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Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago’s 1933–34 World’s Fair

Amazon.com Price:  $30.96 (as of 06/05/2019 12:25 PST- Details)

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Description

From the summer of 1933 to the fall of 1934, more than 38 million fairgoers visited a 3-mile stretch along Lake Michigan, home to Chicago’s second World’s Fair. Millions more experienced the Century of Progress International Exposition through newspaper and magazine articles, newsreels, and souvenirs. Together, all marveled at the industrial, scientific, consumer, and cultural displays, many of which have been housed in fifty massive and colorful exhibition halls, the largest architectural project realized in the USA throughout the Great Depression.

In the richly illustrated Building a Century of Progress, Lisa D. Schrenk explores the pivotal role of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair in modern American architecture. She recounts how the exposition’s architectural commission promoted a broad definition of modern architecture, not relying on purely aesthetic characteristics but instead specializing in new design solutions. The fair’s pavilions incorporated recently introduced building materials such as masonite and gypsum board; structural innovations (for instance, the first thin-shell concrete roof and the first suspended roof structures built in the USA); and new construction processes, most notably the usage of prefabrication. They also featured curiosities like the giant, constantly operating mayonnaise maker and the glass-walled House of The next day, which had no operable windows. Schrenk shows how the halls’ designs reflected cultural and political developments of the period, including the expanding relationships between science, industry, and government; the upward push of a corporate consumer culture; and the affect of the Great Depression.

Many of the designs provoked intense responses from critics and other prominent architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Ralph Adams Cram, fueling heated debates over the appropriate direction for architecture in the USA. Demonstrating the rich diversity of progressive American building design seen at the fair, Building a Century of Progress captures a the most important moment in American modernism.

Lisa D. Schrenk is assistant professor of architecture and art history at Norwich University and former education director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation.


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