Left: Pan American Airways base, Treasure Island, wartime, Middle: Grand International Exposition poster, Tokyo, 1940, Right: Aerial view, Treasure Island, San Francisco Bay
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ART & STATUES
CERAMICS & GLASS
The World's Fairs of the 1930s
Building Tomorrow in Plaster and Steel
For six months at a stretch, in one city after another, whole districts appeared that had not existed the year before and would not exist the year after. They had streets and restaurants and water mains and their own police, they were built mostly of plaster, plywood, and painted steel rather than stone or brick, and after dark they were the most brilliantly lit places on their continents, at a time when most city streets outside a handful of downtowns had no electric lighting to speak of. This was the world’s fair: a temporary city, built to be walked through for a season and then torn down, that stood in for a future nobody could actually buy yet. A ticket bought entry to a rehearsed vision of what was coming: model kitchens nobody yet owned, a robot that could hold a conversation, television sets before most people had ever seen one, highways wider and faster than any yet built. None of it was expected to outlive its first winter, which is exactly why it could look however its builders wanted it to look. Underneath the spectacle sat a genuinely serious argument. These fairs were staged, at enormous cost, by governments and corporations that in most cases had very little money to spare, on the premise that good design and new technology were the way out of the worst economic collapse of the century. Millions of people believed it, or at least paid to see it for themselves. Chicago alone counted close to fifty million admissions across two seasons, and the fairs that followed drew comparable crowds in Paris, New York, Brussels and San Francisco.
Left: Master plan, Flushing Meadows, New York World’s Fair, 1939, Middle: Treasure Island cartograph, Ruth Taylor White, 1939, Right: Aerial view, Century of Progress, Chicago, 1933
World’s fairs were not new in the 1930s. The format runs back to the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, a single enormous hall of glass and iron built to show the world what industry could now produce. Paris built the Eiffel Tower as a temporary entrance arch for its 1889 fair and never took it down, then in 1900 drew fifty million visitors to an exposition that introduced Art Nouveau to the world. Chicago answered in 1893 with the so-called White City, an entire fairground built in gleaming plaster classicism that set a standard every fair afterward tried to match. For decades these were essentially inventories, a chance for a nation or an empire to display everything it had grown, mined, manufactured, or conquered. Paris broke that pattern in 1925 with an exposition built around decorative and industrial art rather than national wealth, and it succeeded so completely that the style it popularized eventually took its own name from a shortened version of the exposition’s title, Art Deco. Nearly everything built across the following fifteen years, in country after country, carried some trace of what had first appeared in Paris that year. By 1928, fairs had grown frequent and expensive enough that an international convention created the Bureau International des Expositions to regulate how often, and by whom, one could be staged, an organization that still sanctions the Expos held today. The 1930s inherited that entire tradition and gave it a new job, and paid for it however a city could manage: through municipal bonds, corporate sponsorship, or the New Deal relief agencies that built much of Cleveland’s grounds and San Francisco’s Treasure Island outright. A fair could no longer simply put a nation’s wealth on display, because for most of the decade there was little wealth left to display, so instead it sold visitors a future that had not happened yet.
Left: Trylon and Perisphere under construction, New York, 1938, Middle: Cinquantenaire Arch, Brussels, 1905, Right: Union Pacific M-10000, Century of Progress, Chicago, 1934
That future needed a look, and Art Deco was made for the job. The style had already made its name in the decade’s skyscrapers, ocean liners and movie palaces, so when organizers wanted something instantly recognizable as modern, Deco was the obvious choice rather than an experiment. Its vocabulary was built from a small, powerful set of moves: the zigzag and the chevron, the sunburst radiating out from a doorway or a spire, the stepped, ziggurat silhouette borrowed loosely from ancient temple architecture, all of it rendered in materials that were themselves symbols of the machine age, aluminum, chrome, glass block and neon tubing standing in for the carved stone and gilding of an earlier century. That combination held its power at any scale, as bold and commanding on a two-hundred-foot pylon as it was compressed onto a dinner plate, which is exactly why fair architects reached for it again and again even while blending other visual traditions in alongside it: Mayan stepped pyramids in San Diego and San Francisco, a full-scale Angkor Wat rebuilt in the middle of Paris. The same instinct for speed and polish showed up in the trains fairgoers arrived on. Union Pacific unveiled its stainless-steel M-10000 at Chicago’s fair in 1934, wearing the same streamlined language that would soon define Raymond Loewy’s locomotives and half the other machines of the coming decade. Nothing else read as clearly to a crowd walking past at speed, and nothing else scaled down so cleanly into something a visitor could carry home. Fair organizers licensed vendors by the thousand to press each fair’s symbols onto souvenirs sold at the gate. New York alone put its Trylon and Perisphere on rings, bracelets, dinner plates and printed silk scarves, and Ford struck commemorative medallions by the hundreds of thousands for visitors to its own exhibit in Chicago. The buildings themselves rarely outlived the closing gate. The small objects did, which is a large part of why so much of what collectors and museums hold from these fairs today fits in the palm of a hand.
Left: Trylon and Perisphere model, Harrison and Fouilhoux, 1939, Middle: Golden Gate Exposition postcard, Stanley A. Piltz Company, 1939, Right: Ford Exposition medallion, Century of Progress, 1934
Stockholm opened the decade in May 1930, and it made an argument no other fair in this story would repeat: that modern design’s first job was to house people better, not to entertain them. There was no colonial pageant here and no rocket-shaped ride, though visitors could still rent a foot-pedaled water cycle to cross the bay for one crown, and some evenings ended in fireworks nobody had advertised in advance. The architect Sigurd Lewerentz designed the fair’s poster and topped the grounds with a tall illuminated mast that visitors used to orient themselves after dark, and the entrance itself was treated as part of the show rather than just a gate to walk through. Visitors could eat lakeside at a restaurant built for the occasion before walking on to the fair’s real argument: a series of small furnished apartments they could walk straight into and inspect room by room, each built for an ordinary working family rather than a wealthy one, with a kitchen meant for someone who actually cooked in it and windows large enough to catch every scrap of daylight through Sweden’s short winters. Heavy carved furniture, the kind that had filled Swedish homes for generations, gave way to simple, mass-producible pieces meant to be affordable rather than impressive. Four million people came over five months, an enormous turnout for a country of six million, and the argument mostly won: within a few years, Swedish building codes, housing programs and furniture makers had adopted the ideas almost wholesale, and within two decades those same instincts had become Mid-Century Modern design, radiating out from Scandinavia to the rest of the world. One teenage visitor from Denmark, Jørn Utzon, later said the fair set the course of his career; he grew up to design the Sydney Opera House. The following year several of the fair’s architects put the argument in writing with a manifesto called acceptera, urging Sweden to accept mass production and modern living as plain facts rather than passing fashions, a piece of persuasion that, unusually for its kind, actually worked.
Top: Left: Paradiset restaurant, Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm, 1930, Right: Functionalist model interior, Stockholm Exhibition, 1930 Bottom: Left: Exhibition poster, Sigurd Lewerentz, Stockholm, 1930, Middle: Entrance rendering, Rudolf Persson, Stockholm, 1930, Right: Advertising Mast, Sigurd Lewerentz, Stockholm, 1930
Paris answered Stockholm a year later with an idea built on the opposite premise entirely. The Exposition Coloniale Internationale, which opened in the Bois de Vincennes in 1931, promised a trip around the world in a single afternoon, and for six months nearly eight million people took it, buying more than thirty million tickets between them. A miniature train carried visitors between reconstructed African markets, Southeast Asian temple compounds and a full-scale replica of Angkor Wat, floodlit at night so it seemed to hover above the treeline, while camels were led across the grounds to complete the effect. The whole event was really a piece of persuasion aimed at the French public, an attempt to convince ordinary citizens that holding onto an overseas empire was worth its cost, and organizers gave subsidized group visits to French schoolchildren, betting early opinions would last. It worked well enough that visitors nicknamed the fair Lyauteyville, after the retired general who ran it, and it turned an actual profit, rare for a fair of this decade. Two things it built are still standing in Paris today. The zoo that now occupies part of the Bois de Vincennes grew directly out of the animal enclosures built for the exposition, and the exhibition hall constructed for it, its entire street-facing wall carved by the sculptor Alfred Janniot into a dense relief of colonial produce and figures, still stands at the edge of the park with a tropical aquarium in its basement that has run continuously since 1931. The fair also demands an honest accounting its organizers never intended it to receive. The living displays that made it such effective persuasion depended on colonized people being brought to Paris and housed on the grounds specifically to be looked at, largely forbidden to leave without permission, which is why historians now use the term human zoo to describe it. The Surrealists and the French Communist Party urged the public to boycott the fair outright, and the politician Léon Blum pointed out the plain contradiction of celebrating Cambodian architecture in a Paris park while suppressing dissent in French Indochina itself.
Top: Left: Colonial exposition poster, Joseph de la Nézière, 1928, Middle: Bird’s-eye plan, Bois de Vincennes, Paris, 1931, Right: Salle des Fêtes, Albert Laprade, Paris, 1931 Bottom: Left: Bas-relief façade, Alfred Janniot, Paris, 1931, Middle: Angkor Wat reproduction, night illumination, Paris, Right: Pavillon du Maroc, Francis Smith, 1931
Chicago’s Century of Progress opened on 27 May 1933 with a gesture that says everything about the decade’s confidence. Light from the star Arcturus was collected at a series of observatories, focused on photoelectric cells, converted to current and used to switch on the fairgrounds. Admission was fifty cents. Every building on the grounds was painted in bright color, which had never been tried at this scale before: reds, blues, oranges and greens replacing the white plaster that had defined every American fair since Chicago’s own exposition forty years earlier, an effect so unfamiliar that newspapers were calling it the Rainbow City within days of the gates opening. The man behind it, an Austrian-born set and costume designer named Joseph Urban, had spent his career designing for the theater rather than the street, which goes a long way toward explaining why the fairgrounds ended up looking more like a stage production than a piece of city planning. After sundown, neon and mercury vapor tubing outlined the buildings and laid their reflections across the lagoon. The best-known ride ran on cables strung between two 628-foot towers, the highest points in the city, carrying thirty-six passengers at a time in rocket-shaped cars roughly two hundred feet above the water, and four and a half million people took it over the fair’s two seasons. Elsewhere, a motor oil company put up the largest thermometer in the world, its graduated columns made of neon tubing, dedicated with a straight face as a monument to Chicago’s climate. The Travel and Transport Building took the biggest engineering risk of the fair, hanging its entire roof from cables strung between twelve external towers instead of resting it on conventional interior supports, so the whole structure visibly grew and shrank by several feet as the temperature swung between a Chicago afternoon and a Chicago night. General Motors ran a working assembly line, and Chrysler built a quarter-mile track where visitors rode alongside actual stunt drivers. In the Streets of Paris on the midway, a performer named Sally Rand danced behind a pair of ostrich-feather fans in an act that got her arrested more than once and still drew about two million people to watch. Just down the midway, Robert Ripley opened his first Believe It or Not Odditorium, a sideshow of oddities from around the world that grew into a chain still running today. A glass-walled house built with an airplane hangar for a garage, meant to show what an ordinary home might look like a few decades on, still survives today near Lake Michigan in Indiana. The motto over all of it read Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms, and the fair ran a second season in 1934. It was the first international fair in American history to pay off its debt.
Top: Left: Century of Progress poster, Weimer Pursell, 1933, Middle: Sky Ride towers, Century of Progress, Chicago, Right: Globe exhibit, Century of Progress, Chicago Bottom: Left: Havoline Thermometer postcard, Chicago, 1934, Middle: Travel and Transport Building, Chicago, 1933, Right: Hall of Social Science pylons, Chicago, 1933
Henry Ford refused to take part in Chicago’s fair for its first season in 1933, and watched from the sidelines as General Motors and the other automakers soaked up exactly the kind of national attention money cannot usually buy. He changed his mind fast. When the fair announced a second season, Ford spent enormously to build his own pavilion on eleven acres, a twelve-story drum stepped and clad in aluminum to suggest a cluster of interlocking gears. It became the single most talked-about exhibit of the second season, more than making up for having sat out the first. Inside, a rotating globe turned slowly beneath the dome while visitors circled it on ramps, and one entire wing was built around Ford’s genuine personal fixation on soybeans: a real barn shipped in from his estate in Dearborn, live demonstrations of soybeans being pressed into plastic and paint, and on one memorable afternoon an entire dinner cooked from soy and served to thirty newspaper reporters, most of whom left unconvinced about soy as food but genuinely impressed by its future as car parts. Outside, the exhibit people actually talked about afterward was Roads of the World, an oval track split into twenty-one sections that let a visitor walk or drive through the entire history of road building, from Roman paving stones to a fresh strip of modern concrete highway. Ford liked the building enough that he refused to let it be scrapped with the rest of the fair. He had it taken apart and rebuilt in permanent materials at his own headquarters in Dearborn, where it reopened in 1936 as the welcome center for tours of the Rouge factory and stood as one of the most visited destinations in the country for a quarter century, until it burned down in a single afternoon on 9 November 1962.
Left: Ford Rotunda, Albert Kahn, Dearborn, Middle: Proof of Safety exhibit, Ford Building, Chicago, 1934, Right: Court of the World globe, Ford Exposition, 1934
Three more American fairs filled the middle of the decade, built by people who had worked in Chicago and wanted to try the formula closer to home. San Diego reopened Balboa Park in 1935, dressing up its 1915 Spanish colonial buildings with new Deco additions, including a tower Standard Oil modeled on a Mayan temple and a low white drum designed by Walter Dorwin Teague in Streamline Moderne that now houses the city’s air and space museum. Just off the midway sat Gold Gulch, a mocked-up 1850s mining town, and next to that the fair’s strangest attraction: a nudist colony staffed by hired performers rather than actual practicing nudists, open to any visitor willing to pay the extra admission at the gate. Cleveland’s Great Lakes Exposition opened the following year on reclaimed lakefront that had recently been a shantytown, and its Streets of the World district let visitors eat and shop their way through forty countries in an afternoon. Its second season introduced a synchronized swimming spectacle called the Aquacade, built around Olympic champions, and it proved so popular that the whole production packed up and moved to New York for the 1939 fair, where it drew even bigger crowds. Dallas outdid them both, and its most popular attraction wasn’t a building at all but the Cavalcade of Texas, a nightly pageant that marched four centuries of state history across an outdoor stage. George Dahl designed more than fifty buildings in about nine months for the Texas Centennial Exposition, finished in smooth stucco the color of pumpkin and set along an esplanade seven hundred feet long between reflecting pools, murals and monumental statues of the six nations that had governed Texas. Its centerpiece, the Hall of State, nearly never got built at all. A committee of Dallas architects argued over the design so long that organizers brought in a Houston outsider, Donald Barthelme, at the last moment, and what he produced there, limestone walls, seventy-six-foot pilasters, a gilded bronze Tejas Warrior in the entrance niche, is still considered one of the decade’s finest architect-and-artisan collaborations. About sixty percent of the Texas Centennial’s buildings still stand today, more than any other fair of the 1930s, making Fair Park the only intact world’s fair site in the United States built before 1950.
Top: Left: Ford Building, Walter Dorwin Teague, San Diego, 1935, Middle: Tejas Warrior, Allie Victoria Tennant, Dallas, 1936, Right: Streets of the World, Cleveland, 1936 Bottom: Left: Gold Gulch entrance, San Diego, 1935, Middle: Esplanade and reflecting pool, Fair Park, Dallas, Right: Texas Centennial poster, Florian, 1936
Europe staged its own fairs on a similarly grand scale, though none matched Chicago or New York for spectacle. Brussels opened in 1935 on a plateau built specifically for the occasion, its centerpiece a Deco exhibition hall whose concrete arches spanned wider without support columns than any covered space yet built in the country, a genuine engineering feat wrapped in bronze figures and geometric ornament. Its Congo pavilion followed the same colonial-display logic Paris had used in 1931, presenting Belgium’s own colony as a national achievement rather than an occupied territory. Visitors could walk from either building straight into Old Brussels, a recreated medieval quarter built at the edge of the grounds with actors in period costume, which turned out to be one of the fair’s most popular attractions and the one most visitors said they missed once the gates closed for good. Milan folded its contribution into an existing event, moving its influential design triennial into a new exhibition hall built specifically to house it, with a slender steel tower rising over the surrounding park. Glasgow closed out the European run in 1938 under conditions nobody could have planned around: it was one of the wettest summers Scotland had recorded in decades, with rain on all but three Saturdays of the entire run. Organizers had hoped for twenty million visitors and got well under thirteen, a shortfall the fair’s guarantors had to cover out of pocket. Nearly thirteen million people came anyway, many of them drawn to an amusement park run by a young Canadian showman named Billy Butlin, who used the profits to help build the chain of British holiday camps that later made his name. The architect Thomas Tait’s three-hundred-foot Tower of Empire stood on its hilltop, visible on a clear day from a hundred miles off, of which that summer offered very few. It came down within a year of closing. Almost nothing survives of Glasgow’s fair today except the Palace of Art, which still stands in Bellahouston Park.
Top: Left: Centenary Palace, Joseph Van Neck, Brussels, 1935, Middle: Vieux Bruxelles poster, James Thiriar, 1935, Right: Palazzo dell’Arte, Giovanni Muzio, Milan, 1933 Bottom: Left: Scottish Avenue postcard, Brian Gerald, Glasgow, 1938, Middle: Tait Tower and North Cascade, Glasgow, 1938, Right: Belgian Congo Pavilion, Brussels, 1935
Paris could not keep politics off the grounds in 1937. The Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne opened on 25 May with several pavilions still wrapped in scaffolding, and organizers quietly told visitors to hold off until June, yet it still drew thirty-one million people over the run. The fair’s own poster, a bright, optimistic design by Jean Carlu, promised harmony between nations; the halls told a different story. Guards stood inside them to stop anyone photographing the industrial exhibits, and one architect who sat down to sketch the nighttime lighting patterns on the French buildings had his drawings confiscated on the spot. After dark the fair was worth the trouble regardless: floodlights sweeping the grounds, beams turning from the Eiffel Tower, illuminated fountains, fireworks over the Seine. What everyone still remembers is the sight that greeted visitors at the base of the Trocadéro. Germany’s pavilion, designed by Albert Speer, stood directly across the promenade from the Soviet Union’s, crowned by Vera Mukhina’s steel sculpture of a striding worker and a farm woman, positioned so neither government could avoid seeing exactly what the other had built. Speer was soon to become one of the most powerful men in Hitler’s government, and both governments understood what they were building: not an exhibit but a display of raw national strength, in the middle of a fair whose official purpose was peaceful cooperation. Not every pavilion at the fair was making a show of strength. Finland’s, designed by Alvar Aalto, was built almost entirely from timber, a quiet, human-scaled contrast to the stone and steel display just a short walk away, and inside the Grand Palais, a new science museum called the Palais de la Découverte let visitors watch live experiments, a format so popular it became a permanent Paris institution the following year. Elsewhere on the grounds stood the pavilion built by Spain’s Republican government, which was still fighting a civil war back home and had almost no money to spend on a fair pavilion. What little it built held one of the most consequential paintings of the century. Weeks earlier, German and Italian warplanes flying in support of Spain’s Nationalist rebels had destroyed the Basque town of Guernica in a bombing raid that killed hundreds of civilians, and Picasso turned the event into a mural-sized painting he titled Guernica, finished in about five furious weeks. It hung inside a plain steel and glass building alongside a fountain by Alexander Calder that ran with liquid mercury instead of water, a detail visitors remembered almost as vividly as the painting itself. The fair’s permanent legacy is architectural rather than political. The Palais de Chaillot and the Palais de Tokyo, both stripped down and colonnaded, were built for this exposition and still stand above the Seine today.
Top: Left: Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, Vera Mukhina, 1937, Middle: Palais du Trocadéro, Paris, demolished 1937, Right: Mercury Fountain, Alexander Calder, Paris, 1937 Bottom: Left: Arts et Techniques poster, Jean Carlu, 1937, Middle: Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 1937, Right: Finnish Pavilion, Alvar Aalto, Paris, 1937
New York opened on 30 April 1939, a date chosen because it marked a hundred and fifty years since Washington’s inauguration in the city. Roosevelt gave the opening address, and RCA used the occasion to introduce television to the public, so a few thousand sets scattered across the metropolitan area became among the first anywhere to broadcast a sitting president live. Robert Moses had wanted the Queens ash dump turned into parkland for years and finally had his excuse. The fair’s theme was Building the World of Tomorrow, and its symbol was a pair of gleaming white structures nobody who saw them ever forgot. The Trylon was a slender three-sided spire, 610 feet tall, sharp enough to look almost weightless. Beside it sat the Perisphere, a plain white globe 180 feet across, looking for all the world like it had rolled up next to the spire by accident. By day the two were simply white; after dark, floodlights turned them into the brightest objects on the grounds. The fair’s own poster, designed by Joseph Binder, put that same pairing on walls and subway cars across the city months before the gates opened. Visitors rode the longest escalator built anywhere up to that point to get inside the sphere, then walked back down along a spiraling ramp called the Helicline, touring the two structures as a single continuous experience. Everything else on the grounds was color-coded by zone, the tones growing more intense the farther a visitor walked from that white center. Inside the Perisphere, in a scene designed by Henry Dreyfuss, visitors stood on a balcony that moved slowly in a full circle, looking down at a miniature city called Democracity while recorded music played and projected images washed over the dome, an experience closer to a planetarium show than a museum diorama. At the General Motors pavilion, the designer Norman Bel Geddes built something bigger still: Futurama, which carried 552 people at a time through upholstered, speaker-fitted chairs along a third of a mile of track suspended above a miniature America of 1960. Everyone who rode it left wearing a pin that read I have seen the future, and the line for it was the longest at the fair by a wide margin. Consolidated Edison answered with its own miniature world: a diorama called City of Light, designed by Walter Dorwin Teague, packing four thousand scale buildings, including a twenty-two-foot Empire State Building, into a model of the city cycling through a full day and night. Elsewhere, a 250-foot Parachute Jump sponsored by Life Savers candy dropped riders from the second-tallest structure at the fair; it would later move to Coney Island and become one of Brooklyn’s most recognizable landmarks. Westinghouse showed off a seven-foot robot that could count on its fingers and smoke a cigarette, and buried a time capsule not meant to be opened until the year 6939. Story and Clark unveiled the Storytone, the first electric piano sold commercially anywhere, its case designed by John Vassos. The fair had been selling a frictionless 1960 for exactly four months when Germany invaded Poland. It closed in October 1940 with half of Europe already at war, went bankrupt, and was torn apart for scrap, the steel from the Trylon and Perisphere melted down for munitions within two years of the last visitor walking out the gate.
Top: Left: Trylon and Perisphere, Samuel Gottscho, 1939, Middle: Futurama, Norman Bel Geddes, New York, 1939, Right: New York World’s Fair poster, Joseph Binder, 1939, Bottom: Left: Celestial Sphere, Paul Manship, Geneva, Middle: Trylon and Perisphere, night illumination, 1939, Right: City of Light diorama, Walter Dorwin Teague, 1939
San Francisco opened its fair ten weeks before New York, on an island that had not existed three years earlier, dredged up out of the bay by the Army Corps of Engineers and intended, once the crowds went home, to become the airport for Pan American’s new trans-Pacific flying boat service. The Golden Gate International Exposition opened there on 18 February 1939, billing itself the Pageant of the Pacific. The commission overseeing the design lost its chief architect partway through, when George Kelham died in 1936, and Arthur Brown Jr. carried the project the rest of the way with a team that included Timothy Pflueger. Together they invented a style for the occasion, blending Cambodian, Malay, Siamese, Mayan and Incan sources into something they called Pacifica, and because the site sat directly in the path of the wind funneling through the Golden Gate, they solved the problem by turning the whole fair into a walled city with no back wall at all: visitors arriving by ferry saw a long blank rampart first, then passed through Donald Macky’s Elephant Towers into courts that opened up all at once. Brown’s own Tower of the Sun rose at the center of it, capped with a gilded phoenix. Ralph Stackpole’s statue of Pacifica presided over the court in front of it, a curtain of metal rods chiming behind her whenever the wind moved through them. Not every building followed the theme: Pflueger’s own Federal Building and William Wurster’s Yerba Buena Club broke from Pacifica into plain, unornamented modernism instead. The fair’s amusement zone, the Gayway, ran forty acres of sideshows and rides, including a racetrack where trained monkeys drove miniature cars around the loop. The fair lost money in both of its seasons, but its second one is the reason it’s still remembered: Pflueger proposed putting working artists on public display, and visitors who came for the exhibit called Art in Action got to stand and watch Diego Rivera paint an enormous mural in real time.
Top: Left: Golden Gate Exposition poster, Treasure Island, 1939, Middle: Yerba Buena Club, William Wurster, 1939, Right: Elephant Towers, Treasure Island, 1939 Bottom: Left: Tower of the Sun, Arthur Brown Jr., 1939, Middle: Pacifica, Ralph Stackpole, Treasure Island, 1939, Right: Aerial view, Golden Gate Exposition, 1939
The decade was supposed to close with two more fairs, and neither one opened. Rome had been planning an exposition for 1942, called E42, meant to celebrate twenty years of Mussolini’s rule with a fairground of stark white marble on the edge of the city. Its centerpiece, a six-story cube of stacked arches that Romans still call the Square Colosseum, was actually finished and formally opened in November 1940, months after the fair itself had already been cancelled with Italy’s entry into the war, a monument dedicated to an event that would never happen. Treasure Island did become an airport, briefly, exactly as planned. Pan American’s flying boats began landing in the cove beside it in 1939, running scheduled passenger service across the Pacific all through the fair and for years after. One of those planes, the Pacific Clipper, left the island on a routine flight to New Zealand on 2 December 1941. Five days later, with Pearl Harbor bombed and the ocean beneath it suddenly hostile, its crew changed the flight plan and flew home the other way, all the way around the world, landing in New York weeks afterward as the first commercial aircraft ever to circle the globe. The Navy took over the rest of the island soon after and held it for the better part of sixty years. Pacifica and the Tower of the Sun both came down within weeks of Pearl Harbor. What outlasted the buildings were the ideas behind them. Norman Bel Geddes’s miniature automated highways became, more or less exactly, the American interstate system. Several companies that had leased space in New York were later recruited on purpose as the first tenants at Disneyland when it opened in 1955, and EPCOT Center revived the same pairing of national pavilions and an imagined city of tomorrow almost thirty years after Flushing Meadows closed for good. Fair Park in Dallas, sandblasted and half-forgotten by the 1970s, found a defender in the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who toured the grounds in 1976 and declared herself in love with what Texas had built there in 1936, a verdict that helped save it. Tokyo’s own fair, planned for 1940 alongside an Olympics the city had also been awarded, was called off the same way Rome’s was, after Japan invaded China in 1937. A million ticket booklets had already been sold, and nobody was ever refunded. Those tickets never entirely lost their value. In May 2025, a Tokyo collector named Fumiya Takenawa bought one of the old booklets online, brought it to that year’s World Expo in Osaka, and was let in, eighty-five years late, exchanged for two ordinary day passes, exactly as organizers had done for earlier ticket holders at Japan’s 1970 and 2005 expos.
Recommended Reading
The best single starting point is Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, edited by Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo and published by Yale University Press in 2010, which grew out of the National Building Museum exhibition of the same name and gathers essays on all six American expositions with particular attention to how modern design reached a mass public through them. For Chicago specifically, Lisa D. Schrenk’s Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago’s 1933-34 World’s Fair, from the University of Minnesota Press in 2007, is the most thorough treatment of how the buildings were conceived, financed and put up, and it is especially good on the prefabricated panels, suspended roofs and thin concrete shells that entered general construction practice after the war. For New York, Trylon and Perisphere: The 1939 New York World’s Fair by Barbara Cohen, Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, published by Abrams in 1989, remains the richest visual record of the fair’s graphics and merchandise. For San Francisco, Jack James and Earle Vonard Weller’s Treasure Island, “The Magic City,” 1939-1940: The Story of the Golden Gate International Exposition, published in San Francisco by Pisani Printing and Publishing Company around 1941, is a firsthand account assembled while the fair was still fresh in memory.
If you are interested in further stories of Art Deco design, collecting, and celebrating the artistry of early 20th Century:
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