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For General Electric, for example, architects turned a huge dome inside out, revealing its supporting lining of intersticed steel so that its overall look suggests tripes à la mode de G.E. IBM, in a glorious defiance of sanity, has set what appears to be a 50-ton egg on a nest of plastic in the tops of metal trees. Johnson's Wax has suspended a huge gold clam over a blue pool inside six slender white pylons that rise high and flare into unearthly petals. Eastman Kodak has built a plaza under an undulating roof of thin-shell concrete that plays hide-and-seek with geometry, now duncing up into conical pinnacles, now forming a hole so that real and artificial rains can pour through onto Sculptor Harry Bertoia's metal flowers below. People can walk up and down dale on the roof. Young boys go there and control the rains by pinching their fingers over dozens of brass nozzles, spraying all the girls below.
The eye stops appreciatively on the massive, floating box-and-cloister of Charles Luckman's United States pavilion, and disapprovingly on Bell Telephone's flying wing, which looks more like a big hunk of sedimentary rock than an airfoil. The three-acre building that houses General Motors' Futurama ends in one gigantic tail fin, which may be good as advertising but is ridiculous as architecture. The boldest structure at the fair is Architect Philip Johnson's New York State pavilion: 16 tremendous columns support an elliptical roof of colored plastics that is larger than a football field.
Beware Behemoths. Beyond architecture, one other characteristic of the fair stands out from above, and before descending to join the masses the fairgoer might do well to contemplate it. There are sometimes more than 200,000 people down there and half of them seem to be standing in lines. People have waited more than 2½ hours to get into Ford, two for General Motors, one for General Electric. There is obviously a number of minutes beyond which a show is not worth waiting for. The fair is full of fine things that demand no queuing at all.
Ford's Magic Skyway is worth a wait of perhaps 30 minutes, on a cool day. But lines mass there as if the company were giving away Fords. The superb showmanship of putting people in new automobiles and driving them past an assemblage of plastic reptiles and plastic cavemen by Walt Disney is more than the contemporary world is able to resist. The prehistoric pageant lasts only twelve minutes. The car radio announces: "This is the world that was," and the rider swerves past little dinosaur eggs hatching before his very eyes, while off to the left a two-story Tyrannosaurus rex is busily killing a tough stegosaurus. A caveman with Cro-Magnon bravado appears, confronting an 800-lb. bear. A pert little cavewoman turns meat on a spit, while her cave-baby warms his bottom beside her. Cavedaddy turns out to be the first tycoon. He invents the wheel.