Ran across a piece of interactive non-fiction released today, a “hypertext essay about vernacular architecture” by Kit Buckley. It makes for a pretty rambly reading experience so I’m not sure it entirely works for me, but it was interesting.
Hello and welcome to the eighth installment of Tennessee Adoxographic, my occasional newsletter about the 1982 World’s Fair and one of it’s key pieces of themed architecture, the Sunsphere. This letter is a collection of a lot of different things I have been thinking about the last several months, about Las Vegas and Gatlinburg, about context in the built environment, and about an architect named Hubert Bebb. Because there are a lot of connections between these ideas, I thought it might work to present this letter as a work of hypertext, using Twine. There are also a lot of dead ends; you may want to use the back button to explore other threads.
My take on this is that the large international expos of the past have been superceded by more specialized industry trade shows.
However, one cannot overstate the lasting historic and cultural influence these fairs have had on their host cities. The Chicago Field Museum, the Seattle Space Needle and monorail, The New York State Pavilion, and Montral’s Habitat 67 are all iconc reminders of International Expos held in those cities.
The 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville might have been one of the smaller ones, but I remember my younger sister travelled there with her Girl Scout troop from Chicago and returned with a sense of awe and wonder. I will add Kit Buckley’s hypertext essay to my playlist.