I was looking for a lost book in the stacks and saw a few items that were unusual for the collection or were classified for a general collection rather than the special collection of the Scholes Library of Ceramics. One of them was
Magic Motorways by Norman Bel Geddes, published in 1940 just after he'd designed the
Futurama exhibit for the 1939 New York World's Fair. Scholes serves the art and engineering schools of the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, part of SUNY. The engineering is mostly related to ceramics (not surprising), glass, and other materials. Not so much traffic or civil engineering. The book was a gift in 1951 so it's not that surprising that it crept into the collection, and it actually has circulated a few times in the last twenty years.
The Futurama exhibit envisioned the world twenty or more years into the future. Things like the interstate highway system, super highways on city outskirts and smaller feeder highways out from the city, high towers dispersed around the city, divided pedestrian and car traffic but big streets. Some of this has happened, some of this has happened badly, some of this has been demolished and replaced by a denser fabric or parks over sunken highways (Boston's Big Dig or Dallas's Klyde Warren Park, for example).
I was intrigued by this illustration on page 270:
It rather looks like a meld of some of the Italian rationalist buildings I saw in Italy last month and the
Porta Nuova development in Milan. The plaza (Piazza Gae Aulenti) at the Porta Nuova is a lively pedestrian area and the car traffic zips underneath and there's a train station (Garibaldi station) just to the East.
Porta Nuova
One of the side treats was seeing the NBG logo on the spine of Magic Motorways:
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