As the Panama Canal neared completion, US cities competed to host an international fair celebrating the bridging of two worlds. San Francisco, still rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake, won the bid and constructed the fair in record time, opening the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in 1915. When the fair ended, 288 days later, everything that could not be sold and shipped off was dynamited, leaving the leased land open for the development of the Marina.
Despite its impermanence, the PPIE influenced a generation of visitors and became emblematic of the city’s rebirth as a potential utopia—if city planners only chose to follow the Exhibition’s model. Drawings, collages and printed ephemera follow the architectural structures of this lost city, pointing at what could have been and/or what we’re better off without.
Works
Towering, 2010Selected Sources, 2010
Flight Paths (Lincoln and Art), 2010
Untitled I-III, 2010