From May through December of 1904, St. Louis, Missouri hosted the largest World's Fair ever devised, with thousands of buildings and concessions stretched across a carefully designed and meticulously organized park landscape. Most scholars regard the Fair primarily as a tableau for narratives of progress and for the rehearsal of imperial mastery. This paper argues that the Fair was also an elaborate argument for a civic design agenda, where the deployment of architecture, landscape architecture, and engineering would shape an orderly metropolitan future. To present this civic design agenda, Fair organizers drew upon a set of emerging urban practices to code a narrative of rational order, classical beauty, and progress through technology and industrial peace. Yet Fair designers expressed these meanings through an incoherent array of designs rendered in temporary, non-durable materials---a form of planned obsolescence. Ultimately, this incoherent and ephemeral design program would leave a mixed and elusive legacy both on the ground in St. Louis, and on the emerging urban professions in America.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Adnan Morshed;
(2015)
Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder
Article
Harper, Christine Froechtenigt;
(2004)
The Water Wizard: John F. Wixford and the Purification of the St. Louis Water Supply in 1904
Book
Rydell, Robert W.;
Schiavo, Laura Burd.;
Bennett, Robert;
(2010)
Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s
Article
Richard Greenwood;
(1998)
A Mechanic in the Garden: Landscape Design in Industrial Rhode Island
Book
Roberts, Sam;
(2013)
Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America
Article
Fisher, Linda A.;
(2005)
A Summer of Terror: Cholera in St. Louis, 1849
Article
Matthew Wilson;
(2019)
Labour, Utopia and Modern Design Theory: The Positivist Sociology of Frederic Harrison
Chapter
Berger, Michael L.;
(1992)
The car's impact on the American family
Book
Wachs, Martin;
Crawford, Margaret;
(1992)
The Car and the city: The automobile, the built environment, and daily urban life
Book
Lorenzo, Antonio Amado;
(2011)
Voiture Minimum: Le Corbusier and the Automobile
Book
Jean-Louis Cohen;
(2021)
Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture
Article
Lewis, Michael J.;
(2012)
William Birch and the Culture of Architecture in Philadelphia
Book
James Zarsadiaz;
(2022)
Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A.
Book
Schlichting, Kurt C.;
(2012)
Grand Central's Engineer: William J. Wilgus and the Planning of Modern Manhattan
Article
Liddiard, Robert;
Sims, David;
(2012)
A Piece of Coastal Crust: The Origins of a Second World War Defence Landscape at Walberswick, Suffolk
Chapter
Nathalie de Haan;
(2016)
Roman Domestic Architecture
Book
Kwinter, Sanford;
Davidson, Cynthia C.;
(2007)
Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture
Book
David Gissen;
(2014)
Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis
Article
David Espinosa-Espinosa;
A. César González-García;
Marco V. García-Quintela;
(2018)
Urban Planning and Ritual Action in Colonia Ulpia Traiana (Xanten, Germany): Understanding a Non-solar Orientation Pattern
Book
Treu, Martin;
(2012)
Signs, Streets, and Storefronts: A History of Architecture and Graphics along America's Commercial Corridors
Be the first to comment!