During the 1939 World's Fair, Futurama was the showcase future city wherein the world of tomorrow had General Motors highway and ev...
During the 1939 World's Fair, Futurama was the showcase future city wherein the world of tomorrow had General Motors highway and everyone was comfortable with the future technology. The exhibit covered more than 35,000 square feet with a large scale model of the city itself composed of 500,000 buildings and houses, countless trees and over 50,000 vehicles (some of which where in motion!).
Futurama is a large-scale model representing almost every type of terrain in America and illustrating how a motorway system may be laid down over the entire country – across mountains, over rivers and lakes, through cities and past towns – never deviating from a direct course and always adhering to the four basic principles of highway design: safety, comfort, speed and economy.
The popularity of the Futurama exhibit fit closely with the fair’s overall theme “The World of Tomorrow” not just in its emphasis on the future, but also in its redesign of the American landscape. The highway system was supported within a one-acre animated model of a projected America containing more than five hundred thousand individually designed buildings, a million trees of thirteen different species, and approximately fifty thousand motorcars, ten thousand of which traveled along a fourteen-lane multi speed interstate highway.
It prophesied an American utopia regulated by an assortment of cutting-edge technologies: remote-controlled multi lane highways, power plants, farms for artificially produced crops, rooftop platforms for individual flying machines and various gadgets, all intended to create an ideal built environment and ultimately to reform society.
As shown on this video:
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