“Exposition Architecture: 1893 versus 1933”

AboutCompares the architecture of Chicago's two world's fairs, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and A Century of Progress of 1933. Opens by noting Louis Sullivan's contemporary protest, as one of the 1893 fair's own architects, against the "slavish copying" of European classical tradition that dominated the earlier fair's design, and credits Sullivan's example with eventually proving influential on European modernism, which by the 1930s had begun to affect American design in turn. Contrasts the unified classical planning and monumental white plaster "staff" construction of 1893 with the commercially driven, unplanned sprawl, artificial (rather than daylight) interior lighting, prefabricated veneer construction, restrained ornament, and extensive use of colored illumination at the 1933 fair. Singles out Paul Philippe Cret's Hall of Science and Raymond Hood's Electrical Building as the strongest designs of 1933, criticizes the Agricultural Building and the truss-roofed Travel and Transport Building, and closes by characterizing the 1933 fair as a commercial "carnival" lacking the earlier fair's unity of purpose and enduring architectural significance.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1543-6314%28193305%295%3A4%3C17%3AEA1V1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E