“The White City and the Black City: The Dream of a Civilization”

AboutExamines the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition as a cultural symbol of Americans' ambivalent relationship to the machine age. Argues that the fair's classical "White City," designed largely by Beaux-Arts-trained architects under Daniel Burnham's direction, concealed and repressed anxieties about industrial machinery even as it celebrated technological progress, an ambivalence traced through contemporary accounts of the fair's construction, a carpenters' strike during its final preparations, and its critical reception. Positions Adler and Sullivan's Transportation Building, and Louis Sullivan's public dissent from the fair's imposed classicism, as a notable exception to the prevailing historicist consensus, quoting Sullivan's complaint about the fair's "dream of misinterpretation." Contrasts the fair's sanitized, machine-repressing "White City" with the surrounding industrial "Black City" of Chicago, and with the Midway Plaisance's licensed carnival space (including the Ferris wheel), arguing that only in Chicago's emerging skyscraper architecture, exemplified by Adler and Sullivan and Henry Ives Cobb, did an authentic new architectural idiom begin to emerge from the era's technological transformation.

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