Overview

The “Century 21 Exposition” was held in Seattle, Washington, United States, from April 21 to October 21, 1962. Organized by the City of Seattle, the State of Washington and the U.S. government, it was a general exhibition of the second category under the 1928 Paris Convention. The International Exhibitions Bureau (Bureau International des Expositions, BIE) records 9 million visits on a 30-hectare site; city records put the total at more than 10 million.

Origins and the bid

The idea came from Seattle City Councilman Al Rochester, who had attended the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition as a boy and proposed a second exposition to commemorate it. A 1955 state law funded a World's Fair Commission chaired by hotel executive Eddie Carlson, with Rochester as executive director; Joe Gandy later succeeded Carlson and served as the Expo's president. Seattle voters approved a $7.5 million Civic Center bond, which the state legislature matched, and the U.S. government contributed more than $9 million, mainly for its science exhibit. BIE approval, which Gandy won despite a competing project in New York, helped the organizers recruit 35 foreign governments as exhibitors.

Scholar Stacy Warren shows that the Walt Disney Company shaped the Expo without designing a single pavilion or attraction there. In May 1958 Seattle planners met Roy Disney and his executives in Burbank, California, and four Disney employees were later hired full time to advise on crowd handling, concessions, parking, insurance, fire protection and security. Economics Research Associates, a longtime Disney partner, prepared attendance and traffic forecasts, and the Alweg monorail, already running at Disneyland, was recommended as the Expo’s transportation of the future. The 30-hectare (74-acre) site was the old Warren neighborhood, which civic leaders called a slum: 203 buildings, including homes, a fire station and an elementary school, were demolished, and only eight survived. Drawing on historian John Findlay, Warren reads the result as a suburban vision planted in the city.

Theme and subthemes

The theme, "Man in the Space Age," looked ahead to life in the 21st century at a moment when the space race dominated public imagination. President John F. Kennedy opened the Expo on April 21, 1962. The BIE lists 49 participants, and international exhibits came from countries including Canada, India, Japan, Sweden, France and the United Arab Republic. The Soviet Union did not exhibit, although cosmonaut Gherman Titov visited.

Warren notes that the organizers offered foreign exhibitors space rent-free and asked them to show modern industry alongside handicrafts and tourist attractions, together with their vision of the future and its problems. The result had little consistency. The Republic of China (Taiwan) displayed traditional textiles, ceramics and furniture behind an ornate facade, a few steps from Great Britain’s Hall of Science and Technology, with its 46-meter (150-foot) wall honoring British engineers and astronomers. Sweden also had its own freestanding pavilion, but most other participants, including a group labeled simply “the African Nations,” shared warehouse-like halls in the International Plaza. France was placed in the World of Century 21, while Spain and a second Japanese exhibit ended up on Show Street.

The site

Architect Paul Thiry, named chief architect in 1958, planned the grounds and designed the Washington State Coliseum, whose suspended roof sheltered the state's pavilion. Minoru Yamasaki designed the U.S. Science Pavilion, blending Japanese and Gothic forms around a NASA-themed exhibit; Boeing's Spacearium was its most popular attraction. Tokyo architects Hideki Shimizu and Kazuyuki Matsushita designed the International Fountain, dedicated on May 31, 1962.

The 30-hectare grounds were divided into five “worlds,” Science, Commerce and Industry, Century 21, Art and Entertainment, with axial “Boulevards of the World” radiating from the International Fountain. Science was meant to be the Expo’s “jewel box.” Design scholar Celia Pearce links the federal commitment to the poor U.S. showing against the Soviet Union at Expo 1958 Brussels and to the Soviet space program, and Warren notes that the government appropriated $9.5 million after Sputnik, with more than 100 scientists helping to plan the exhibit. After the Eames film, visitors moved through “The Development of Science,” Boeing’s Spacearium and “Horizons of Science,” where a rotating floor delivered them to the exit beside the reflecting pools.

The Space Needle became the Expo's symbol. Carlson sketched the idea on a napkin after dining atop a television tower in Stuttgart, Germany, and Victor Steinbrueck and John Ridley developed the design of a tripod crowned by a disc. Built in about a year, the 605-foot tower offered an elevator ride for $1.

To link the grounds with downtown, the city contracted Alweg Rapid Transit Systems for a monorail that ran 1.3 miles along Fifth Avenue; the trip took 95 seconds. The city also built a 1,500-car garage and moved about 3.5 miles of overhead lines underground. Gandy closed the Expo on October 21, 1962, at Memorial Stadium. Kennedy had been expected but sent regrets, citing a cold, while he was in fact facing the early days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Pavilions and international participation

Inside Minoru Yamasaki’s six-building U.S. Science Pavilion, visitors began seated on the carpeted floor of a darkened theater watching “The House of Science,” a film by Charles and Ray Eames. Design scholar Celia Pearce credits it with stretching a single continuous image across all six of its screens, and notes that its history section was written by Thomas Kuhn, who published “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” the same year. Not every exhibit was so confident. In the Coliseum, the World of Century 21, themed “Century 21: The Threshold and the Threat,” carried visitors in a glass elevator, the “Bubbleator,” to a show that alternated a domed Seattle of the year 2000 with images of atomic blasts and families in fallout shelters.

Pearce explains that “The House of Science” used architecture as its metaphor, showing in hand-drawn animation how the sciences, pictured as buildings, divided into ever more specialized subdisciplines, alongside still and live-action footage of current research. While their staff installed the government exhibit, Charles Eames and his team also photographed the construction of the nearby Herman Miller pavilion, the company that manufactured their furniture. The pictures became “Before the Fair,” a film made for publicity and advertising rather than for training salespeople, as their earlier Herman Miller films had been.

The Coliseum that housed the World of Century 21 was itself a technical display: Warren cites 3,700 aluminum panels hung from more than 8 kilometers (5 miles) of cable, enclosing angular spaces 11 stories high. General Motors, Pan Am, RCA, the American Library Association and France occupied the edges around the central show. Its “City Century 21” imagined Seattle in 2000 as a downtown under a climate-controlled dome, ringed by greenbelt, industry and suburban homes, and the souvenir program promised that while some people would fly or drive air cars, most would ride monorails.

The World of Commerce and Industry, by contrast, was scattered across the grounds. At the Ford pavilion, a gold, aluminum-trimmed geodesic dome, visitors took a 15-minute simulated space journey, “Adventure in Outer Space.” IBM’s open-air pavilion used poplar trees as living walls for three “gardens of learning” that traced 15,000 years of human thought up to the computer. Nalley’s Space Age Theatre, built without a single straight line, reminded visitors of a potato chip, one of the company’s products. Two model homes promoted plywood as the building material of tomorrow, General Electric showed the fictional Larsen family’s all-electric home, and the Sermons from Science pavilion addressed science and Christian belief.

Culture and entertainment

Warren describes the World of Art and the World of Entertainment as largely free of the science theme. The new Fine Arts Pavilion admitted only painting and sculpture, in five galleries that ranged from traditional masterpieces and art since 1950 to the art of the ancient East and Native art of the Northwest. Everything else, from opera and ballet to water-skiing shows, baton twirling, circus acts and firefighting demonstrations, belonged to Entertainment, which reused civic buildings: the 1927 Civic Auditorium became the Opera House, the Civic Ice Arena became the Arena, a 1947 high school stadium gained an aquatic ring, and the Food Circus filled the former Washington National Guard Armory of 1939.

Many visitors came for other reasons. The Gayway midway, with 20 rides and 45 games of chance, and Show Street, an adult entertainment zone conceived by local entrepreneur Gracie Hansen, who declared her mission was to save the exposition from science, drew about 90 percent of daily visitors, while fewer than half entered the Science Pavilion. City officials closed Show Street attractions more than once for indecency. Warren reports that the Expo ended about $1 million in the black. The midway lived on as the Fun Forest until 2011, and when the city again hired Disney as a consultant in the mid-1980s, residents and officials rejected its plan to replace local favorites with corporate entertainment space.

Legacy

The grounds became Seattle Center, a 74-acre campus that hosts more than 30 arts, culture, sports and entertainment organizations. The Coliseum is now Climate Pledge Arena, which kept its original roof and framework, and the U.S. Science Pavilion is the Pacific Science Center. The Space Needle became a City of Seattle landmark in 1999, and the monorail and its tracks received landmark status in 2003. The monorail still carries riders between Seattle Center and downtown.

Warren adds that some 7 million visitors came from out of state and spent about $320 million off the grounds on food, lodging, transportation and entertainment, leading sponsor Seattle First National Bank to conclude that the Expo left the state better off. Few publicly mourned the Warren neighborhood. When Seattle Center opened on June 1, 1963, a 21-member advisory commission ran it as what its members openly called a Disney-like arrangement of separate zones, with about 30 percent of the site built and 70 percent left as landscaped open space, plazas and fountains. Against all recommendations, the Gayway survived as the Fun Forest; when it was removed in 2011, its ground went to attractions with entrance fees, including the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum.

Expo 1962 Seattle brought the city international recognition and gave it a civic center that remains in daily use. Its vision of the Space Age, captured in the Space Needle, endures as one of the most recognizable legacies of any Expo.