most distinguished critics of American explores anxiety and hope, despair and surprising optimism of a traumatized nation. Dickstein's fascination springs from his own childhood, from a father who feared a pink slip every Friday and from his own love of more exuberant side of era: zany screwball comedies, witty musicals, and lubricious choreography of Busby Berkeley. Whether analyzing influence of film, design, literature, theater, or music, Dickstein lyrically demonstrates how arts were then so integral to fabric of American society. While any lover of American literature knows Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, Dickstein also reclaims lives of other novelists whose work offers enduring insights. Nathanael West saw Los Angeles as a vast dream dump, a Sargasso Sea of tawdry longing that exposed pinched and disappointed lives of ordinary people, while Erskine Caldwell, his books Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre festooned with lurid covers, provided most graphic portrayal of rural destitution in 1930s. Dickstein also immerses us in visions of Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Roth, only later recognized for their literary masterpieces. Just as Dickstein radically transforms our understanding of Depression literature, he explodes prevailing myths that 1930s musicals and movies were merely escapist. Whether describing undertone of sadness that lurks just below surface of Cole Porter's bubbly world or stressing darker side of Capra's wildly popular films, he shows how they delivered a catharsis of pain and an evangel of hope. Dickstein suggests that tragic and comic worlds of Broadway and Hollywood preserved a radiance and energy that became a bastion against social suffering. Dancing in Dark describes how FDR's administration recognized critical role that arts could play in enabling the helpless to become hopeful, victims to become agents. Along with WPA, photography unit of FSA represented a historic partnership between government and art, and photographers, among them Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, created defining look of period. The symbolic end to this cultural flowering came finally with New York World's Fair of 1939-40, a collective event that presented a vision of future as a utopia of streamlined modernity and, at long last, consumer abundance. Retrieving stories of an entire generation of performers and writers, Dancing in Dark shows how a rich, panoramic culture both exposed and helped alleviate national trauma. This luminous work is a monumental study of one of America's most remarkable artistic periods.

The 1939–1940 New York World's Fair and the transformation of the American science extracurriculum

AbstractAt the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair, several thousand boys and girls, all members of a growing national network of high school science and engineering clubs, displayed their science fair projects and conducted live experiments to more than 10 million visitors. Housed in the building sponsored by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, their exhibits depicted a wide range of scientific phenomena. They also represented the conflicting values of science educators and industrialists about the societal worth of science education. In some instances, students' projects and laboratory activities prized hands‐on learning and aimed to abet widespread rational thinking for democratic citizenship, which reflected the civic priorities of Progressive science educators. In other cases, science was presented as a magical spectacle with consumer applications intended to entertain and inspire the public's confidence in American industry and scientific experts. Ultimately, the corporate sponsorship of the high school science extracurriculum at the World's Fair marked a turning point when the Progressive purposes of science education began to give way to “manpower” and “professionalist” ends that aligned with the nation's economic and military imperatives. This historical episode also anticipated recent proposals to reform science education in the United States and ideas about scientific learning in museum settings. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 93:892–914, 2009

The end of the innocence: the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair

From April 1964 to October 1965, some 52 million people from around world flocked to New York World's Fair, an experience that lives on in memory of many individuals and in America's collective consciousness. Taking a perceptive look back at the last of great world's fairs, Lawrence R. Samuel offers a thought-provoking portrait of this seminal event and of cultural climate that surrounded it. Samuel counters critics' assessments of fair as ugly duckling of global expositions. Opening five months after President Kennedy's assassination, fair allowed millions to celebrate international brotherhood while conflict in Vietnam came to a boil. This event was perhaps last time so many from so far could gather to praise harmony while ignoring cruel realities on such a gargantuan scale. This World's Fair glorified postwar American dream of limitless optimism even as a counterculture of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll came into being. It could rightly be called last gasp of that dream: The End of Innocence. Samuel's work charts birth of fair from inception in 1959 to demolition in 1966 and provides a broad overview of social and cultural dynamics that led to birth of event. It also traces events and thematic aspects of fair, with its focus on science, technology, and world of future. Accessible, entertaining, and informative, book is richly illustrated with contemporary photographs.

Prelinger Archives, http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger. Rick Prelinger, in association with the Internet Archive, San Francisco. Reviewed Aug. 15, 2007

The Prelinger Archives contains “ephemeral” films (defined as “advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur” films) available for free download. Rick Prelinger began this archive in the 1980s to preserve scarce film materials that historians have tended to overlook in favor of Hollywood productions. In 2002, the Library of Congress acquired sixty thousand titles from Prelinger's collection; but the Prelinger Archives still exists and continues to grow, allowing this Web site to offer nearly two thousand short films that vividly document the industrial, governmental, educational, and emotional history of the twentieth century. This trove of “lost” treasures, most of which are in the public domain, come in a variety of formats for easy downloading. That, combined with the films' short length (most are twenty minutes or less), make them ideal for classroom use. Modern historians will probably find greatest interest in the government films, newsreels, advertising, and educational films, but the “amateur films” (many of which have no dates or producers' names) are perhaps the most intriguing. You can find anything from home movies to documentations of the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair. Produced by random individuals documenting their own lives and interests, the short amateur films demonstrate the fashions and fascinations of many generations of individual Americans.

The Records of the New York Composers' Forum: The Documentary Motive and Music in the 1930s

The New York City Composers' Forum-Laboratory was created in 1935 as part of the Music Education Division of the Federal Music Project (FMP), under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), funded by Roosevelt's Depression-era New Deal. The Forum was a unique phenomenon in the history of American music. For the first time in American history, the federal government played an active and enthusiastic role in sponsoring and funding the arts. The federally funded Music Project--along with the Federal Writers Project, Federal Theater Project, and Federal Arts Project--was initiated as part of the larger Works Progress Administration (later renamed the Works Projects Administration) in order to get artists and musicians off the streets, out of the breadlines, and into jobs. Yet many people in the musical commu-nitv fervently hoped and believed that it would develop into a permanently funded arts program. A popular venue for the performances of new music, the Composers' Forum thrived from 1935 to 1940. Weekly--and later, biweekly--concerts introduced an exceptional variety of composers to a newly developing audience. Each Forum featured one or two composers, among them Amy Marcy Beach, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Roger Sessions, and Elie Siegmeister. Admission was free. Question-and-answer sessions between composers and audience followed the conceits, prompting discussions on a range of topics: modernism, politics, gender, representations of race, Jewish music, American identity, jazz, and other art forms. A stenographer took careful and thorough transcripts of the discussions, and these survive in the National Archives II, in College Park. Maryland. The success of the New York City Composers' Forum prompted cities across the country to institute similar programs. Boston and Philadelphia established flourishing forums that met weekly. Forums in Los Angeles and Chicago were only slightly less active, while cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and San Francisco held forums from time to time. Other activities by the New York branch included a collaboration with Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan to present an evening of All-American ballets--Virgil Thomson's Filling Station, Robert McBride's Showpiece, and Paul Bowles's Yankee Clipper. A special summer season of concerts, produced in conjunction with the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, was broadcast over WNYC, and a series of the regular concerts was broadcast over WQXR. Under the auspices of the Forum, Roy Harris presented a lecture series entitled Let's Make Music over WNYC, which attracted thousands of active listeners. After 1939, federal support for the Forums ceased and various organizations assumed responsibility for maintaining the Forum, which exists to this day (1) THE DOCUMENTARY IMPULSE The careful documenting of Composers' Forum post-concert discussions makes this series particularly valuable for musicological research today. At no other time in American musical history were the reactions and thoughts of the audience documented so extensively and systematically. This emphasis on documentation reflected a wider American phenomenon of the thirties. As William Stott observes, a documentary motive was at work throughout the culture of the time: in the rhetoric of the New Deal and the WPA arts projects; in painting, dance, fiction, and theater; in the new media of radio and picture magazines; in popular thought, education, and advertising. (2) The goal of this documentary work was to record the American experience. The America of the 1930s was engaged in a cultural revolution. Not only did America own a cultural identity, it was a culture that needed to be shared with a broad new public. The documentary motive broughtcomposers and listeners face-to-face for the first time, and recorded the result. Audience reactions, thoughts, and attitudes, usually so elusive, are represented in the Forum documents in abundance, providing a compelling testament to the power of reception and to the dynamic relationship between composer and listener. …

‘Too Much French, but a Swell Exhibit’: Representing Lebanon at the New York World's Fair 1939–1940*

This article investigates the participation of Lebanon in the 1939 New York World's Fair. Through an analysis of the preparations in Lebanon, the inauguration ceremony of the pavilion in New York and its displayed content, three main themes are highlighted. First, the article focuses on the relationship between French colonial conduct and its impact on Lebanese elites. Second, it demonstrates the complexity of inter and intra-sectarian dynamics in Lebanon; and third, it discusses the much disputed national narrative of Lebanon as displayed in the pavilion.

Watching the traffic go by: transportation and isolation in urban America

Acknowledgments Introduction: Stabilizing Mobility I. Transportation as Antidote to Modern City 1. The Trolley, the Automobile, and Autonomy 2. Townless Highways and Highwayless Towns II. German Critical Theory Meets American Cartopia 3. The Building of a Superhighway Future at the New York World's Fair 4. Film Noir and the Hidden Violence of Transportation in Los Angeles III. The Public's Fears of Urban Gridlock 5. Stories of the MTA: Contesting Meanings of Subway Space 6. Urban Freeway Stories: Racial Politics and the Armored Automobile Epilogue Works Cited Index

Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow

This article explores the ideology behind the contemporary “New Urbanist” movement alongside two key twentieth-century American utopian urban plans for the city of the future, Democracity and Futurama. Both Democracity and Futurama were displays at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and like many contemporary New Urbanist projects, both were totalizing visions—holistic attempts to remake the entire American landscape and in so doing link art and life in the name of democracy. It is the author's argument that many New Urbanist planners suffer from what she calls historical amnesia rooted in a myopic form of nostalgia, since, as she demonstrates in the article, the plans for Democracity and Futurama contain both the closest precursors and the root of many of the problems that proponents of New Urbanism are attempting to rectify. By exploring these two historical models within the context of contemporary urban community building, the author calls for the eradication of historical amnesia in further planning for the city of the future and the development of a new model of American urbanism that appropriates nostalgia for more radical ends and grounds it in the present and its problems.

Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century Samuel C. Florman (bio) Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century. By David P. Billington and David P. Billington Jr. . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xxv+270. $29.95. The editors of Technology and Culture, in a routine memo to reviewers, ask that, if possible, the book under consideration be placed "in the context of relevant scholarship." This seems a perfectly appropriate guideline. Except what is one to do, as in the present case, when the book at hand appears to be totally unique? For starters, Power, Speed, and Form is physically an extraordinary volume: a coffee-table book if you will, square (but not oversized), and chock full of the most extraordinary photos. The illustrations are not artistic as ordinarily defined, being mostly black-and-white archival portraits. But they are wondrous in that, rather than viewing the icons of American technology as we are used to seeing them—elderly, somber, and bewhiskered—we find an array of young, dynamic, bright-eyed creator-heroes. There they are: Edison, Tesla, Steinmetz, Bell, Marconi, De Forest, Ammann, Ford, Chrysler, the Wright brothers, and all the others, looking at us proudly as if posing for a college yearbook, or perhaps as young men of promise in People magazine. (Only George Westinghouse is shown in a traditional portentous image, perhaps because there was no lively, youthful picture readily available.) In addition to the people, there are also stirring photos of objects and places—the Corliss steam engine, a Baldwin locomotive, the Menlo Park laboratory, the Wright glider, an early Pennsylvania oil well, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as it collapses. And finally, as if to underscore the importance of the visible image, photos from the authors' family album—the senior author and his brother at the 1939 New York World's Fair, his grandmother [End Page 635] driving an early automobile, his uncles as boys with a primal radio set. More than eighty illustrations in all, most of them eye-catching and worthy of study. The senior author, a professor at Princeton, is famed for his lectures using slides to help bring technology to life for nontechnical students and to help engineers recognize the connections between their work and the general culture. Now, in partnership with his son, a historian, he has skillfully brought this technique to the printed page. Yet this is not a picture book. It is a serious history of the development of American technology in the period between the year 1876, "the high point of the reciprocating steam engine and the beginning of its decline" (p. 6), and 1939, when the Futurama ride at the New York Word's Fair was both a vision of the future and a portrayal of "a technology and a society already in existence" (p. 3). "Our goal," write the authors, "is to explain to a non-technical audience, and to engineers themselves, the ideas behind historic innovations that are still essential to modern life" (p. xvi). The scope of the book is best defined by the ten chapter headings: "The World's Fairs of 1876 and 1939," "Edison, Westinghouse, and Electric Power," "Bell and the Telephone," "Burton, Houdry, and the Refining of Oil," "Ford, Sloan, and the Automobile," "The Wright Brothers and the Airplane," "Radio: From Hertz to Armstrong," "Ammann and the George Washington Bridge," "Eastwood, Tedesko, and Reinforced Concrete," and "Streamlining: Chrysler and Douglas." Nothing surprising about this list—except for the refining of oil, which is less often celebrated than the other achievements and so, to me, of particular interest—and little to be said about the narrative other than it is very well done. Also, there are some insightful observations about the nature of engineering and how it differs from science. But what is unique, and what, along with the illustrations, makes this book something of a treasure, is the inclusion of more than forty sidebars, each a full-page explication in words, numerical formulas, and splendidly clear diagrams, of the historic innovations discussed in the text. These are apparently the topics covered in the senior author's course...