World's Fairs by
World's Fairs have always motivated architects, artists, and designers to create the exceptional. The Eiffel Tower, the Crystal Palace, and the Seattle Space Needle are all products of World's Fairs. Yet many of these splendid structures have been woefully consigned to oblivion. This book highlights all the major exhibitions from London in 1851, Montreal in 1967, to Hannover in the year 2000, including their most important pavilions and other architectural creations, using original plans, design studies, period photographs, and ephemera such as programs and postcards.
Fair World: A History of World's Fairs and Expositions from London to Shanghai 1851-2010 by
The great World's Fairs and Expositions staged around the world since the mid-nineteenth century were among the largest and most dramatic cultural events ever staged. In both beneficial and detrimental ways they affected the lives of tens of millions of people. Fair World tells the story of these extraordinary exhibitions from the Victorian period to present day. Over 40 expositions from around the world are studied in detail in this beautifully illustrated book with previously unseen material, including original photographs and postcards from the earliest fairs.
World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions by
In the depths of the Great Depression, when America's future seemed bleak, nearly one hundred million people visited expositions celebrating the "century of progress." These fairs fired the national imagination and served as cultural icons on which Americans fixed their hopes for prosperity and power. World of Fairs continues Robert W. Rydell's unique cultural history—begun in his acclaimed All the World's a Fair—this time focusing on the interwar exhibitions. He shows how the ideas of a few—particularly artists, architects, and scientists—were broadcast to millions, proclaiming the arrival of modern America—a new empire of abundance build on old foundations of inequality. Rydell revisits several fairs, highlighting the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial, the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, the 1935-36 San Diego California Pacific Exposition, the 1936 Dallas Texas Centennial Exposition, the 1937 Cleveland Great Lakes and International Exposition, the 1939-40 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, and the 1958 Brussels Universal Exposition.
All the World's a Fair by
Robert W. Rydell contends that America's early world's fairs actually served to legitimate racial exploitation at home and the creation of an empire abroad. He looks in particular to the "ethnological" displays of nonwhites--set up by showmen but endorsed by prominent anthropologists--which lent scientific credibility to popular racial attitudes and helped build public support for domestic and foreign policies. Rydell's lively and thought-provoking study draws on archival records, newspaper and magazine articles, guidebooks, popular novels, and oral histories.
Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World's Fairs, 1851-1939 by
World's fairs were the most important vehicles for debuting advancements in modern living. These renowned international expositions were showcases for design on a national and global level, and they democratized design unlike any previous forum. Inventing the Modern World is lavishly illustrated with two hundred examples of woodwork, metalwork, ceramics, glass, jewelry, and textiles from private and public collections, primarily in America and Europe, many never before published or seen outside of their respective collections. Incredibly diverse but all representing the pinnacle of scientific and artistic achievements of their time, these extraordinary creations range from a monumental 1850s Gothic Revival cabinet to a streamlined glass chair from 1939, to masterpieces of jewelry and objects in glass, silver, and porcelain by Baccarat, Tiffany, Gorham, Cartier, S#65533;vres, and Herman Miller. This unprecedented volume, edited by Jason Busch and Catherine Futter, and with contributions by them and many other specialists and scholars, breaks new ground in the study of decorative arts.
The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940 by
In the American Southwest, no two events shaped modern Spanish heritage more profoundly than the San Diego Expositions of 1915-16 and 1935-36. Both San Diego fairs displayed a portrait of the Southwest and its peoples for the American public. The Panama-California Exposition of 1915-16 celebrated Southwestern pluralism and gave rise to future promotional events including the Long Beach Pacific Southwest Exposition of 1928, the Santa Fe Fiesta of the 1920s, and John Steven McGroarty's The Mission Play. The California-Pacific International Exposition of 1935-36 promoted the Pacific Slope and the consumer-oriented society in the making during the 1930s. These San Diego fairs distributed national images of southern California and the Southwest unsurpassed in the early twentieth century. By examining architecture and landscape, American Indian shows, civic pageants, tourist imagery, and the production of history for celebration and exhibition at each fair, Matthew Bokovoy peels back the rhetoric of romance and reveals the legacies of the San Diego World's Fairs to reimagine the Indian and Hispanic Southwest. In tracing how the two fairs reflected civic conflict over an invented San Diego culture, Bokovoy explains the emergence of a myth in which the city embraced and incorporated native peoples, Hispanics, and Anglo settlers to benefit its modern development.
Expo: International Expositions 1851-2010 by
International expositions, held around the globe since 1851, have helped to shape the modern world. Unsurpassed in their scale and confidence, they rank among the most spectacular, popular and important events ever held. Following the enormous success of London's Great Exhibition of 1851, expositions have been held in Europe, America and Asia and provided a stage on which the world has come together to display its achievements and ambitions.
Fair America: World's Fairs in the United States by
Since their inception with New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition in the mid-nineteenth century, world's fairs have introduced Americans to "exotic" pleasures such as belly dancing and the Ferris Wheel; pathbreaking technologies such as telephones and X rays; and futuristic architectural, landscaping, and transportation schemes. Billed by their promoters as "encyclopedias of civilization," the expositions impressed tens of millions of fairgoers with model environments and utopian visions.
Expanding Nationalisms at World'Fairs: Identity, Diversity, and Exchange, 1851-1915 by
Expanding Nationalisms at World's Fairs: Identity, Diversity, and Exchange, 1851-1915 introduces the subject of international exhibitions to art and design historians and awider audience as a resource for understanding the broad and varied political meaningsof design during a period of rapid industrialization, developing nationalism, imperialism,expanding trade and the emergence of a consumer society. Its chapters, written byboth established and emerging scholars, are global in scope, and demonstrate specificnetworks of communication and exchange among designers, manufacturers, marketsand nations on the modern world stage from the second half of the nineteenth centuryinto the beginning of the twentieth. Within the overarching theme of nationalism and internationalism as revealed atworld's fairs, the book's essays will engage a more complex understanding of ideasof competition and community in an age of emergent industrial capitalism, and willinvestigate the nuances, contradictions and marginalized voices that lie beneath thesurface of unity, progress, and global expansion.
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