Architectural experiments at Chicago’s World’s Fair tested the parameters of a new movement.

BY ERIC WILLS

Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago’s 1933-34 World’s Fair
By Lisa D. Schrenk
University of Minnesota Press,
368 pp., $39.95

Buy this book

In the midst of the Great Depression, along the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, a stunningly fanciful collection of buildings took shape. The colors bright, the materials newfangled, the designs ambitious, this was architecture intended to challenge and redefine the boundaries of an emerging movement called modernism. The occasion was the 1933-34 World's Fair, entitled A Century of Progress, and the buildings were a celebration not only of Chicago's centennial but also of man's increasing ability to master his environment.

But the reverie was fleeting. Almost all the structures were dismantled at fair's end-no Eiffel Tower left behind as a reminder of what was-and as a result, contends Lisa D. Schrenk in Building a Century of Progress, many scholars have overlooked the influence the spectacle had on 20th-century American architecture. An associate professor of architecture and art history at Norwich University in Vermont, Schrenk argues that the fair did have a significant impact on modernism, and on Frank Lloyd Wright in particular.

A Century of Progress was, without question, a popular success. More than 38 million people visited the fair, marveling at George Frederick Keck's House of Tomorrow, complete with an airplane hangar, anticipating the day when planes would be as ubiquitous as cars; the Railroad Hall of the Travel and Transport Building, whose exterior cables and towers supported the country's first major suspended roof; and the Skyride, double-decker rocket cars that offered a riveting ride between two 620-foot-tall towers.
So, too, was the press alive with comment. The harshest words were reserved for the exclusion of Frank Lloyd Wright from the fair's design commission. Wright had a reputation as a strong-minded individualist, someone who did not work well with others. He responded to the snub by calling the fair “a conspicuous example of modernism sprung up overnight, of superficiality, sham, [and] imitation.”

The architect submitted his own designs to the fair, including that of a skyscraper enclosed in a glasslike material-designs he thought were truly revolutionary. Though his buildings were never constructed, the controversy rejuvenated Wright, 66 years old when the fair opened, his career on the wane.

Perhaps the fair's greatest success, Schrenk argues, was its promotion of man-made building materials, such as Masonite, Formica, and Vinylite. Such materials made possible “disposable architecture,” an idea championed by Daniel Burnham Jr., a Chicago architect and the fair's secretary. He envisioned buying a house the way a person bought “a suit of clothes, with the intention of discarding it and buying another as soon as it grew shabby and out of date.”

The disposable movement came with its share of lamentable consequences, as Schrenk reminds us: the harmful environmental effects of disposing demolished buildings, for example, or the deterioration of cheaply built, mass-produced suburbs and the subsequent rise of exurbs that displaced farmland.

Many of us are keenly aware of modernism's criticisms, of the disdain from some quarters for certain soulless creations. But so, too, did the movement have its shining exemplars, and A Century of Progress may have set the tone. The concrete thin-shell roof from the fair's Brook Hill Farm Dairy, for instance, helped inspire Eero Saarinen's magnificently birdlike TWA Terminal in New York.
With so many modernist buildings threatened today, Schrenk's insight into the spirit and influence of the fair, the belief in progress and rejection of classical forms, reminds us why preserving these structures is so important. As one fairgoer, a Mrs. Frederick Foley from St. Paul, said, “I think it's all quite beautiful, particularly at night.”

Read more excerpts from our November/December 2007 online, look for Preservation on newsstands, e-mail us to purchase a copy, or subscribe to the magazine.