Their century was already old enough to have seen a world war, a pandemic and a worldwide depression, but young enough to foster hopes of a brighter future through democracy, industry and technology. So, in the worst year of the worst depression in living memory, the people of Chicago put on a World's Fair called the Century of Progress. Celebrating the first 100 years of their metropolis, the Fair ran from May 27 to November 12, 1933 and May 26 to October 31, 1934. The original plan had been to run the Fair for only a year, but its great popularity prompted the organizers to extend the run for another year. The NAACP and African American legislators won rules prohibiting racial discrimination at the Fair, in return for extending the run. The promise of the Fair was that despite the privations of the Great Depression, science and technology would build a bright future that was just around the corner...
The era of streamlined trains began with the Chicago Fair, including a record run from Denver to Chicago by the Burlington Zephyr and the exhibit of the Union Pacific's aerodynamic M-10000. The Travel and Transport Building shown beyond the trains was designed by Bennet, Burnham and Holabird, and featured the first catenary, cable-supported roof structure in the United States. Airborne visitors included a two-hour appearance over Lake Michigan by the Graf Zeppelin, and a trans-Atlantic airplane flight from Italy by Italo Balbo which stopped on the east coast and continued to the Century of Progress.
Inventor and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller demonstrated his Dymaxion* car. One of the few cars ever designed with a rear engine and front-wheel drive, it exhibited strange handling characteristics resulting from the extreme rearward weight bias, the driven front wheels and the single rear wheel, the only wheel that steered. An accident on Lake Shore Drive prompted Fuller to require special instruction for anyone seeking to drive the Dymaxions.
Completed for the second year of the exhibit, architect George Fred Keck's Crystal House was perhaps the most visionary building at the Century of Progress. Anticipating the exoskeletons of buildings like the Pompidou Center in Paris which appeared 4 decades later, the steel-structured, transparent cube posited a house made largely of prefabricated components. In this night-time shot, a Dymaxion prototype slumbers in the translucent garage...
The year before, Keck had stunned the crowds with his House of Tomorrow, a largely transparent 12-sided polygon with two stories of living space atop a garage and utility level that offered power-operated garage doors. The passive solar house featured the first General Electric dishwasher.
Sitting in the drive of the House of Tomorrow in these two photos is the Pierce Silver Arrow, which must have seemed like a visitor from another time to fairgoers. Designed by Phil Wright and built in record time for the New York Auto Show, the V12-powered sedan explored themes that wouldn't show up on any American production cars until the second half of the next decade. These themes included front fenders flowing into the passenger cabin, allowing more seating width and eliminating running boards. Windshield and backlight are "V"-shaped in plan, echoing the plan shape of the radiator, one of the few traditional references on this car. The spare tire is concealed behind a panel in the front fender, while the headlights, which Pierce Arrow had integrated with fenders on its earlier cars, here are housed in a streamlined tube that runs all the way to the contrasting color molding that surrounds the windows. Five of these SIlver Arrow concept cars would be built, and offered to the public at $10,000 apiece.
Henry Ford was initially opposed to building an exhibit when planning for the Century of Progress began in 1928. He may have had other things on his mind, having launched the Model A the previous year. Positive publicity attracted by General Motors plans to exhibit an automobile assembly line eventually caused him to grudgingly endorse an exhibit. Architect Albert Kahn, creator of modern Detroit manufacturing plants, designed the giant Ford exhibit hall with its main rotunda echoing the theme of a gear wheel. Two dozen 5000 watt projectors hurled pillars of light into the night sky. Inside the rotunda, 67 vehicles summarized the history of wheeled vehicles, beginning with an Egyptian chariot. Contrary to Henry's predictions, Ford's exhibit was the most popular of the two dozen companies represented at the Fair. Building exteriors were colorful, in contrast to the White City of the 1893 Chicago Fair, and led to the Century of Progress being called the Rainbow City.
John Tjaarda, designer of the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr and father of Tom Tjaarda*, designer of the Fiat 124 Spider and Ford Fiesta, produced a radical design for the Briggs Body Company's Dream Car. Featuring unitized body construction, a rear-mounted Ford V8, and an automatic transmission, the car paralleled the Czech Tatra*, a rear-engined V8 developed around the same time. Ford applied early use of consumer surveys when it exhibited this car as a possible future Lincoln at the Fair, and concluded that American drivers wanted streamlining, but not rear engines, and not the steeply sloping nose of the Dream Car. What they got in 1936 was Tjaarda's design for the Lincoln Zephyr, which kept the streamlining but moved the engine, now a V12, to the front.
General Motors took a more conservative approach with their Cadillac V16 coupe, which nevertheless predicted GM's design direction for the second half of the decade. Fleetwood would build six more of these close-coupled coupes on the V16 chassis.
Nash Kelvinator, headquartered in Kenosha, Wisconsin, sent a fleet of its newest cars to outfit a display of a new idea for crowded cities, the elevator-equipped garage. The glass-walled elevator tower could bring up new vehicles for display from subterranean storage...
Real estate development had begun to change the environment of what had been quiet wilderness in Florida during the boom of the Twenties, so the Florida House was one of the dozen modern prototype houses on display. The design, by architect Robert Law Weed, featured generous glazing, flat roofs and broad terraces, and undoubtedly encouraged dreams of tropical escape by Chicagoans familiar with icy, snowbound winters...
Another kind of escapism was sponsored by the Indiana firm of Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg. The Duesenberg SJ Twenty Grand Torpedo Sedan was designed by Gordon Buehrig and built by Rollston specially for the fair. It was named after its price, which would have bought nearly four dozen of the base model Ford V8s introduced the previous year. Buehrig's design for the bid Duesy looks back to the Roaring Twenties with emphasis on separate elements like the sweeping, open fenders, external exhausts, side-mounted spare tires, and free-standing headlights. These elements make a striking contrast with the Pierce Silver Arrow, where the front fenders flow directly into the doors, enclosing the headlights and hiding the side-mounted spares. Only the Twenty Grand's low-roofed cabin, with its sloping "V" windshield and notchback rear, seems to belong to the Thirties. Buehrig would issue his answer, and A-C-D's, to the fair's concept cars with his groundbreaking design for the Cord 810*, which appeared in November 1935 and went into series production the next year.
Architect Walter Schuler designed the Wieboldt-Rostone House to showcase a new building material called Rostone, composed of limestone waste, shale and alkaline earth. The resulting precast panels were bolted to a steel frame. The massing, sheer surfaces, and reliance on window shapes for decoration reflects Art Moderne influence*. The exterior panels deteriorated by the 1950s, and the house was re-surfaced in another precast material. A dozen buildings, including the Wieboldt-Rostone House, the House of Tomorrow and three others from the Homes of Tomorrow exhibit, were purchased by a developer and moved to Beverly Shores in Indiana after the exhibit closed.
This move wasn't possible for the house designed by Chicago architect Andrew Nicholas Rebori for the Brick Manufacturers Association. The forms Rebori created were compact, full of spatial intrigue, and more suited to an urban environment than the sprawling Florida house. Rebori exploited the potential of brick in the articulated surface treatments at the base, the porthole window and around the cantilevered balconies, and used sharply delineated mass to cast sharp shadows, as at the stairway which passed under a square arch on its way to a rooftop terrace...
Packard's Model 1106 Sport Coupe was voted Best of Show among the new car designs. It was one of two designs created on Packard's short-wheelbase V12-powered chassis by Le Baron. The open Runabout Speedster model, which shared the pontoon fenders connected by curved running boards (these were deleted on at least one), was actually built by Le Baron, while the teardrop-windowed coupe shown was built at the Packard factory in Detroit. No more than four Sport Coupes were made, joining no more than half a dozen Speedsters.
By contrast, assembly-line production techniques were envisioned by architect Robert Smith Jr. of Cleveland for the Armco-Ferro house, the only surviving Homes of Tomorrow exhibit which actually met the criteria established by the Fair Committee, which were for a design which could be mass-produced and sold at a price affordable to families of modest means. Seen against the backdrop of our current housing shortage, the Armco-Ferro is intriguing. It was bolted together from enameled, insulated steel panels with corrugations to add stiffness, forming structure and enclosure at once. The Armco-Ferro might have provided a new product for idled automobile factories during the depths of the Great Depression, and thus put enough people to work that they could afford to buy one. Instead, it inspired the Lustron homes for a short period during the housing shortage after World War II. These houses, along with a series of gas stations built by Sunoco, also featured enameled steel panels...
In addition to all the serious efforts to advance innovation in design and engineering at the Century of Progress, there was also plenty of show business. Studebaker's team traveled from South Bend, Indiana to assemble this giant model of the 1934 Studebaker* Land Cruiser for the fair, despite the fact that the company had gone bankrupt a mere two months before it opened. Concealed in the base of the Land Cruiser display was an 80-seat auditorium. The company was reorganized by a new management team, which discontinued the entry-level Rockne line and sold Pierce-Arrow, which had merged with Studebaker in 1928. While this move erased Studebaker's bragging rights to the Pierce Silver Arrow at the House of Tomorrow, it allowed the company to move into the late Thirties with new designs by Raymond Loewy. By the end of the that decade, war dashed the hope of universal progress through democracy and technology expressed at the Century of Progress, and the ingenuity and resourcefulness that built the fair (and the New York World's Fair* in 1939-40) was called upon to build thousands of tanks, planes and ships instead of affordable cars and houses. Studebaker, Packard, GM and Ford would all suspend car production for more urgent business of the war that, instead of the brighter world promised by the Fair, was around the corner and just down the road from the Rainbow City...
*Footnote: Fuller's Dymaxion is detailed in these posts in "Architect-Designed Cars Part 1" from 5-7-17. We presented a survey of prefabricated house designs exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art in our post entitled "Mobile vs. Prefab" on 8/3/17. Tom Tjaarda's designs were given a retrospective in "Architect-Designed Cars Part 4" on 5/11/20. Tatra automobiles have been featured once in "A Word About VW" (11/27/15) and pictured on two other occasions: "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile" (7/30/17) and "Roadside Attraction: Rolling Sculpture" (12/31/16). A Cadillac V16 bodied by Pinin Farina is featured with later Caddies in "Jets vs. Sharks: Pinin Farina Cadillacs" in the Archives for 5/15/16. The Cord 810, Studebakers and other cars built in Indiana are surveyed in "Looking Back: When Indy Was Indie" from 9/1/15. And we featured the Phantom Corsair, a car based on that Cord 's drivetrain and exhibited at the New York World's Fair in 1939, in "Phantom Corsair: Shadows Over Tomorrowland", posted July 17, 2016.
*Postscript: One reader e-mailed to say the Wieboldt-Rostone House looked like a mausoleum, and this made a connection with a subconscious impression that I hadn't been able to name. The style of the house, with its sparse decoration, geometric windows, and absence of humor, could easily have served as a template for many of the mausoleums that were built in the Chicago suburbs after World War II.
*Postscript: One reader e-mailed to say the Wieboldt-Rostone House looked like a mausoleum, and this made a connection with a subconscious impression that I hadn't been able to name. The style of the house, with its sparse decoration, geometric windows, and absence of humor, could easily have served as a template for many of the mausoleums that were built in the Chicago suburbs after World War II.
Photo Credits
Top: architecture.org
2nd: Encyclopedia of Chicago
3rd & 4th: Hedrich Blessing Collection, from Chicago History Museum
5th: pinterest.com
6th: chicagology.com
7th: motorcities.org
8th: General Motors
9th: Kaufmann-Fabry Agency, from Chicago History Museum
10th: Nash Kelvinator, from theoldmotor.com
11th: archiveofaffinities.tumblr.com
12th: customcarchronicle.com
13th: visitindiana.com
14th: Packard Motor Company, from theoldmotor.com
15th: indianalandmarks.org
Bottom: motorcities.org
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