Q: What do the Ferris Wheel, the Television, and Seattle's trademark building, the Space Needle, have in common?
A: They were all first displayed at World's Fairs! Yeah!
Q: What do a trip up the Space Needle and through Andrew Garn's new book Exit To Tomorrow: World's Fair Architecture, Design, Fashion 1933-2005 have in common?
A: They are expensive and lame. Save your money.
Coffee tables with discerning taste will spit this sloppy volume on the floor. Its bright, campy cover looks promising enough -- illustrated citizens of the 60's ride New York's AMF monorail, a look of wonder in their eyes as they gaze forward into a future of hoverboots and chrome -- but, as the saying goes, snazzy graphic design does not a good book make.
I recently read Chris Ware's perfect graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, and shared the nine-year-old titular character's mute enchantment with Chicago's World's Colombian Exposition of 1893. The showcasing of the past and future, of spectacular new technology, massive, adventurous architecture, and cultures from lands afar must have been wondrous to behold, especially during a time when, for many, the known world ended at the county line. The ensuing century's creation of the global village may be partially responsible for the dwindling popularity and size of world's fairs. The idea of looking back at these bygone exhibitions is attractive in part because of their grandiose architecture and in part to see how their predictions of the then-future measure up to the present. Exit to Tomorrow reveals that those prophecies were sometimes clairvoyantly accurate, such as the foretelling of vast suburbs and super-cities and the rise of the computer. Other predictions seem laughable from where we now stand, especially in the realm of future fashion, most of which seem to involve an abundance of transparent clothing.
As for the architecture, Garn displays in bright, large color images the spectacle of world's fairs at their peak. For most of us, those captured snapshots of a bygone phenomenon are the main draw. Unfortunately, many of the pictures are not photographs at all: they are the odd mementos that commemorate the fair. Myriad illustrations of proposed or actualized architecture and images of world's fair guidebooks and stamps clutter the pages, displacing photographs of buildings. In fact, Exit to Tomorrow contains no actual photos of the Space Needle. And the bona fide darkroom-born pictures of world's fair architecture are not particularly special. After a quick search online, I found many pictures equal or better than the ones selected to be in this book. The collection could also benefit from some focused proofreading and editing--captions and pictures repeat, an oversight surpassed by the exact duplication of the text on pg. 9 incoherently replacing whatever was supposed to be on pg. 21.
And what are all these words doing in my picture book anyway? Turns out we're also supposed to learn something. This wouldn't necessarily be bad, but the textual aspect is pulled off poorly. The book feels slapped together in part because of is its four authors. That's right, you straight-through readers get to study curator Paola Antonelli's and historian Udo Kultermann's accounts of world's fairs before you even get to most of the pictures. Then, an outro by librarian Stephen Van Dyk assures that Exit to Tomorrow doesn't end too quickly. To be fair, some of the ideas and information advanced by these authors is interesting--did you know that Warhol was commissioned for a mural at New York's 1964 World's Fair, only to have it painted over in one day? However, the theoretical and historical tone of the other three authors sits unevenly with Garn's more entertaining, kitschy pictures. Most readers will flip past the often convoluted abstraction and historical name-dropping of Kultermann's, Antonelli's, and Van Dyk's texts.
Exit to Tomorrow is an errant student's Trapper Keeper: pull open the cool, shiny cover and you find untidy notes thrown in every which way, the History crumpled up with Art on the back of Science, all of it in a half-learned cursive scrawl. If you're lazy and financially irresponsible, then the spine of this book will look good in your den's bookshelf. If you're intrigued and even slightly industrious, you'll find your time better spent on Google Image Search.