The dazzling energies of world’s fairs are well known —millions of visitors, encyclopaedic displays of goods and ideas, fantastic settings of pavilions and exhibition halls—but the sites that gather the exposition experience into a spatial unity are often overlooked. Civic Visions, World’s Fairs looks at the contribution of site planning to the history of international exhibitions, illustrating the world’s-fair landscapes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The forty objects exhibited, drawn from the CCA collection, include exposition prospectuses and other promotional publications; maps, souvenirs, and guidebooks; illustrated news reports; park histories and builders’ “golden books“; official views of the U.S. Centennial and the World’s Columbian Exposition; Albert Robida’s proposal for Paris’s Exposition universelle de 1900; and a presentation model showing the earliest site plan for Montréal’s Expo ‘67.

Curated by Benjamin Portis, CCA.