Hall. The theme center emerged after more than one thousand sketches
and models, and despite its new forms, the design was not without
precedents, including Bauhaus and constructivist references.
Each hour more than eight thousand spectators entered the
Perisphere through the Trylon, a triangular obelisk 610 feet high, larger
than the Washington Monument, ascending on the two largest escalators
ever built to a 65 -foot-high bridge that led directly into this visionary
extravaganza. Six minutes later they would exit down the Helicline, an
18 -foot-wide ramp with a stainless steel underbelly. Ironically, this futuristic
trademark was built with common steel and clothed in the imperfect
materials of the day, including gypsum board that would flake and crack,
and required continual maintenance. Even Harrison commented that “in
many ways, it was more beautiful when it was just steel.”
Selling the public on modernity, and more importantly on coming
to see it incarnate in Flushing Meadow, was a task as monumental as
building the Fair itself. No sales pitch was as persuasive as the one extolled
by the view from the Perisphere as visitors left Democracity.That first
elevated view of the fairscape was a stunning advertisement for the
rightness of the future—or so the planners hoped. Laid before Mr. and
Mrs. Average American in all its colorful splendor was the World of
Tomorrow today. Equivalent to more than 370 city blocks, it included more
than two-hundred modern and moderne buildings curiously laid out
according to a nineteenth-century beaux-arts rond-pointsystem of radiating
streets and fanlike segments extending like spokes from a central hub.
The Fair vividly represented and profoundly utilized the new,
distinctly American field of industrial design. Industrial designers were
industry’s predominant form-givers, whose “faith was... based on moral
conviction,” wrote historian Francis V. O’Connor, “that the public good was
to be attained by the universal adoption of a certain rightness of form in all
matters from the design of cities to the styling of pencil sharpeners.” The
lighting stanchions, monumental fixtures, and most of the kinetic exhibits
were imaginatively designed by these gifted proponents of the new
streamline aesthetic. Among them were Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin
Teague (who was an original member of the design board), Henry
Dreyfuss, Donald Desky, Egmond Arens, Russell Wright, Gilbert Rohde,
and Norman Bel Geddes.
Loewy, who before establishing himself as an industrial designer
was a commercial artist following the dominant moderne style, conceived of
the Chrysler Corporation and Transportation exhibits; Teague, who was
also a skilled but pedestrian commercial artist, designed seven exhibits
including those for Kodak, U.S. Steel, Consolidated Edison, DuPont,
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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