(2 of 4)
Moses' fair has no architectural unity, and this fact may be its esthetic salvation. Architects and city planners screamed "hodgepodge" when Moses first revealed that it was going to be every designer for himself in 1964. But the resulting potpourri of styles, materials and shapes provides a laboratory for architectural experimenters who can afford to test new and nutty ideas on temporary structures—ideas which may give permanent builders in the U.S. something to think about. Buildings range in style from Architect Ira Kessler's Doric-columned Hall of Free Enterprise, through the gold and vermilion dragon's lair of the Hong Kong pavilion dreamed up by Painter Dong Kingman, and the fortresslike stone Japanese pavilion embellished by Sculptor Masayuki Nagare, to one of Eero Saarinen's last works, the egg-shaped IBM pavilion, which nests above steel treetops, hauls 500 spectators at a time up into its ovoid interior on a sloping "people wall" to view a nine-screen movie about computers.
Theme symbol of the Fair is the Unisphere, a stainless-steel skeleton of the earth complete with illuminated, cut-glass inserts marking capital cities. The 120-ft.-diameter globe is the gift of U.S. Steel, will remain on its fountainhead after the Fair closes. Visitors remembering the Trylon, the tricornered obelisk that towered 700 ft. above the 1939 fair, may wonder why nothing so tall or eye-catching looms above the 1964 exposition. The answer is "progress," in the form of a skyful of jets lowering for Kennedy International Airport six miles away or for La Guardia even closer at hand. The FAA has put a ceiling on the Fair. Tallest structure allowed is the 232-ft. observation tower of the New York State pavilion; on most other buildings, there is an 80-ft. limit. In place of a Trylon, a 13 billion-candlepower tower of light beaming up from the Electric Power and Light pavilion will lure fairgoers at night.
Enough domes have been decreed to make Kubla Khan's eyes bug. Buckminster Fuller's 159-ft.-diameter geodesic dome (TIME cover, Jan. 10) floats over the 2,100-seat World's Fair assembly hall (designed by Architects Eggers and Higgins). Welton Becket & Associates has designed for General Electric a "curvilinear lamella" dotted with lights; moon craters and mountains encrust the dome of the Transportation and Travel pavilion, designed by Clive Entwhistle Associates. The State of Alaska exhibit hunches beneath a concrete igloo conceived by Olson & Sands of Juneau.
The three largest exhibitors at the Fair are automakers. Behind a facade resembling a giant curving windshield, General Motors will present the 1964 model of the Futurama that it introduced at the 1939 fair, will tote 70,000 visitors a day into the future on moving lounge chairs. Ford has hired Walt Disney to whip up a Magic Skyway ride, an updated version of the old scenic railway, which seats visitors in shiny convertibles for an automated safari through a "time tunnel" into prehistory to observe the invention of that vital device, the wheel. In Chrysler's moated compound, between Ford and General Motors, something is going on, but only Chrysler knows what.