1939 World's Fair Futurama

1939 World's Fair Futurama

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General Motors commissioned industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes to design a futuristic vision of 1960 America for the 1939 New York World's Fair called Futurama: Magic Motorways. The exhibit did more than predict the future. It stimulated mass appeal for personal rapid transit, laying the groundwork for massive, publicly funded roadway infrastructure construction in the early part of the 20th century. People left wanting to drive, giving planners the political will to build the interstate highway system.

Below are video clips of the 1939 Futurama:

Part 1

Part 2

Magic Motorways

A car-oriented vision for the future

Bel Geddes designed a life-sized diorama the size of a football field with huge, curvaceously modernist skyscrapers and grand, interstate "automated" expressways. 45 million visitors delightedly waited upwards of hours to view the spectacle from seats moving along a track perched above the display while a smooth-voiced narrator explained the marvels of a car-dominated future. Tens of thousands of tiny houses, cars, buildings and trees would become larger and larger as people moved through the exhibit. When at last they were spat out of the experience, they were surrounded by full-size versions of prototype buildings, cars, and even appliances representing new materials and manufacturing processes. [1]

The highway system was really the star of the exhibit. In the period following the Great Depression and just before the Second World War, Futurama presented an optimistic vision of progress and the glorification of mankind's ability to build its way out of any problem through technology and engineering. Automatic, radio-controlled cars would be able to move safely at high speeds through pastoral countrysides to urban centers. Lanes would be segregated with four lanes traveling at 50 miles per hour, two at 75 and two at 100. Keep in mind that at this time, trains were the preferred mode of distance travel and cars were hardly in every garage. Most homes probably did not even have garages! It was this vision of building an interstate highway to accommodate high speed automobile travel that would be the most powerful, compelling result of the project.

Problems

Some ideas were more fully baked than others. The airport would be a round disc that sat on a pool of oil. This would enable it to rotate into the best direction for current wind patterns. Runways would be made obsolete. How passengers would connect from the city center to a spinning airport seems a bit of a mystery.

The grand highways connected dense urban cores but the designers failed to consider how road construction would effect the communities between cities. Pastoral rural landscapes were portrayed devoid of strip malls and parking lots. Farmland remained intact. The relationship between land use and transportation was not fully thought through.

Highways would be thick with traffic yet nonetheless move at high velocities, free from safety concerns, congestion or pollution as a result of automation, radio-control and physical segregation of cars. Similar visions still materialize both in science fiction visions of the future and in actual prototypes coming out of Silicon Valley.

Significance

Building a vision

Futurama was a hugely popular exhibit and is widely regarded as having been incredibly influential in the development of modern highways and the primacy of the automobile in the United States.

"Detailed miniatures are always compelling," says Dan Howland, editor of the Journal of Ride Theory. "It doesn't matter whether they are doll houses or model trains or it's Legoland, something about them just sucks you in. The 1939 Futurama had two other factors that compounded the fascination: first, a promise of personal car ownership (and after the Great Depression that sounded pretty good), and second, a grand vision of the future. Up until the Futurama, manufacturers had exhibited at fairs to show how they made their products, and then the Futurama came along and said, Here is how the future will feel. The 1939 audience wasn't used to having a company selling optimism, and it made their hearts sing."

GM's vision heightened the importance of the role of transportation planners like Robert Moses who was New York City Parks Commissioner and worked closely with the World's Fair planning commission. No doubt the exhibit bolstered public support for the highway projects he would bring to bear upon the city in the following years.

"You have to understand that the audience had never even considered a future like this," says Howland. "There wasn't an interstate freeway system in 1939. Not many people owned a car. They staggered out of the fair like a cargo cult and built an imperfect version of this incredible vision." [2]