Future-Proof

Replica of Futurama souvenir button

Long before Matt Groening's animated "Futurama," there was Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama, a highlight of the 1939-40 World's Fair created for the General Motors pavilion. As opposed to the chaotic camp of Groening's series, Bel Geddes' Futurama - a huge working model of the city of tomorrow - was a technocratic vision of the superpower metropolis to come, where queues of streamlined automobiles were the lifeblood of the highly ordered urban organism. If you're reading this while stuck in traffic on the BQE, you may be cursing Bel Geddes' vision and its de facto executor, Robert Moses. But see the exhibition Norman Bel Geddes: I Have Seen the Future at the Museum of the City of New York for a showcase of the amazing breadth of Bel Geddes' work as a whole.

Long queue of visitors to Futurama, GM pavilion, '39-40 World's Fair

Few contemporaries can claim to have covered the spectrum of design as Bel Geddes did: from architectonic sets for productions of Dante and Shakespeare to sleek gas ranges that could have graced June Cleaver's kitchen. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, who sketched everything from a cat house to a mile-high skyscraper, Bel Geddes was a designer who moved freely across a range of media and projects as a way of crafting a comprehensive design makeover for postwar America. But with major commissions for General Motors, Chrysler and RCA, Bel Geddes was a better exemplar of design in the service of industry, more akin to Peter Behrens' work for AEG in Germany. Wright never successfully reconciled his genius with the realities of mass production and consumption, but Bel Geddes' iconic Emerson radios (the "Patriot" model cast in red, white and blue) rolled off the assembly line and into the hands of consumers eager to access the airwaves. 

Amidst the exquisite drawings and Buck Rogers-like models in the MCNY exhibition, it's easy to overlook a small book by Claude Bragdon in the introductory section displaying some of Bel Geddes' formative texts. But Bragdon's influence on the young Bel Geddes is significant in that Bel Geddes continued Bragdon's quest for a synthesis of the applied, visual and performing arts under the aegis of modern architectural practice. Dimensions of light, sound and performance were instrumental to the forms created by both designers. Such synthesis is obvious in Bel Geddes' sets for the Inferno and King Lear, but harder to see in his industrial designs. Still, even his appliances and vehicles are infused with the sleek lines and bold shadows that invoke the velocity of the Atomic Age as well as the mannered, floodlight drama of 1930s stage and screen.

The similarities between Groening's animated Futurama and Bel Geddes' GM attraction are superficial, but Groening's Planet Express spaceship ("Old Bessie") bears at least a passing resemblance to Bel Geddes' terrestrial vehicle designs. Groening's retro-futurism may be deliberately corny, but its progenitors were sincere in their campaign to streamline the advent of an ideal future.

Above: Planet Express ship / Below: Bel Geddes' Motor Car No. 9, 1933