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Building
a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago's 1933-34
World's Fair, by Lisa D. Schrenk.
In the realm of history, the 1893
World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago overshadows
the Century
of Progress held forty years later in the same city.
Where the former is both loved and hated for its classically-inspired
architecture that influenced both architecture and town
planning in the years following the immensely popular event,
the latter looked to the future, and in turn perhaps sealed
its fate for a country that more than not embeds its technological
progress in historical forms. As author Lisa D. Schrenk
points out in this thorough history of the Century of Progress,
this does not mean that the 1933 fair was not as influential
as the previous one in Chicago. Rather, it was influential
via the innovative products and construction processes found
in the exhibition buildings, keeping with the fair's embrace
of science, industry, and the human (or American) drive
towards progress via the two.
While the fair featured the usual
corporate and country exhibition halls, this influence was
found the most in the model homes that littered the fairgrounds,
just south of the now Museum Campus and on Northerly Island.
These houses showed firsthand not only the embrace of prefabrication
and atypical materials for domestic architecture, via the
likes of George
Keck and others, but also the appliances that would
come to be standard in American homes in the years to come.
Being shown to people during the depths of the Great Depression,
the forward-thinking designs and contraptions showed Americans
an apparent light at the end of the dark tunnel they found
themselves in at the time. Not to say that everything was
forward formally, particularly in the European-Modernist
sense (something that predominated and was a point of contention
by many critics and architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright,
a glaring omission at the fair), but the clean lines, unadorned
facades, and bold colors and lighting of the architecture
definitely favored this aesthetic.
Besides some of the houses presented
in the book that appear not only brazen but extremely well-done,
it becomes clear why the 1933 Fair did not have the lasting
impact of the 1893 Fair, mainly the inconsistent quality
of the architecture. Even those who do not appreciate the
plaster classicism of the earlier fair, the consistency
of the aesthetic created a very strong and immersive sense
of place, something lacking in the grab-bag formalism and
unimaginative planning of the later fair. In this sense,
the fair's architecture failed to engage the visitor at
the level of the urban. It failed to become more than an
assemblage of pavilions (something many fairs since could
be equally criticized of), even though it was oriented around
a lagoon, like the 1893 fair.
Perhaps if the strong, megalomaniacal
mind of somebody like Frank Lloyd Wright played the role
that Daniel Burnham did earlier the results would have been
more cohesive, but at the same time they would have been
less democratic. In the end, what resulted was a fairly
democratic expression of an apparently democratic but decidedly
top-down theme of science, industry, and man, the trace
results of which exist in most, if not all, of our homes
today.
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