In 1939 at the New York World’s Fair, industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes presented his exhibition on the future of the American city. Named “Futurama,” this world was one of the mega-highways that cut through dense metropolises and their skyscrapers. Some five million people viewed the exhibit, shattering records at the time. Geddes had begun his career in the theater, and so he knew how to stir the people’s imagination. Attendees were presented with a special pin upon exiting that read “I have seen the future.”
Americans did see a glimpse of the future that day, but there wasn’t much of them in it. Geddes’s exhibit was a mechanical world intended for organized movement. Its 14-lane highways acted as conveyer belts for a utopia designed around the automobile. The living quarters were secondary, based on a grid system whose boundaries were set by dense motorways. Despite the diminished sociability built into its design, Futurama illustrated a narrowly efficient world that gave an impression of the cutting edge.
Read Full Article »
