This was the same insecurity that drove the fathers of Chicago to raise the dreamlike White City, the temporary pavilions of the Chicago World’s Fair that soared along the southern edge of the lake in the summer of 1893. The White City exhibited the future in prototype, pieces of an unfinished puzzle. On August 26, 1893, a day of demonstrations at the Palace of Mechanical Arts, a building twice as large as the U.S. Capitol, the palace rumbled and whirred with machines
