From Berlin to Bunker Hill: Urban Space, Late Modernity, and Film Noir in Fritz Lang's and Joseph Losey's M

This essay focuses on Alvin Coburn’s The Octopus, a photograph of Madison Square taken from atop the Met Life Tower in 1912. Working against the conventional interpretation of the image as a study ...

The City from Afar Urbanization and the Aerial View in Alvin Coburn’s The Octopus

The Austrian-born graphic artist Joseph Binder's winning entry in the poster competition for the 1939 New York World's Fair shines a spotlight on the fair organizers' proclivity to imagine the future with what could be called an ascensional spirit.1 With sparkling graphic lines, Binder reinforced the vertical thrust of the fair's iconic 700-foot Trylon by a synchronized squadron of nine airplanes, ascending to a new stratospheric frontier (Fig. 1). The rhetorical positioning of the airplanes in the poster seems to represent the flying machines as the pinnacle of an evolution in transportation technologies. The message is that airplanes would be not only much faster and unperturbed by the fragility of geographic terrains, therefore, more convenient than earthbound modes of transportation, but also a most efficient vehicle to an ideal future. The patterned skyline of New York City, composed at the foot of Trylon, appears to be the urban alter ego of the airplane. The fact that Binder's poster was used on the cover of the First Edition Official Guide Book of the fair alludes to the extent to which the fair organizers subscribed to a buoyant World of Tomorrow.

Flying to the world of tomorrow: the ascension theme at the 1939 New York world's fair

Changing Directions in U.S. Urban History

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Howard Gillette

Papers

film as artifact: the city (1939)