Chicago World's Fair, 1893.

1. Who Said the World's Fair?
In 1893 at the Chicago World's Fair, the future was light. Night was banished and happy citizens of the future, living and working in their neo-classical homes and buildings were assured that they ever after would be bathed in light.

By day, the built environment showed itself as a blinding white, the landscape a series of ornate temples of commerce and industry. One pair of eyes in Chicago had already seen the future and it was definitely not this. The young architect Louis Sullivan, designer of the first skyscrapers, had a different cityscape in mind and said the fair had set the development of architecture back 50 years.

The makers of the Chicago fair got the light part right, but missed the rest badly.

Airplanes, radio, the discovery of distant galaxies and other novelties came along in short order as the 20th century unfolded. The future got a lot bigger, and soon enough Flash Gordon was rocketing about, spreading Euro-American Enlightenment among the stars. Astounding science-fiction became both a literary genre and the name of a magazine which every month showed readers the future was even bigger than they had thought it was last month.

Fifty years after Chicago, New York had a go at the future in the 1939 World's Fair. The New Yorkers, with a little encouragement from General Motors, saw a future of easy, swift transportation based on gleaming strips of concrete laid through the American wilderness.

Futurama, 1939 World's Fair.

They saw television coming, as well as robots, and even gave a small hint of a computerized world.

Nimatron & pal (1939).

What's missing from these 1939 pictures? The reality that we live today: The commercial sprawl generated by those lovely ribbons of concrete, not to mention the life-and-death-boxes called houses that sprouted behind the sprawl.

Future Tensed, page 2

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