Design: Back to the Lost Future

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The Brooklyn Museum's entrance hall is a period room of the recently lost future, haunted by a peculiar American dream from the days when model-airplane kits were still mostly balsa. A 1929 high-wing monoplane, bravely lacquered in sky blue and wasp yellow, hangs from the ceiling, almost low enough for the grown visitor to touch its spats. Nearby sits the Chrysler Airflow -- not, alas, the classic 1934 model with the "waterfall" radiator, but still modernity on wheels, squinty windshield, fairings and all. Between them are such icons as the 1936 Sears-Roebuck Waterwitch outboard, offering its owner some whiff of the thrill associated with Henry Dreyfuss's bullet-nosed locomotives or Norman Bel Geddes' flying wings. Your trousers shorten as you look.

Was it only 50 years ago? How touching our grandfathers' faith in the future seems, in our day of acid rain, exploding shuttles, decaying inner cities and general creeping dystopia. The mood is epitomized in objects like the male costume of the future dreamed up for Vogue -- a bearded figure in an immaculate white jumpsuit wearing a circular antenna as a halo on his head, John the Baptist among the insulators. Everything is streamlined, even objects that are screwed down and cannot move, so that America's breathless rush toward Utopia is clearly signified by things like a 1933 Raymond Loewy metal teardrop desk-mounted pencil sharpener. In the twelve years between the Wall Street Crash and Pearl Harbor, the American imagination seems to have oscillated between two images, the streamline and the breadline -- the former promising relief from the latter. And in the maxim of the 1939 New York World's Fair, "See tomorrow -- now!," lay the siren syllables of undeferred gratification that would abolish the constraints of Puritan America while preserving its millenarian fantasies.

A plethora of dreams flowed from America in the 1920s and '30s; and though, at least on the face of it, we have ceased to share them, they lend a deep and sometimes rather scary poignancy to the remarkable exhibition organized by Art Historians Richard Guy Wilson and Dianne H. Pilgrim, titled "The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941." The show will run until Feb. 16 at the Brooklyn Museum and travel to Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Atlanta through 1987.

It was in the '20s and '30s, and in America, that a cultural fascination with machinery that had been growing since the early 19th century reached its apogee. One is used to reading, in prattle like Tom Wolfe's 1981 book Bauhaus to Our House, that the American affair with machine culture during those years -- functionalism, steel-and-glass buildings and so forth -- had been imported, as intellectual fashion, from Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. The concise and mighty industrial-based forms of American building, conceived by architects from James Bogardus in the 1850s to Louis Sullivan in the 1890s and by the engineers of a technology whose emblematic climax was John and Washington Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge, were among the prototypes of European avant-garde thinking before and after World War I. Even to the Russian constructivists, "Americanism" was something infinitely desirable: it stood for electricity, progress, a society knit together and made transparent by fast communication.