NYWF
(1939-40)
In many ways this major international exhibition typified the global economic, commercial, and corporate power and influence wielded by the United States of America by the time of the Second World War. Many of that country's leading companies, such as General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Kodak, and Westinghouse, contributed major buildings and exhibitions on the Flushing Meadow site and generally sought to portray themselves as major contributors to a utopian future world in which they played a key role in satisfying consumer desires and needs. Typical of this outlook was the representation of an imagined world of 1960 in the highly popular Futurama display in the General Motors Pavilion by Norman Bel Geddes or the vision of a futuristic Democracity by the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss in the Perisphere at the centre of the exhibition site. In some ways it may be seen as a full-blooded expression of the aims that had underpinned the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-4, planned as a testament to a technologically and scientifically progressive America in which major corporations played a key role in the period of recovery following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. However, the NYWF was distinctly more forward looking than other international exhibitions held in the United States in the same decade: the California-Pacific International Exposition at San Diego (1935-6) and the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco designed to celebrate the building of the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges in the city (1939). Fittingly the NYWF came at the end of a decade that had seen the brief rise of the Technocratic Party, the popularization of the medium of science fiction, and emergence of comic strip heroes such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Superman.
The NYWF provided a fitting material response to its chosen major theme of ‘Building the World of Tomorrow with the Tools of Today’. It took three years to plan and build prior to its opening in April 1939 and the participation of 60 countries, the majority of American states, and numerous powerful companies underlined its international, political, and economic significance, as did the enormous 1,216-acre (492-hectare) site and 300 buildings. The striking and highly visible centrepieces of the exhibition were the Trylon and Perisphere, both of which became widely recognized symbols of the Fair. The soaring, needle-like 700-foot (212-metre) Trylon tower, symbolizing aspiration, and the adjacent Perisphere (the largest ever man-made globe), symbolizing the significance of the world, dominated the site and featured in much of the NYWF publicity, related ephemera, souvenirs, and merchandise. These included Remington Cadet typewriters, Bissell carpet sweepers, radios, silverware, and commemorative plates by Tiffany & Co., numerous fabric designs, postage stamps, comics, magazines, and posters, including Joseph Binder's award-winning design for the NYWF poster competition of 1938. The Perisphere contained Dreyfuss's utopian vision of Democracity, a vast panorama of a planned metropolitan environment of 2039 that could be viewed from above by spectators who travelled round the exhibit on revolving balconies, as if in an aircraft, at the rate of 8,000 per day.
The NYWF was planned around several major zones, one of the most significant of which was the Transportation Zone, which included buildings housing the Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, and Firestone exhibitions as well as the Aviation Building, the Marine Transportation Building, the Railroads Building (with industrial designer Raymond Loewy acting as consulting designer for the Railroads exhibits). The rapidly changing world of modern railways, a rapidly increasing network of passenger aircraft flights, luxury ocean liners, and road transportation was one which had captured the public imagination. The Chrysler Building, whose displays were coordinated by Donald Deskey, included the Transportation Zone's Focal Exhibit of the History of Transportation as well as a Rocketport of the Future. The latter, coordinated by Loewy, was a son et lumière display portraying future passenger flights by rocket between the United States and London. The General Motors Buildings housed the Norman Bel Geddes-designed Highways and Horizons exhibit, the most popular of the entire Fair. Up to 28,000 visitors a day were taken around Bel Geddes's portrayal of an envisaged world of 1960 by means of a moving ‘travelator’ on which they were seated, as if in a low-flying aircraft. From this vantage point they were able to view a vast panoramic landscape in which experimental farming, hydro-electric power plants, leisure resorts, and dramatically futuristic cityscape were all linked by a multi-lane motorway system. The visitor experience culminated in arrival at a full-scale street intersection of the future where visitors could see contemporary production models of General Motors automobiles (Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, LaSalle, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac), buses, and commercial vehicles. Similarly, in the Ford Exposition, visitors experienced the ‘Road of Tomorrow’, a spiral ramp at the centre of the Ford Building, upon which they could test-drive contemporary Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln automobiles as well as marvel at the ‘Ford Cycle of Production’ display by Walter Dorwin Teague.
Also very much in keeping with the NYWF vision of the ‘World of Tomorrow’ was the Communications and Business Systems Zone, the pavilions of which included those of the Radio Corporation of America and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company with interior displays by Henry Dreyfuss. The former housed a highly popular television exhibit where the public could see in operation this new broadcasting medium, which had been inaugurated in New York on the day of the Fair's opening. Also significant in sustaining corporate and consumers' optimistic visions of the future were many of the exhibits in the Production and Distribution Zone, also highly favoured by visitors who were intrinsically interested in technological and commercial innovation. Typifying such an outlook was the Eastman Kodak Company Building with interiors designed by Teague and Stowe Myers, where a growing public appetite for snapshot photography and increasingly affordable home movie making was catered for in the varied displays. The Westinghouse Building, at the front of which was positioned the science fiction-like Singing Tower of Light, contained a crowd-drawing proto-robot, Elektro, that performed a number of elementary tasks such as talking and counting, accompanied by his robotic dog, Sparko. In the NYWF 1940 season the Westinghouse display included the ‘Battle of the Centuries’, a staged washing-up competition between Mrs Drudge and Mrs Modern, the former cleaning by hand, the latter with the aid of an electrical dishwasher. Also in the Production and Distribution Zone were the General Electric, Du Pont, and Consolidated Edison Buildings, the latter containing a massive diorama of ‘The City of Light’. In a dramatic son et lumière performance it portrayed the many varied ways in which the city of New York consumed electricity over a 24-hour period.
The Government Zone contained a number of more traditional style buildings as seen in the Court of the States (of America) in which the historicizing Pennsylvania Building, a replica of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, played an important role. Other buildings reflected aesthetically the stylistic roots of colonial American architecture, visible manifestations of the imperial legacy of France, Spain, and Britain. Many national overseas pavilions and displays also played a major part at the NYWF and included contributions by Britain, France, Italy, the USSR, Belgium, Holland, Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Argentina, and Brazil.
In essence, the NYWF can be seen as an expression of a commitment to technological progress, eagerly endorsed by many major American corporations that sought to promote in the public's eyes a futuristic utopian era where corporate enterprise was seen to play a beneficial role for society as a whole. Such companies often employed the services of the emerging generation of American industrial designers to act as mediators between the worlds of production and consumption by giving substance to persuasive visions of the future where economic prosperity and technological innovation were portrayed as the necessary underpinnings of vastly improved social and material living conditions. However, such an outlook has also been seen as the means by which powerful American corporations were able to create consumer demand for fresh models, test out future styling possibilities, and familiarize the public with new models. Almost a decade earlier this had been referred to as the process of ‘consumer engineering’. After the Second World War such corporate commitment to the unremitting stimulation of increased patterns of consumption gave rise to the populist, yet powerful, critiques of writers such as Vance Packard and the more trenchant critiques of leftist economists such as J. K. Galbraith in his seminal 1957 text The Affluent Society.
