Inside An Icon

The centerpieces of the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York were the Trylon and Perisphere. There was – as there always is with these fairs – a lot of gibberish in the explanation of what they were and what they were meant to represent, but it didn’t matter, as they were so visually striking that they remain the symbol of the fair 80 years later.

There were more or less sculpture rather than proper buildings. The Trylon was a slender, triangular-plan, 610-foot high tower, which would have made it roughly the twentieth-tallest building in the world at the time if it were occupied or occupiable, which it was not. The Perisphere was a 180-foot diameter sphere which housed a diorama; people would take a very long escalator up to see the sights inside the sphere and then walk down a very long helical ramp back to grade. They were meant to be temporary and so were demolished after the fair, which was arguably a mistake. Flushing Meadows Park still has the Unisphere, a skeletal globe from the 1964-1965 World’s Fair, which in my opinion is a pale shadow of the earlier sculpture.

Here’s an aerial view of the fair itself, from October 1939:

The only building from the fair still standing is the New York City Building, which is the low rectangular dark-roofed building to the right of the Perisphere. The Trylon is a little hard to pick out in this view because the side facing us is in shadow, but it’s there, just to the left of the sphere. The real long-term contribution of the fair was the park itself, which had been a garbage dump in a swamp before the fair was built. But here’s the picture I really like, the fair grounds under construction in September 1938:

Let’s zoom in on the Trylon and Perisphere:

These were steel-framed buildings, and this shot caught them with the framing complete and the skins not yet started. If you look at the right half of the sphere, you can see straight through to the white building beyond. There is a long-standing belief among architects that reinforced concrete gives you the ability to create any curve you want while steel forces you into rectilinear structures. I think seeing a sphere built out of straight-line pieces of steel is a pretty good counter-argument to that. The tower, skinless, looks very much like a radio antenna or tower to carry electric lines, just at a bigger scale, but the sphere doesn’t look much like anything we commonly see. Geodesic domes had already been built by then (although not under that name), but they traditionally have been based on triangular facets rather than the “squares” we see here. Since Frank Gehry made blobs popular with Guggenheim Bilbao, there have been a series of free-form shapes made with steel framing, but they all relied on 3D computer modeling. Here in New York, the original Hayden Planetarium, opened in 1935 and replaced starting in 1997, had a concrete dome that was among the first (if not the first) in the US. So the sphere structure is looking like it might have been nearly unique, certainly when it was built. There is a long history of unique engineering feats at world’s fairs, including the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and the Ferris Wheel in 1893.

I occasionally daydream about projects I’d like to have. Sprucing up the Trylon and Perishpere for their 80th, or 90th, or 100th anniversary is a nice dream that unfortunately can’t happen.