The aviator's (re)vision of the world : an aesthetics of ascension in Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama

This dissertation considers a new ontology of vision brought on by the advent of human flight. It focuses on the project that best reflects this new vision: the Futurama, an exhibit designed by the American industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes for the 1939 New York World's Fair. The Futurama's status as the cause celebre of the 1939 World's Fair derived largely from its theatrical technique of seeing: spectators literally gazed down upon an American utopia as if they were aviators in a low-flying airplane. My analysis contextualizes Bel Geddes's Futurama within a utopian vision prevalent among urbanists, architects, artists, novelists, and science-fiction writers during the 1920s and 1930s. This "golden age" of American aviation was marked by the fantasy that the vision of the world from above would usher in new spatial dynamics from which would emerge the city of the future. I argue that Bel Geddes's method of seeing the Futurama from a simulated airplane revealed as much about a culturally valorized aviator hero as it did about the utopia itself. By demonstrating how the Futurama spectator's aerial viewing became enmeshed in broader 20th-century modernist visuality, my study reveals the crucial presence of an aesthetics of ascension in the avant-garde imagination. The Futurama was one of those modernist utopias that ideologues like Nietzsche, Wells, and arch-modernist Le Corbusier visualized through the eyes of an ascending protagonist. Histories of modernism have often overlooked the exalted presence of this protagonist in favor of focusing on the aesthetic object itself.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Morshed, Adnan Zillur

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stanford Anderson.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8314
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8314

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8314