Designing for the World of Tomorrow Australia at the 1939 New York World’S Fair

Figure 1. An endless belt of ‘Russellite’ colour transparencies ran through the heart of Australia The map, made of five different woods and topped with hundreds of small red cones, indicated the contours of the land reproduced courtesy estate of the artist Designing for the world of tomorrow Australia at the 1939 New York World’s Fair by Ann Stephen Abstract The Australian pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair promoted a new independent image of the nation within the Pacific rim. The article traces the design, publicity and reception of the pavilion within the wider context of the fair’s futurism and the looming crisis of the Second World War. reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia March 2006, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 29–40 Introduction Menzies’ claims would shortly be tested by war. For those visiting the fair’s vast Good evening, America. Good fantasy landscape laid out on the reclaimed evening, from the Commonwealth land of Flushing Meadows at Queens, the of Australia, from your friends and undercurrents of international politics were neighbours across the Pacific. Today visible in the national pavilions that fanned is Australia Day at the New York out around a vast pond called the Lagoon of World’s Fair. No doubt many of you Nations. As a minor player, Australia shared have been to the fair and amongst a building with New Zealand below the the great national exhibits you have British pavilion which was overshadowed by managed to find the Australian Mussolini’s majestic porch housing a massive pavilion. Our exhibit is far more than Roman goddess and a waterfall. a commercial exhibit. It is in fact Among the millions who flocked to intended as a graphic message of marvel at the fair over the northern summer goodwill from one English speaking of 1939 was the director of Sydney’s country to another ... Technology Museum, who made four visits (Prime Minister Robert Gordon in late July. Like Menzies, AR Penfold was a Menzies, 1939) conservative committed to a technological Prime Minister Menzies spoke on the new vision of modernity. At the end of a nine- Trans-Pacific Radiophone as if it were a month museum study tour funded by the fireside chat at the Melbourne Club. Those Carnegie Corporation, he was exhausted listening across the United States, who had but confessed that ‘for the modern museum tuned in to radio station WJV New York, director’ such fairs were ‘of more benefit may have been surprised to hear an unknown than all the museums in Europe because foreign leader speaking in such avuncular practically every phase of modern life was terms of an alliance with America. covered, including design, architectural form, sculpture, murals, illumination, display Whenever we meet there is an technology, horticulture, etc’.2 Amongst the instinctive bond between us. other Australians who had the opportunity We are both strongly democratic. to study the fair were several young We both hate formalities and distrust architects and designers responsible for the pomposity. We both put a high construction of the Australian pavilion. premium on the character and powers As a well-resourced but ephemeral project of the individual. We both have a it had allowed them to experiment with a fresh and optimistic attitude, an range of modern resources and techniques. outlook on life and its possibilities. In short, we speak to each other The pavilion was never seen in Australia in language and with ideas that the but was well known through extensive other fellow can at once understand. media coverage; indeed, the glamour and If I may say so, we are bound to be excitement of the New York World’s Fair friends. This does not mean that there proved a welcome distraction from the is any loosening of our ties with our anxieties generated by the looming crisis mother country, Great Britain. We the enveloping Europe. The following reading British people of Australia can never of the pavilion, based on its publicity and fail to appreciate that there is a special several first-hand accounts, proposes that link between ourselves and America.1 its vernacular modernism promoted a new 30 Designing for the world of tomorrow independent image of Australia as a place included displays of the Magna Carta, the of travel, tourism and investment within the Crown Jewels and heraldry, he thought Pacific rim. magnificent. His official report on the trip By the 1930s modern design was made no reference to the Australian pavilion, beginning to assume a popular character possibly because he had felt excluded from in much commercial and architectural its conception. work, though modernism in art remained a contentious, even political, subject. Director Tentative steps towards Penfold’s diary entries reveal his very mixed emotions about the modern when an Australian expression confronting its myriad forms in New York. of modernism Up until his arrival in Manhattan the high In Penfold’s lifetime the role of organising point of his trip had been the industrial participation in international exhibitions had works and museums of the Third Reich sidestepped museums and (in the absence which, like many technocrats of the time, of any national museum) was administered he admired. In contrast he found New directly by the Commonwealth Government. York chaotic. The Museum of Modern Art The grand old days, when Sydney and (MoMA) did impress him with its ‘very fine Melbourne had briefly commanded attention new building … of extreme modern design, as spectacular sites for international colonial largely glass’, though he could not cope exhibitions, were over. Nationhood had with abstract art, becoming ‘very disgusted coincided with a loss of economic power with the displays because I am not an for these cities, which could no longer claim 3 admirer of extreme modern pictures’. He the status of being among the 20 largest in was impressed by MoMA’s display methods the world. Through the early decades of the and services, particularly the fluorescent twentieth century Australia’s involvement lighting, airconditioning, lecture hall, film in various international exhibitions reveals library and theatrette. As a chemist, Penfold a failure to conceive ways to project the was transfixed by Du Pont’s pavilion at the nation beyond its former colonial status. fair, which harnessed the latest publicity By 1937 a tentative modernity was adopted methods for didactic entertainment. Its when the Australian architectural firm then ‘Wonder World of Chemistry’, designed known as Stephenson, Meldrum & Turner by the American master of streamlining, was commissioned by the Commonwealth Walter Dorwin Teague, demonstrated such to design a pavilion for the Paris Exposition. modern miracles as liquid acetate turning It took the form of a diminutive cylinder into silk stockings.4 In the Government on a black and orange base distinguished by Precinct he was less enthusiastic, examining an ‘Australia’ sign in orange neon lettering. ‘critically the Australian pavilion’, noting The interior housed a trade display and ‘not many exhibits but well planned’ and travel bureau with large photographs of grudgingly admitting that ‘the wool looked an Aboriginal head, bathing beauties and better than anticipated (staff however a modern house hung around its interior wasted). Picture show section admirable ... in a continuous ‘pictorial girdle’.6 The art Opals another exhibit [that] should revolve’, publisher Sydney Ure Smith, who was on ending despondently, ‘Nothing restful in the advisory committee, selected a dozen NY — everything moves’.5 The historic paintings, predominantly landscapes, the pageantry of the British Pavilion, which most renowned being Arthur Streeton’s Ann Stephen 31 Land of the Golden Fleece, painted ten years the Spanish pavilion, wrote of being ‘stabbed’ earlier. While affirming pastoral values, the by its ‘powerful imagery of brutal conflict’.8 trade commissioners may have felt uneasy The architect Arthur Stephenson, whose when Streeton added several stark tree firm designed the Australian pavilion, was stumps to the foreground before it was convinced by his visit to Paris that their next exhibited, reflecting his growing concern commission must be a thoroughly modern with deforestation. The commercial designer conception. Douglas Annand made a stylised ceiling map Unlike the 1937 exposition where of the world orientated to the antipodes. temporary national pavilions were erected Amongst the expatriates who visited the in the centre of Paris along an axis from exposition were several young designers the Eiffel Tower, the New York fair site was then working in London: Gordon Andrews, constructed on a former wasteland in the Raymond McGrath, and Geoffrey and Dahl Queens borough. The novelist EL Doctorow, Collings. Andrews reported that they had who visited as a child, recalled the futuristic been appalled at the display, writing that ‘[i]t impression of its signature geometrical was without a doubt the worst exhibit of all constructions which dominated the park: … arranged on shelves around the perimeter of the interior were pyramids of jams and The Trylon was a sky-scraping obelisk; canned fruit, here and there punctuated by the Perisphere was a great globe. moth-eaten stuffed koalas and wallabies’.7 They stood side by side at the Fair, and together they represented the While architectural opinion was divided on World of Tomorrow … They were the pavilion, international politics ensured enormous. They were white in the sun, that it was completely marginalised by the white spire, white globe, they went bombastic nationalism that turned the Paris together, they belonged together as Exposition into a propaganda battle. The some sort of partnership in my head showdown between contending ideologies … We went around the Commerce was dramatised by the siting of Albert Circle and through the Plaza of Speer’s German pavilion opposite the Soviet Light and right under the Trylon and Union’s monumental structure topped by a Perisphere, which, up close, seemed heroic pair of Soviet youths.

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