Pull up any image of a 1939 World's Fair exhibition hall, and something strange happens. The buildings look familiar, the confidence of the lines almost feels recent, but nothing about that world ever arrived. A miniature highway carries 50,000 tiny cars. A city of towers sits under glass. Visitors ride past it all in moving chairs and exit wearing a button that says: I Have Seen the Future.
Nobody told them it would not quite look like this.
The discrepancy between imagination and reality is perhaps the most revealing space in visual culture. The forgotten future is never a failure. Every one is an image of how that society saw the future, its progress, its purpose, and whom it was supposed to serve before reality brought different ideas.
Forgotten Futures Begin With Paint and Motion
The sharpest early version of this idea came from Italian Futurism.
In February 1909, Marinetti released his manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro. It was a statement that denounced the Italian obsession with its classical past and embraced the modern world with speed, machinery, and strength of industry as the proper subject of modern art. The painters who followed his lead, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Giacomo Balla, pushed that premise directly into color and composition.
This is most evident in The City Rises (1910), which now resides in the New York Museum of Modern Art, known as MoMA. Here, we see horses plunging through rubble while people dissolve into motion, and the brushstrokes fragment into red, white, and orange streaks. Nothing holds still. Stillness, the composition insists, is already obsolete.
The City Rises, 1910, Umberto Boccioni, oil on canvas, 199 x 301 cm; Wikimedia Commons / Museum of Modern Art, New York (Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund); public domain; reproduced for commentary and analysis.
The visual logic here is worth pausing on. Futurist paintings did not simply depict industrial life. Their surface structure, shattered planes, overlapping exposures of the same figure in motion, deliberately fragmented letterforms in Futurist typography, tried to force the eye to move at machine speed. The medium was meant to perform the future, not describe it.
That ambition carried a cost. The adoration of speed and technology found in futurism was entwined with nationalism and, finally, fascism. Sometimes, the most visually attractive future may be hiding the most political undertones. It is a pattern that keeps returning.
The Future as a Consumer Product You Could Ride Through
By 1939, the future was no longer just a painting on a gallery wall. It had become a consumer experience with admission lines and souvenirs.
General Motors hired industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes to create Futurama for the New York World’s Fair, which was a 35,000-square-foot model of America as it would be in approximately twenty years to come. Visitors rode in moving seats, guided by the voice from each headset, above 500,000 miniature buildings, one million trees and 50,000 miniature cars driving on 14-lane super-highways.
At the exit, all visitors were given a button which had printed on it “I Have Seen the Future.”
Street intersection model, Futurama exhibit, 1939 New York World's Fair; designed by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors; Wikimedia Commons; reproduced for commentary and analysis.
Futurama model, elevated view of the city of 1960; designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the General Motors Exhibit, New York World's Fair, 1939; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-39060 / Wikimedia Commons. reproduced for commentary and analysis.
The exhibition was the most visited attraction at the fair. President Franklin Roosevelt later invited Bel Geddes to consult on national transportation policy, and the concepts presented in Futurama fed directly into the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944.
The future, in this case, did arrive. But arriving and arriving well are different things. The highways have been constructed. Along with that, the urban sprawl, automobile dependence, traffic congestion, and pollution became evident in what urban planners have been trying for decades to undo. The exhibition promoted the location and never mentioned its consequences.
Soviet Cosmism: When Space Was a Spiritual Idea First
While Futurama was selling chrome highways to Americans, a completely different imaginary of the future had been developing in Russia for decades before anyone sent a satellite into orbit.
Russian Cosmism began at the end of the nineteenth century in the writings of philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who believed that mankind’s fate literally was to travel into space, conquer the cosmos, and ultimately to resurrect the dead by means of science. Sounds ridiculous today. However, Fedorov’s thinking motivated Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), a self-educated schoolteacher from Kaluga, to develop the mathematics of rocket flight in 1903 and then spend thirty years drawing plans for spacecraft, space suits, space stations and weightlessness.
The 1933 Album of Cosmic Journeys by Tsiolkovsky, created as production design sketches for the Soviet science fiction movie Cosmic Voyage (1936), includes weightless people secured within a spacecraft, airlocks, storage of supplies in zero gravity, and cosmonauts in rescue following a severed lifeline. All this was twenty-four years before the launching of Sputnik.
Page from Tsiolkovsky's Album of Cosmic Journeys, 1933, pencil on paper, 31.1 x 22.7 cm; Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences; photograph by Jon Agar, Science Museum London exhibition / Flickr; reproduced for commentary and analysis. Copyright status: archival institutional property; verify reproduction rights before CMS upload.
The reason why this is a forgotten-futures story is the rapidity with which the visual and philosophical aspirations of Cosmism were set aside. By the mid-1930s, Soviet aviation had replaced space as the culturally approved obsession. Cosmism's spiritual dimensions, its talk of resurrection and panpsychism, were incompatible with Soviet materialist ideology. The ideas went underground, survived largely in the work of rocket engineers who kept the technical side while quietly discarding the philosophy.
The drawings remained in archives. The rockets eventually flew.
Architecture's Drawings That Never Became Buildings
Perhaps no body of work makes this distinction between imagination and future more visible than the speculative architecture of the 1960s.
Founded in London in 1961 by six young architects –including Peter Cook and Ron Herron– Archigram disseminated their ideas through a mimeograph publication of the same name, which was freely distributed to architectural schools. The graphic style of Archigram is aggressively playful: pop-art color palette, comics-style lettering, photos from the space race and from advertising campaigns collaged and layered upon each other into images that seem like festival flyers rather than urban planning submissions.
Ron Herron's Walking City (1964) is one of the best-known images from Archigram. It depicts giant pods mounted on telescopic legs, which are part submarine, part insect exoskeletons, and are able to move entire populations of cities over post-nuclear terrain. This image is extremely detailed, showing the hatched lines of panels, conduits, docking facilities, and what seems to be heat shields.
Walking City on the Ocean (Exterior perspective), 1966, Ron Herron / Archigram; cut-and-pasted printed and photographic papers and graphite, 29.2 x 43.2 cm; Museum of Modern Art, New York. Copyright: Archigram Archives; verify reproduction rights before CMS upload. Reference the MoMA collection page for editorial use.
It is easy to overlook the visual argument contained in the image if one only sees its sheer strangeness. Herron made his pods appear to be well-engineered objects. The Cold War fear of permanent infrastructure as a nuclear target is written into every joint and leg socket. A city that could travel was a city that could survive.
The drawings did their job without the buildings. They found their way into the architectural schools and shifted a generation’s thinking about what buildings were supposed to be used for, and helped shape the plug-in, modular thinking that would eventually find its way into everything from mobile homes to data centers. Forgotten futures don’t always vanish. Sometimes, they melt into the future.
Afrofuturism: A Future Not Planned For
The typical forgotten future has one thing in common: it had a universal vision of the future that was in fact, very specific. The superhighway future was designed for white suburban car-owners. The Cosmist space future was a Russian intellectual project. The Archigram future, brilliant as it was, was produced by London architects in a decade of colonial endgame.
Afrofuturism asked yet another question: What future do you build when the dominating society finds no space for you in their future?
"Afrofuturism" is a term first used in 1993 by cultural critic Mark Dery; however, the phenomenon itself exists much earlier. Already in the 1950s, Sun Ra, the musician known as Herman Poole Blount born in 1914 in Alabama, had built his own future visual language based on Egyptology and electronics; he made futuristic costumes for his Arkestra and even album covers where black identity existed in futures that never saw it before.
Today, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture curates and archives such visual practice as an independent artistic movement.
Afrofuturism exhibition, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; permanent collection holdings; reproduced for commentary and analysis. Verify specific image reproduction rights before CMS upload.
Octavia E. Butler carried on the same idea into literary work in the form of speculative fiction in her novels that envision survival, power and identity in futures that cannot possibly resemble the present.
A forgotten future, in this framing, is not only a prediction that failed to materialize. It can be a future that was never given room to exist.
The Visual Language of Tomorrow, Now
Looking at these images today is a specific kind of experience. The Futurama model photographs look precise and confident. Tsiolkovsky’s pencil drawings seem almost casual, like hastily scribbled ideas. The Archigram collages have the same sense of excitement as they did in the sixties. The Sun Ra LP cover art has an otherworldly aura about it.
None of them shaped our reality, but each of them inspired imaginations, and that too is a sort of legacy.
The visual culture around forgotten futures matters to anyone interested in how images carry ideas across time. A painting is not only a picture. An architectural drawing is not only a proposal. A sci-fi album cover is not only packaging. Each one is a document of what a particular moment believed the future should look like, and who it thought the future was for.
The Real Question Hidden Inside Every Forgotten Future
There is a temptation to look at this material nostalgically, as though those chrome interiors and optimistic diagrams represent a more hopeful era. It is a temptation worth resisting.
The same decades that produced Futurama's gleaming model highways also produced the Depression, world war, colonial violence and enforced segregation. A polished aesthetic does not point toward a just society. Some of the most visually beautiful futures were imagined by movements whose politics were dangerous.
The better question is not: "How wonderful that people once believed so completely in the future." It is: "What did they think progress meant, and would we still choose that definition today?"
Old architectural drawings are not just pictures of buildings that never got built. They are systems of values in line and tone. The road widths say something about who has freedom to move. The absence of certain faces from World's Fair literature says something about who was imagined living inside the future being sold.
Looking at these images carefully means asking those questions out loud, not just admiring the draftsmanship. The futures that got forgotten often tell us more about the present than the futures that arrived.
