Fair Plans

The process of creating for Chicago in 1933 a World Fair which shall never be tiresome, always stimulating, was in full stride last week. The architectural committee and Norman Bel Geddes, famed Manhattan man-of-all-design, gamester (TIME, March 4), who functions as an advisor, had begun talking details.

All previous World Fairs have had vast classic fac,ades which wearied the eye; interminable promenades which wearied the feet; monotonous planning, usually in squares, which wearied the mind. The Chicago planners are determined to permit none of these fatiguing conventions. Architecture will be imaginative rather than historical. Transportation will be ubiquitous (monorails, moving sidewalks, boats). Planning will be organic, molding the entire Fair into an architectural unit.

It is likely that the fairgrounds will be shaped and hollowed like a giant amphitheatre, the centre axis being a lagoon, 2,000 x 600 ft. Entering the Fair on an upper level of this lagoon, visiting dignitaries such as the U. S. President will float on ceremonial barges through a succession of descending locks to the lower levels. The dignitary and his voyage will be visible to every person at the Fair, spectators merely having to stand on the terraces or roofs of the various buildings to survey the entire amphitheatre.

Mightiest of Fair structures will be the Hall of Science building. An enormous children's village will be built, as children themselves might build it, with such necessities as huge sand piles and a good place to roller-skate.

Norman Bel Geddes has been asked to recommend theatrical policies. If his wishes are approved the Fair will include an unprecedented gathering of dramatic talent. There will be perhaps ten theatres, each devoted to some distinct phase of the art, each emphasizing the most advanced ideas which as yet receive little or no support on Manhattan's Broadway or Chicago's Randolph Street. Foreign features--Siamese dancing, marionettes from Java--will be exhibited by natives in the native fashion, not vaudevillized or adapted to U. S. taste. Mr. Geddes is going to suggest an island supper club, in which the dance floor is separated from the dining space by tiny canals. He will propose an open air cabaret which has permanent runways, like hollow walls, winding among the tables. The performers will dance and sing above. The waiters will scurry through the hollows below. The plans of a Geddes sea food restaurant show floor, walls and ceiling of glass tanks filled with swimming fish.

Jubilant is Mr. Geddes because his version of Dante's Divine Comedy will be produced. This conception has occupied much of his time since 1923, is a majestic study in theatrical expressionism, much better known in Europe than the U. S.

Prominent architects and artists are constantly asked to devote their services to public enterprises like the Chicagio Fair. Generous, many of them invariably do so. Their time is usually sacrificed, they receive no payment. In addition, their schemes are often censored by stodgy directors who insist on conventionalities. But Mr. Geddes and the Chicago Fair architects find their task happy, for between them and the men who hold the moneybags is Dr. Allen Diehl Albert of Evanston, Ill., old family friend, collaborator and spokesman of Rufus Cutler Dawes,* the Fair's president. Long a journalist (Washington Times, Columbus News, Minneapolis Tribune), Dr. Albert has, since 1906, specialized in the sober-sided science of city-planning. But he agrees with the Fair planners that the impermanence of a fair makes it appropriate for gala moods, daring design, Arabian Nightlike fantasies.

*Last week, President Dawes's brother, Charles Gates Dawes, U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, received credit for a whirlwind (two-day) campaign in which ten million dollars were raised for the Fair by appeals to potent Chicagoans.