Another useful link from Mike Shiffer:
Definitive document of pre-World War II futuristic utopian thinking, as envisioned by General Motors. Documents the “Futurama” exhibit in GM’s “Highways and Horizons” pavilion at the World’s Fair, which looks ahead to the “wonder world of 1960.” [Views of the exhibition start at 8 minutes in.]
It’s hard to over-emphasize the impact of Futurama: It took the ideas of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and other modernists, filtered through the genius of Norman Bel Geddes, a Broadway set designer, who translated this utopian vision into a populist attraction, just when the public needed an optimistic vision after a decade of Depression and on the cusp of World War II.
And then America, after the war, went out and built it.
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General Motors Headquarters, Detroit
The initial sequence of the waves crashing gives an ominous climate change double entendre to the rising “New Horizons” that the products of this kind of boosterism will have contributed to.
Expo ’86 GM revises future to screens in a car, http://flic.kr/p/d5P3G