Ball & Spike

A motorcade of 300 bright floats, accompanied by even brighter fire engines, motorized troops and limousines, wound through mildly fascinated Manhattan crowds last week to a "World's Fair Rehearsal" in Flushing Meadow Park. As the rolling snowball of Fair publicity thus gained momentum one year from the finish line, Manhattanites began to be aware of another ball--"biggest ever built by man" --which will be white, hollow, 200 ft. in diameter, 18 stories high, and the Theme Centre of the World's Fair. The steel frames of this Perisphere and the Trylon (a three-sided obelisk 700 ft. high) which will stand beside it, were already last week the most conspicuous structures at the Fair grounds.

In the opinion of blunt Manhattan Park Commissioner Robert Moses, "Barnum had his sacred white elephant and every fair is entitled to at least one theme tower." More irreverent remarks than this have been made about the esthetic and symbolic value of the Fair's great ball and spike. At the other extreme, the Fair's publicity department, whose lyricism is more than adequate to its task, has described the Perisphere as symbolic of the all-inclusive World of Tomorrow and the Trylon as a Pointer to Infinity. To the architects who designed the centre, however, the Perisphere and Trylon make a good deal of plain, unsymbolic sense.

Longheaded, high-domed Wallace Kirkman Harrison and affable mustached J. (for Jacques) Andre Fouilhoux were among the architects who planned Rockefeller Center. They share a predilection for economy in architectural form. In evolving their Theme Centre for the Fair they made more than 1,000 sketches before they hit on the ultimate starkness of sphere and pyramidal form. Neither had ever been built before; both would certainly influence other World's Fair architecture to avoid superfluous dressing. And though neither the Sphere nor the symmetrical Trylon alone could serve as a direction-pointing landmark to guide wanderers on the Fair grounds, side by side they will.

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