Remembering the Future

Remembering the Future
Author: Rosemarie Haag Bletter
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1989
Genre: History
ISBN:

New York's 1939-1940 World's Fair

New York's 1939-1940 World's Fair
Author: Andrew F. Wood
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780738535852

The 1939-1940 New York World's Fair promised a new age of global communication, nationwide superhighways, and suburban living-and it delivered. Crafted by designers such as Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, and Raymond Loewy, the twelve-hundred-acre fair in Flushing Meadows sold visitors a streamlined world of consumer goods-teardrop cars and smoking robots, electric dishwashers and nylon stockings-manufactured by companies such as Westinghouse, General Motors, and AT&T. In New York's 1939-1940 World's Fair, insightful narrative accompanies dazzling postcards, advertisements, and illustrations of Democracity, Futurama, the Lagoon of Nations, and the famed Trylon and Perisphere, recalling the promise and optimism of a fair that enchanted forty-five million visitors.

The New York World's Fair, 1939/1940

The New York World's Fair, 1939/1940
Author: Richard Wurts
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
Total Pages: 178
Release: 1977-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

The New York World's Fair 1939/1940 may not have been the greatest of all world's fairs, but it is probably the most fondly remembered of all of them, a spectacle that no one who was there has forgotten. The 700-foot-tall Trylon and the 200-foot-wide Perisphere are still vivid symbols and memories of a wonderful and lost time for millions of people. Do you remember seeing or being told about the vast diorama of Democracity representing the theme of the Fair in 1939, "Building the World of Tomorrow"; GM's Futurama ride; the world's largest mirrored ceiling; 3-D movie; Elektro, a robot seven feet tall; the Town of Tomorrow; Toyland; the Parachute Jump; Bill Rose's Aquacade? The Fair is here in this book which recaptures its abiding images in 155 photographs, 93 of them by Richard Wurts, and catalogs some of its best-remembered artistic and scientific achievements. There is the typical 1930s décor of the Bauhaus and Art Deco persuasion designed by such top-flight industrial designers and architects as Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, Albert Kahn, Morris Lapidus, Edward D. Stone, Skidmore and Owings; its scientific contributions (fluorescent lights, nylon, television); its paintings, fountains, sculptures, and murals by artists like Salvador Dali, Rockwell Kent, Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Calder, Jo Davidson, Carl Milles, Paul Manship; its cultural and popular attractions; personalities like Eleanor Holm, Johnny Weissmuller, H. V. Kaltenborn, and many others. The detailed introduction relates the history of the Fair and the people and principles involved. The accurate and informative captions give the architects and important statistics of the buildings illustrated, and tell about many more exhibits and features not pictured. You will revisit the New York World's Fair and recapture some of its magic within this book.

Tomorrow-Land

Tomorrow-Land
Author: Joseph Tirella
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2013-12-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 149300333X

Motivated by potentially turning Flushing Meadows, literally a land of refuse, into his greatest public park, Robert Moses—New York's "Master Builder"—brought the World's Fair to the Big Apple for 1964 and '65. Though considered a financial failure, the 1964-65 World' s Fair was a Sixties flashpoint in areas from politics to pop culture, technology to urban planning, and civil rights to violent crime. In an epic narrative, the New York Times bestseller Tomorrow-Land shows the astonishing pivots taken by New York City, America, and the world during the Fair. It fetched Disney's empire from California and Michelangelo's La Pieta from Europe; and displayed flickers of innovation from Ford, GM, and NASA—from undersea and outerspace colonies to personal computers. It housed the controversial work of Warhol (until Governor Rockefeller had it removed); and lured Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Meanwhile, the Fair—and its house band, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians—sat in the musical shadows of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, who changed rock-and-roll right there in Queens. And as Southern civil rights efforts turned deadly, and violent protests also occurred in and around the Fair, Harlem-based Malcolm X predicted a frightening future of inner-city racial conflict. World's Fairs have always been collisions of eras, cultures, nations, technologies, ideas, and art. But the trippy, turbulent, Technicolor, Disney, corporate, and often misguided 1964-65 Fair was truly exceptional.