DESIGNER UNKNOWN GENERAL MOTORS / NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR. 1939. 47 1/2x35 1/2 inches, 120 1/2x90 cm. Condition B+: creases, wrinkles and abrasions in margins and image; repaired tears and minor staining in margins. Paper. Framed. A previously unrecorded poster for the most popular exhibit at the New York World's Fair in 1939; General Motors' Futurama. The entire General Motors "Highways and Horizons exhibit occupied a seven-acre site on the Avenue of Transportation" (World of Tomorrow p. 108). The Futurama itself was a detailed model of America in the future (the world in 1960, a distant 20 years from the time of the fair), over and around which visitors were whisked while sitting in sound chairs on a carry-go-round. Looking down on the model, visitors listened to a narrator explain all that they were seeing. The exhibition, "designed by Norman Bel Geddes, covers more than 35,000 square feet and contains 500,000 individually designed houses and buildings and over 1,000,000 trees and shrubs of 18 species and 50,000 scale model vehicles" (General Motors Exhibit Building / New York World's Fair, 1939, brochure). The ride, which covered countryside, highways and future cities, ended up with visitors actually standing in a full-scale street intersection of the future. "It was all brilliantly conceived-a magnificently entertaining journey into the future by hundreds of thousands of consumers-only to be dropped off onto a '1960' stage set filled with the gleaming, streamlined [General Motors] products of 1939 just waiting to be bought" (World of Tomorrow p. 111). Rare.
