Ephemerality, modernity, and progress, architectural light and color at Chicago's 'A Century of Progress International Exposition, 1933--1934' (Illinois)

Designed as an emblem of up-to-the-minute progress by some of America's most highly regarded architects, Chicago's 1933--34 exposition has nevertheless been widely derided as misbegotten modernism, greatly inferior to concurrent European work. Most contemporaneous and post-World War 11 architectural historians perceived Chicago's fair architecture inadequately representative of modernity's technological foundations. It had no "ostentatiously" revealed construction, large glass areas evoking interpenetrating space, nor breathtakingly-scaled structures comparable to Eiffel's 1889 tower. Even worse, the 1933--34 fair pavilions were defined by theatrical, kinetic, polychromatic, electric light, and entire environments painted with saturated colors, integrating large-scale, heraldic figural sculpture. For many historians those attributes simply constituted packaging---too evocative of impure, vulgar, and ephemeral advertising art or now-irrelevant traditional architectural ornament.; One prime intention of my dissertation is to discuss how electric light was perceived as a vivifying incarnation of electricity---a primal force basic to civilization's progress---and emblematic of an incessantly changing modern world. My work reveals that ephemeral qualities of polychromatic electric light and environmental color were also acutely emblematic of the changes wrought by a burgeoning democracy resulting from America's worldwide industrial pre-eminence and unprecedentedly expanding---and increasingly syncretic---consumer culture. For certain influential social commentators that situation was demonstrative of America as the most salient locus of progress---the foundation concept of modernity---yet their message remained unheeded by most architectural historians. As the most industrialized, commercialized, and electrically lighted country in the world, a characteristically American space was evoked at the fair. Light, color, and sculpture created an exotic and emotionally potent aura that involved fair-goers in a mythopeic environment. There, "new pioneers"---workers, scientists, industrialists, and businessmen---explored new boundaries, like frontiersmen of the past, advancing American life. A Century of Progress architects exemplified an American modernism distinct from European avant-garde architecture and distinct from European existence. Inasmuch as that aspect has not been studied in detail, my dissertation demonstrates that the so-called vulgar, commercial, and ornamented architecture of the 1933 fair, defined by kinetic colored light and vividly painted surfaces were essential elements of a new American modernism, more important than construction itself and well beyond dogmatic constraints of contemporaneous modernist architectural historians.