Hasta La Ideas

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the National Building Museum in Wasington, D.C. Set well beyond the National Mall and the Smithsonian Campus, the National Building Museum is housed in an imposing brick structure formerly the home of the D.C. Pension Bureau. The Museum’s featured exhibition was a retrospective on America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, five in all: Chicago, San Diego, Dallas, New York, San Francisco.

The exhibit was a surprisingly thorough look at the planning, culture, technology, architecture and design that went into each of these unique events. Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress expo was organized to inspire a nation in the throes of a depression. New York’s 1939 World’s Fair celebrated the globalized world of tomorrow, personified most memorably by the famous Trylon and Perisphere and Henry Dreyfuss’ Democracity as its centerpiece. To close out the decade in 1939 and 1940, San Francisco engineered the man-made Treasure Island for the Pageant of the Pacific, a celebration of Pacific culture and America’s Manifest Destiny fulfilled.

While the exhibit was a great history lesson and a fun bit of retronauting (see: Westinghouse’s Elektro the Motoman) I was most intrigued by the show’s conclusion. In the “World’s Fairs Today” section, the historians made the typical case about the interconnectedness of the modern era and the decline in demand and need for these global celebrations. The conclusion also added that the United States had its membership revoked by the B.I.E (the Bureau of International Expositions) after not paying its dues for two years, thus rendering the U.S. ineligible to ever host the event again. Additionally, Congress no longer allocates funds for a U.S. Pavilion at any World Exposition. This resulted in a rather embarrassing (yet still surprisingly popular) U.S. Pavilion at the 2010 Expo in Shanghai. Funded by sixty multi-national corporations, the pavilion was designed by a foreign architect (a Canadian no less) and featured only three short video presentations — not exactly reminiscent of the American Dream showcased so fantastically in the early 20th century.

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