IBM, Eames and Saarinen at the 1964 World's Fair

In 1964 New York hosted it's third World's Fair. Much of the American focus was on high-tech and space-age technology, and in many ways represented the birth of the computer age, with pavillions built by corporations such as Bell and Westinghouse. Perhaps the most striking was built by International Business Machines, or IBM.

They engaged Eero Saarinen, the great Finnish architect who would die before the structure was even started, and Charles and Ray Eames, the celebrated designers, to create their pavillion. They came up with an egg-shaped cinema, under which an acre of steel trees formed a strange futuristic garden. The cinema featured 22 screens that showed the various elements of the Eameses' film Think, explaining data processing, and the seated audience were transported en masse from below to the theatre on a massive set of hydraulic rams.

Charles and Ray Eames created a rather brilliant abstract record of the show on film, IBM at the Fair. Using sped-up timelapse photography, they turn the audience themselves into bits of data to be processed by IBM's vast pavillion. Brilliant music by Elmer 'Man with the Golden Arm' Bernstein helps accentuate the chaos and beauty of it all. The style of the film would be imitated two decades later by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass in their masterpiece Koyaanisqatsi, to rather less optimistic effect. This blog here contains some excellent further information.