Filed under: architecture, info, world's fair | Tags: architecture, world's fair
unisphere
…was the slogan for the 1964-64 World’s Fair.
Rode the 7 train to Flushing, Queens yesterday.
Walked around the Unisphere, around the kids skating in the dry fountain, and the families playing soccer along the Avenue of Progress.
Do we still have the will to create such grandiose monuments to an idea about the Future ? Maybe they were just the pipe-dreams of a lot of powerful men who saw the Future as a hybrid state of existence between corporations and nations. The Future was Large, Impressive, and Right-Around-The-Corner. But the scale of the park (and the effort it took to build the New York World’s Fairs – 1939 and 1964 – on a former ash heap) are more inspiring than intimidating. Maybe the least we could do is keep the rust off these old things… a tribute to our own capacity for idealism, even when idealism itself seems as dated as a World’s Fair.
See Also :: Paleo-Future – concepts of the future from various moments in the past.
Tour the stacks and the reading rooms of libraries around the world thanks to Curious Expeditions. Seen as a collection, the library – The Library – becomes abstract. In these photographs, virtually devoid of people, The Library is a concept : it is ‘potential’ energy as opposed to kinetic energy – the latent spring in the mind, coiled but waiting there, on the infinitely high shelves. Trying to decipher the magnetism of these images – having almost nothing to with a desire to actually read all of the books in each room – but each vaulted hall a physical manifestation of the phenomenon of the figurative mental space – the freedom to be found in endless rumination.
