The World's Fair has returned to New York City in 1964 with Futurama undergoing a reboot. This time, modernist architecture charact...
The World's Fair has returned to New York City in 1964 with Futurama undergoing a reboot. This time, modernist architecture characterised the General Motors pavilion with Jetsons-like structures. The fair's theme was "Peace Through Understanding" and was dedicated to "Man's Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe." American companies dominated the exposition as exhibitors highlighted by a 12-story high, stainless-steel model of the earth called the Unisphere.
Although it was not sanctioned by the Bureau of International Expositions, the 1964 fair is best remembered as the showcase of modern American culture and technology to a global audience. It basically highlighted as a grand consumer show that served as a forerunner of today's popular consumer electronics exhibitions. It gave visitors their first interaction with mainframe computers, computer terminals with keyboards and CRT displays, Teletype machines, punch cards, and telephone modems in an era when computer equipment was kept in back offices away from the public, decades before the Internet and home computers were at everyone's disposal.
Many of the pavilions were built in a Mid-Century modern style that was heavily influenced by "Googie architecture". This was a futurist architectural style influenced by car culture, jet aircraft, the Space Age, and the Atomic Age, which were all on display at the fair. The pavilion architectures often expressed a new-found freedom of form enabled by modern building materials, such as reinforced concrete, fiberglass, plastic, tempered glass, and stainless steel.
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