The Architectural Legacy of World's Fairs

World's fairs have had an extraordinary impact on the modern world; from the shape of our cities and civic buildings to the houses we live in, from the department stores in which we shop to the foods we eat, and the way in which we imagine the future. Even our sense of fun in terms of travel and spectacle has been shaped by these universal expositions.

The list of architectural firsts includes building with prefabricated standardized parts, the Ferris wheel, moving sidewalks, alternating current, fluorescent lighting, gunnite and spray paint, the City Beautiful movement, safety glass and the safety elevator. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, world's fairs have been sites of innovation and invention, experimentation and trend setting. In a discussion of impact it bears noting that some six million people visited that first Great Exhibition of 1851, a number that seems small only when compared to the seventy three million who attended the Shanghai Expo in 2010. While we may live in the age of the virtual experience, world's fairs offer experience that is both very real and hyperreal at the same time.

Buildings have always been the most conspicuous exhibits at the world's fairs. After the success of the Great Exhibition, participating countries began to deliberately craft their exhibition buildings to embody a national identity easily digested by fairgoers. It seems extraordinary in today's world of virtual reality that the millions of visitors who came to Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 walked through full-scale replicas of a Norwegian stave church, an early American log cabin, a Japanese temple, and the convent of La Rabida in which Christopher Columbus had plotted his epic journey. Among the fair visitors was Frank Lloyd Wright who looked closely and carefully at the Turkish and the Japanese pavilions and borrowed freely from both. The visual excitement of the fairs was, and is, infectious; the buildings serve as textbook examples that guided and shaped ideas as well as forms for living.