Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s (review)

This lavishly illustrated volume accompanied a major exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. It is not a catalog, but six essays dealing with U.S. expositions held during the 1930s. These are skillfully linked by Robert Rydell’s introduction, by Laura Burd Schiavo’s stunning sixty-three-page photographic essay, and by a closing interview with Richard Guy Wilson on modernism at world’s fairs. The first essay is Lisa D. Schrenk’s meditation on corporate marketing at the Chicago 1933–34 fair, and the last is Robert Bennett’s study of the cultural representations of the 1939–40 World of Tomorrow fair in New York City. The four essays in between discuss the fairs in San Diego (1935), Dallas (1936), Cleveland (1936), and San Francisco (1939). They examine European paintings at the fairs (Neil Harris), the invention of a distinctive “pan-American” architecture (Robert A. González), “Designing the Modern Family” (Kristina Wilson), and model housing at San Diego (Matthew Bokovoy).

These American fairs looked both to the past and toward a stylized modernist future. They memorialized the founding of cities, states, or the nation itself, and pointed to the progress made over one century to suggest that further progress lay ahead. Yet the attraction of what Harris calls “old wine in new bottles” remained. Despite giant modernist murals and striking buildings, masterpieces of European art drew enormous crowds, first in Chicago and later in New York and San Francisco, where Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and major works by Titian, Michelangelo, and Raphael enraptured art lovers. The Italian masterpieces later were shown in other parts of the country to admiring crowds. As the world descended into war, Harris argues, “the old masters suggested a transcendent realm far removed from the violent destruction.” (p. 52).

Despite their admiration for European art, however, Americans wanted their own aesthetic at the fairs. They did not merely copy European modernism but cultivated what González terms a “pan-American modernity,”“a distinct modern language” drawing on Spanish, Mayan, and Aztec sources. It originated at the New Orleans World Cotton Exposition (1884– 85), spread to Chicago, Dallas, and San Diego, and might have reached its apotheosis in a planned but aborted Miami fair. Curiously, González says little of 1939 San Francisco.

Building elements of the past into an imagined future was also evident in exposition model homes for middle-class families. They featured scientific conveniences and modern design. Yet, Wilson emphasizes, “other elements remained firmly attached to domestic precedents established in the later nineteenth century” (p. 141). The houses were not all modern in style, but included period revivals, including colonial and federal. Furthermore, the number of modern buildings and the prominence of modern furnishings declined from one fair to the next. Similarly, floor plans revealed a “shift in family living patterns” toward “increased efficiency and informality,” yet “stubborn Victorian-ness” remained in “rigorous zoning between public and private” (p. 151). Similarly, in San Diego, Bokovoy found, many scale models embraced European modernism and community planning, but the public also liked “Mission, Spanish Colonial, and Pueblo revival styles” (p. 167).

In the last essay, Bennett argues that the New York fair uncritically embraced “a neo-Corbusian logic” (p. 180) and tended toward blind faith in science and social engineering. “Lacking Europe’s more immediate experiences with the darker side of modern technology, the fair’s Americanized modernism tended to fetishize technology as a simple panacea and promote naïve machine-age fantasies” (p. 184). Bennett analyzes science fiction that satirizes the “World of Tomorrow” and approvingly cites Miles Beller’s 2000 historical novel Dream of Venus (or, Living Pictures) that declares Futurama not a timeless city but a “multi-level lie,” an “airstream moderne version of Coney Island.” For Bennett, the fair was “not so much a failed modernist utopia as a kind of faux modernism . . . aligned with corporate power...