The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893

Order is Heaven's First Law"

Henry Van Brunt, architect, the Electricity Building, World's Columbian Exposition

It is today generally conceded that the Fair was most important not for its physical presence, nor for its architecture, nor even for the way it reflected the particular moment of late-nineteenth century American culture, but for the utopian image it developed, an image focused on the interwoven destinies of American and global civilization, and the place of urbanism and urbanity within that civilization.

Its primary planner was Director of Works Daniel Burnham, an architect later to achieve fame as the principal behind the Chicago Plan. Burnham and his colleagues conceived a plan which combined picturesque natural parks, highly formalized gardens, waterways and arcades, and clusters of buildings: the central massing of Classical and Renaissance-Revival exhibition buildings; the state buildings; and a "Midway Plaisance," where the weary visitory could rest, drink beer, travel from sideshow to sideshow, and be entertained by "educational" exhibitions which recapitulated the lessons of the central arcades.

Convinced that their White City would provide the template for future city development, the architects and planners of the Exposition commissioned photographer Charles Dudley Arnold to produce a vast body of photographs of each stage of the construction, and a portfolio of mammoth-plate views of the finished Fair. Arnold's photographs, printed on platinum paper and combined into huge portfolio-books, went to a select audience of directors and sponsors. The final portfolios were also sold as broken sets in Arnold's photographic concession.

The photographs are only one part of a huge trove of materials left to their posterity by the Fair's designers. Burnham's letters, now held in the Burnham Library of the Art Institute of Chicago, reports huge feasts in the half-built fairgrounds and describes in minute detail the process of assembling and marshalling the architects and builders. The Fair generated immense popular reaction; the visitors who came took away with them an immense collection of souvenir books, view books, guidebooks, photographs, watercolors, brochures, and the like. Out of this came a mass-culture vision of the perfect city, a "vast white cloud" of stately historicism set in an urban sublime.