Conditioning the future: Paris 1937 as a civic and urban event

Amongst the many national and international industrial fairs that have pushed the boundaries of traditional, mostly single-themed fairs of old towards survey-type and novelty-orientated events, the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne held between late May and late November in Paris, France, arguably holds a special place in the annals of such events. It is in this environment that the Exposition Internationale attempted to present a view of (and to) the world that was at once not totalitarian and artistically new; the former was endeavoured in the form of a visualization of the city through the creation of a new viewing terrace, while the latter emerged in the form of a 600 m2 mural named ‘The Electric Fairy’ whose creation was entrusted to the French artist Raoul Dufy. This paper positions the 1937 Fair between these two re-inscriptions of urban life as a series of modern interventions; it will do so by tracing the many contours of an eminently political and urban translation of modernity into a non-totalitarian way of life with the help of differently structured archival material and original texts from the 1930s.