The Century of Progress International Exposition, held in Chicago in 1933–34, played
a pivotal yet often underrecognized role in the development and acceptance of modern
architecture. The event was the largest architectural program realized in the United States
during the depths of the Great Depression. It attracted the attention of influential
architects and designers as well as building materials manufacturers and design critics.
The innovative exhibition pavilions introduced more than 38 million fair visitors to thencurrent
progressive ideas in modern architecture. Millions more became acquainted with
the modern exposition designs through secondary sources, including a wide range of
articles, newsreels, and souvenirs.
In 1928 a not-for-profit corporation was chartered to organize a world’s fair to
celebrate the centennial anniversary of the founding of Chicago. The fair organizers
quickly realized that this theme was too narrow to attract enough international or even
national interest to guarantee a successful event. Additionally, the recent financial fiasco
of the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial International Exposition made it apparent that
relying on a structure and character common to past expositions would result in a
financial and cultural catastrophe. To ensure the success of the Chicago exposition, the
organizers knew that they had to broaden the scope of the fair and present an event that
would be perceived by critics and the public as appropriate to modern times.
Consequently, the organizers adopted a more inclusive, forward-looking theme: the
impact of scientific development on the betterment of humanity.
The members of the architectural commission for the exposition—Paul Philippe Cret,
Raymond Hood, John Holabird, Edward Bennett, Hurbert Burnham, Arthur Brown,
Harvey Wiley Corbett, and Ralph Walker—knew that their designs had to reflect the
modern theme of the fair. The struggle of these notable, Beaux-Arts-trained architects to
achieve this through coming to terms with recent developments in their field, as well as
the changing conditions of modern life, is clearly evident in the preliminary schemes for
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the event. Early site plans consisted of neoclassical buildings laid out following a
symmetrical parti that emphasized a strong sense of axiality. The long and narrow exposition
site, financial limitations resulting from the Great Depression, the lack of a rigid building
code, and the ephemeral nature of the event all served as sources of inspiration and
limitation for the committee members in their efforts to create a modern world’s fair. The
final result was an asymmetrical layout of inexpensive yet innovative buildings of
prefabricated materials.
The fairgrounds covered three and a half miles of new manmade land along the shore
of Lake Michigan directly south of the Loop. Recently completed neoclassical buildings,
including the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, and Soldier Field,
framed the north end of the site. These historically derived buildings provided a
monochromatic backdrop, reminiscent of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893,
which con trasted sharply with the colorful, modern exhibition pavilions that covered the
fairgrounds.
Architects produced a wide range of building designs for the Century of Progress
Exposition. These included large exhibition halls, futuristic model houses, progressive
foreign pavilions, and historic and ethnic entertainment venues. Designs of the major
pavilions ranged from the “ultramodern” yellow and blue Administration Building
(Bennett, Burnham, and Holabird), with its silver, undulating entrance and factory
fenestration, to the flat, windowless, streamlined Sears Roebuck Building (Nimmons,
Carr, and Wright). Several of the main pavilions, including the Hall of Science (Cret),
which served as the centerpiece of the fair, and the Electrical Building (Hood), were
decorated with panels of bas-relief sculpture containing stylized, allegorical figures
representing the sciences. Many other buildings, however, including most of the
corporate pavilions, contained little or no applied ornament, except letters spelling out the
company’s name across their facades. Pavilions such as the Time and Fortune Building
(Nicolai and Faro) and the Havoline Thermometer Tower (Alfonso Iannelli and Charles
Pope) strove for more immediate corporate recognition by including giant reproductions
of their products or related items as part of their building’s design. Several other
companies commissioned pavilions constructed out of their own new products. For
example, the Owens-Illinois Glass Corporation Pavilion (Elroy Ruiz) con-sisted of a
tower and two wings built out of glass bricks. A comprehensive color scheme, created by
Joseph Urban, that articulated the individual exterior planes of the major buildings
through the use of vivid hues, unified the diverse fair pavilions. At night, the use of
dramatic lighting effects created a magnificent spectacle. The fair presented the largest
quantity of electric lighting emitted at a single event up to that time and featured the first
major application of neon in architectural lighting.
Millions of attendees stood in long lines to tour full-scale, modern houses on display
in the Home and Industrial Arts Exhibit. For many visitors, the Chicago fair provided
their first exposure to modern residential design. Most of the model houses were
sponsored by building-material manufacturers. They promoted new construction
materials, such as porcelain enamel panels or Rostone (a synthetic stone product), or
demonstrated new uses for traditional building materials, such as “precast” brick walls.
Other houses, including the Tropical House, focused less on materials and more on
demonstrating new ideas in modern living. The House of Tomorrow, designed by George
Frederick Keck, generated the greatest amount of attention. Keck designed his 12-sided
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glass residence to appear as futuristic as possible in hopes of making the aesthetics of
modern architecture more familiar and thus more acceptable to the average American
home buyer.
Because of poor economic conditions around the world, only a few nations
constructed their own pavilions at the exposition. Most countries chose
instead to promote themselves through national displays located in the
general exhibition buildings. Notable exceptions included Sweden,
Czechoslovakia, and Italy, which built large, modern pavilions. The Italian
Pavilion (Mario De Renzi, Antonio Valent, and Adalberto Libera)
consisted of an assemblage of dynamic forms that clearly expressed the
major political goal of the displays inside: to increase support for Fascism
among the American public. The basic composition of the building
consisted of easily recognizable symbols of Italy’s recent
Century of Progress Exposition,
Chicago World’s Fair (1933)
transportation achievements, including a thin, wing-shaped, horizontal canopy that
hovered above the central entrance, and current political ideology, highlighted by an 80-
foot-high steel-and-prismatic-glass tower in the shape of a fas cio littorio.
Not all buildings were aesthetically modern. Event organizers wished to celebrate
earlier cultural developments to provide a context from which visitors could measure
current and future advances. Architecturally, the past was represented by recreations of
historic structures, such as Chicago’s Fort Dearborn and the Maya Nunnery of Uxmal;
ethnic settings for entertainment, such as the Belgium Village and the Streets of Paris;
and a variety of other “midway” attractions. Although historical in formal characteristics,
these buildings were constructed using modern materials.
The fair designers relied heavily on the use of new building materials to minimize
construction costs. The exteriors of most of the pavilions consisted of wall panels
produced from a variety of factory-made materials, including asbestos cement wallboard,
precast gypsum board, plywood, metal siding, and laminated insulation board. In addition
to aesthetics and cost, the factors involved in selecting a particular prefabricated material
included strength and durability, weatherproofness, moisture resistance, relative
resistance to combustion, lightness of weight, ease of securing to framework, and
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availability. A new type of Sheetrock, suitable for exterior use on temporary buildings,
was the favored wall surface material for the large exhibition pavilions.
Factory-made panels were ideally suited to two major concepts in building
construction gaining favor among progressive designers in the early 1930s: prefabrication
and disposable architecture. Architects designing buildings for the exposition explored
systematic construction techniques in their attempt to keep construction costs down to an
affordable level despite sharp increases in labor and material costs and a significant
decrease in available funds as a result of the poor economy. Workers assembled various
types of standardized wall panels to steel framing in modern assembly-line fashion.
Screwing or bolting the panels of the pavilions together provided for easy disassembly
and salvaging of the building parts after the close of the exposition. This led proponents
of “disposable architecture” to highlight the Chicago fair in American architectural
journal discussions on the benefits of short-lived buildings.
The designers also looked toward new structural ideas for inspiration in the creation of
modern yet novel-looking pavilions. Two forms of thin membrane roofing highlighted
structural advances at the event. The first, used in the rotunda of the steel Travel and
Transport Building (Bennett, Burnham, and Holabird), was the first major catenary roof
constructed in the United States. The massive structure consisted of a drum with support
cables traveling from the roof upward to the tops of 12 tall columns and then downward
to anchors at the outer edge of a broader, lower level of the building. The Brook Hill
Dairy (Richard Phillipp and Anton Tedesko), built for the second fair season in 1934,
also demonstrated an advancement in roofing design. The building’s five contiguous
elliptical barrel vaults presented the first use of a multi-vaulted concrete-shell roof and
probably the first applications of the Zeiss-Dywidag process for reinforced thin-shell
vaulting in the United States. A third, less apparent structural development was an
innovative system of low-cost pile footings. This proved more suitable than spread
footings for the unstable conditions of the recently created land of the fairgrounds.
The exposition also provided an opportunity for designers to explore and promote
innovative architectural ideas through unbuilt designs for the event. Frank Lloyd Wright,
whose inability to work cooperatively with other architects kept him off the design
commission, clearly realized the importance of the event in the development of American
architecture. With encouragement from Lewis Mumford and other architectural critics, he
presented three schemes for the fair at a meeting of the American Union of Decorative
Artists and Craftsmen held in New York in February 1931. These conceptual designs
explored housing the entire exposition in a skyscraper, under a massive tent structure, and
on barges floating out on Lake Michigan. Industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, who
briefly served as a design consultant to the architectural commission, also promoted
innovative ideas, including the concept of streamlining, through producing a series of
unrealized, experimental theater and restaurant pavilions. Many of these designs,
including a rotating aerial restaurant, were featured in his influential 1932 treatise Horizons.
In contrast to the first Chicago world’s fair, which helped usher in a massive wave of
neoclassical buildings throughout the United States, the Century of Progress Exposition
played a less discernible role in the development of modern American architecture
despite its tremendous public success. Although the exposition encouraged a greater
acceptance of nonhistorical forms, few architects looked to the fair as a source of
aesthetic inspiration for their modern building designs. Reasons for this ranged from the
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vast difference in functional needs between the temporary exposition halls and more
permanent architecture to the drastic reduction in all construction starts in the 1930s. Also
influential were the strong reactions of architectural critics to Wright’s omission from the
commission and, later, to the formal qualities of designs produced for the event. Although
the direct aesthetic impact of the exposition on everyday architecture was limited, the
designs did influence the formal qualities of buildings with similar functional needs,
particularly the designs of later exposition pavilions. The Chicago fair’s most significant
contributions to the development of American architecture lay instead in the introduction
and promotion of innovative building products and processes adaptable to both
progressive and traditional designs.
