Photographing the Fair

Only at world’s fairs could such a motley range of architectural styles sit in relative harmony. The Elephant Towers, with their howdahs atop Meso-American pyramids, signaled the effort to create a distinctly “Pacific Architecture.” Ralph Stackpole’s impassive and stiff Pacifica, an ethnically indistinct colossus-Buddha, presided over a fountain arrayed with statues of the people of the Pacific.

Italy’s starkly modernist pavilion interrupted these blithe dreamscapes with the real-world politics of Fascism. The campanile, a billboard of nationalism, simultaneously speaks to the power of Italian cities and recalls the larger embrace of the middle ages by Italian Fascism. Quarries of marble revetment in the colonnade evoke Roman grandeur and civilization. In the interior, a photograph of Bologna’s towers and a great industrial crane echo the lotus-like flange of the standing lamps. This vertical striving collides with the invitation to slump in the buttery leather of the chairs under the implied gilded dome. Ancient history, contemporary design, lavish materials, and emptiness mix with almost chilling precision. Meanwhile, Argentina’s pared down modernist pavilion tells a wholly different story about architecture and progress.

All of these images were taken by architecture-trained photographer Esther Baum Born, whose husband architect Ernest Born designed both buildings and exhibits for the Fair.