Designing Tomorrow at the 1930s World’s Fairs
One of my best travel memories as a child was a family trip to New York for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens. It was a showcase of modern technology during the height of the new space age, and included innovations such as picture phones, a controlled nuclear fusion explosion, and the People Mover.
But three decades earlier, in the midst of the Great Depression, millions of people visited 6 major fairs across the country to get a different view of the future. The cities of New York, Chicago, Dallas, San Diego, Cleveland, and San Francisco hosted these major fairs and provided visitors a vision of what a modern, technological tomorrow might look like in the near future.
The National Building Museum’s exhibition Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s shows the impact on society of these six American expositions. Nearly 200 never-before-assembled artifacts from the six fairs highlight modern design and consumerism.
The fairs included building designed by some of the period’s most influential architects who had collaborated with corporation such as Westinghouse and General Motors. The pavilions presented a glimpse of the future showing tomorrow’s highways, televisions, all-electric kitchens (as the electric grid spread during the 1930s), several futuristic model homes, a 35,000 square foot model of an imagined metropolis of the future, as well as never seen before robot technology.
The exhibits were used by corporations and the US government as laboratories for innovation, experimentation, public relations and to introduce new products and ideas to the American consumer.
The exhibit is divided into 7 galleries — Welcome to the Fairs, A Fair-going Nation, Building a Better Tomorrow, Better Ways to Move, Better Ways to Live, Better Times, and Legacies. The exhibits include models of homes and buildings, architectural remnants, drawings, paintings, prints, furniture, an original RCA TRK-12 television which helped introduce TV to the general public in 1939, Elektro the Moto-Man robot, and period film footage.
Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s – National Building Museum – 401 F Street NW, Washington, DC (map)
Dates and Hours – Through July 10, 2011. Monday – Saturday 10:00 am – 5:00 pm and Sunday 11:00 – 5:00.
Admission - Free
Nearest Metro Subway Station – Judiciary Square – Red line, then cross the street or use the DC Circulator bus.
Parking – Limited metered street parking or area paid garage parking is available.
Image – Courtesy of NBM – Golden Gate International Exposition Guidebook, San Francisco, 1939, Collection of the National Building Museum.
