New York World's Fair and Festival of Britain from "Design in Context" by Penny Sparke, Bloomsbury 1987:
1939: "It was at New York's World Fair of 1939 that streamlining as a popular, modern design idiom came into its own, and with it industrial designers. With the exception of the Chrysler 'Airflow' - the first commercially produced streamlined automobile - Chicago's County of Progress exhibition of 1933 had owed more to French art deco and interior decoration than to indigenous American trends, but by 1939 they could not be ignored. The buildings and their contents, most of them designed by the 'big name' designers, all exhibited the well-known bulbous curves of streamlining and expressed a firm commitment to the future. It was a triumph of American commerce and industry and a celebration of the role of design, or more specifically streamlining, in communicating that ideology. The main theme of the exhibition was "Building The World of Tomorrow", and it attempted to answer the question where the products and processes of modern civilisation were leading. The industrial designer, by now firmly established within the structure of American culture, was the obvious candidate to envisage this future world of high technology, and he replaced the architect in the construction of an exhibition area which covered over one thousand acres of waste land outside New York. Walter Dorwin Teague describes the appropriateness of using the industrial designer in this context. 'Because the industrial designers are supposed to understand public taste and be able to speak in a popular tongue as a profession and they are bound to disregard traditional forms and solutions and to think in terms of today and tomorrow, it was natural that the Board of Design should turn to them for the planning of the major exhibits in which the theme of the Fair is to be expressed'. Teague was selected to represent industrial design on the Fair's planning committee and he was responsible for many of the constructions, including the Ford pavilion, nd those for US Steel, Eastman Kodak and National Cash Registers. The style of buildings was left to the designers involved, and in most of the American pavilions a design vocabulary was achieved with the use of streamlining. This meant an emphasis on smooth, rounded surfaces, and a neo-futurist use of dramatic architectural punctuation. This was most clearly seen in the 3,700 - foot Trylon and 2,000 - foot Perisphere, two constructions which provided a focal point from which the 1400 exhibits radiated outwards. A vivid use of colour was evident; each avenue out of the central point took on a darker hue the further away it got from the central white constructions.
Henry Dreyfus was responsible for the interior of the Perisphere which housed the City of Tomorrow, viewed from a revolving balcony dubbed 'The Magic Carpet'. The American exhibits emphasized the role that transport and the new road rail systems would play in the environment of the future. Raymond Loewy's "Transportation of Tomorrow", which was exhibited in the Chrysler Motor Building, included a streamlined taxi, liner, car and trucks, as well as a rocketship which would travel between New York and London. A model was set up to show the rocketship in action, and Teague described it: "Accompanied by a flash of light, a muffled explosion, and ingenious effects which make it appear that a rocket vanishes in the skyline ceiling of the designer building." The industrial designer was undoubtedly the hero of the hour. As Teague explained: "At the Fair the profession is coming into its own and emerging for the first time in its major, basic role, as the interpreter of industry to the public." Norman Bel Geddes showed the results of several years of his experiments in the General Motors Building at the Fair. His exhibit was called 'Highways and Horizons', and it envisaged a whole new network of motorways covering the US - an innovation that he claimed was necessary before transport could be developed. The pioneer designers succeeded in capturing the popular American imagination through their involvement with the New York World's Fair. The purist international style was over-turned by a neo-futurist interest in styling the World of Tomorrow - a world in which idealism, optimism and faith in technology ruled the day, and which was symbolised, in the words of Teague, 'by a dynamic architecture that shall be a true expression of our own materials and our own spirit.' This dynamic concept of architecture and design was to become an internationally accepted style for many consumer goods in the years following the Second World War."
1951: "The idea of a festival to celebrate the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition was first mooted by the Royal Society of Arts in 1943. Conceived as a show of civilization and industry, it was planned in a spirit of campaigning reform, with the help of the Council of Industrial Design from 1947. A balance between education and celebration was sustained from the start. The travelling exhibitions, the display at the Science Museum and architectural reconstruction project at Lansbury were educational, while the Battersea Pleasure Gardens provided the fun. The exhibition on the South Bank was the focal point of the Festival of Britain and provided a meeting place for the architectural and design establishments and the public. The architects and designers included Hugh Casson, Misha Black, James Gardner, James Holland* and Ralph Tubbs, while the Council selected the objects to be shown. The South Bank 'story' was divided into three main sections and the layout emphasized the narrative treatment of the topics showing the glory of man's achievement. It was as an experiment in town planning and landscaping that the exhibition was most successful. It developed what the 'Architectural Review' dubbed, "a picturesque landscape principle", which was unorthodox and informal, making use of contrast, variety of shape and scale, interrupted views and multi-levels. An emphasis upon the environment rather than individualised structures was achieved by concentrating on details like railings and street furniture. Jack Howe's litter bins and Race's "Antelope" and "Springbok" chairs were typical. A nautical theme dominated the Festival, with flagpoles, riggings, lookouts and other details completing the effects. The Council of Industrial Design selected the objects for the 'Homes and Garden' and 'New Schools' sections. The accompanying design philosophy was once more formulated by Gordon Russell (the Council of Industrial Design's second director, appointed in 1946), who stated "A well-designed object should be pleasing to the eye, efficient in use and soundly made whether by hand or machine." In contrast to the pre-war Modern Movement's abhorrence of decoration and the wartime drabness, the emphasis of the Festival was upon vibrant colour and strong surface pattern. Inspiration derived from several sources among the fine arts. Abstract sculpture by Moore, Hepworth, Lyn Chadwick, Reg Bulter and others exhibited on the South Bank, as were the crystal structures developed by the Festival Pattern Group. This had been established in 1949 specifically to experiment with crystal structure diagrams, and its creations were chosen because they 'had the discipline of exact repetitive symmetry; they were above all very pretty and were full of rich variety, yet with remarkable family likeness'. The Festival stood as a symbol of public enthusiasm and pleasure at having been released from wartime restrictions. As a Labour-backed project, it was criticized by the Opposition as a waste of tax-payers' money, and it has been seen by some as a reason for the fall of the Labour government in that year. But it not only captured public feeling, it paved the way for the strong fantasy element which appeared in much British design in the decade that followed.
The problem of the public taking over the role of design arbiter from the establishment in a changing industrial and social context was one which concerned designers in the 1950's. The fact that 'the bonds of austerity had been loosened' led to a popular delight in pattern, colour and 'artistic' form. In interior decoration, different patterns and colours often coexisted in a single setting, while in furniture there was an imaginative use of 'jigsaw' shapes, 'knitting-needle' coat stands, plant holders and table legs. The Council stood out against this public enthusiasm and 'do it yourself' tendency, encouraging instead 'a decent well-bred elegance' which should, it claimed, provide a 'quiet background to living'. It also expressed criticisms of what it considered to be the vulgar excesses of American streamlining."