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)¹

The airplane indicts the city.

—Le Corbusier, Aircraft (1935)²

Fantastic 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.³ 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 “Balloon 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,⁷ 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. For example, Adnan Morshed posits that the 1939 New York World’s Fair Futurama ride reveals a city that is an “American utopia as it might appear in the year 1960 to people traveling in a low-flying airplane,” which reflects the...