"My most ambitious and time-consuming job was the two and a half page spread for LIFE of the Seattle World's fair, February 1962. In the months prior I made trips to Seattle (my first to the West) for conferences and on-the-spot surveys while construction was in progress. I had been given carte blanche and was on my own. I talked the editors into accepting my idea of a night scene with spectacular lighting - which I had to invent. With plans, photos and color transparencies of a very accurate scale model, my work was cut out for me, actually six months from start to finish. Ninety five percent of the work was done with the airbrush and numberless friskets. Small details with the smallest brushes available. No-one saw the work in progress nor knew what to expect. No researchers looking over my shoulders. My one and only such experience. This was next to last assignment for LIFE. Change of art director thrust me aside. Some personal antagonisms didn't help." The Fair opened April 21st 1962 and had more of its fair share of lunacy - the Bubbleator Elevator, the biggest Birthday Cake in the world, a Wild Mouse ride, an International Fountain, a Food Circus and the usual appearence of the House of Tomorrow. It was the setting for one of the more vapid of Elvis Presley's movies, It Happened at the Fair. The Space Needle from which Elvis surveyed both girl and landscape, was originally painted a warm orange which was criticised at the opening (not least by Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh) for looking like the priming paint used on bridges. Not the first example this of the meddling of the British Royal Family in aesthetic matters way beyond their ken. For Tony the job signified the end of a lucrative and widely distributed source of employment with LIFE - perhaps repeating the way that he had been eased out of FORTUNE by the new art directors' orientation towards European modernism after Hank Brennan. Tony's visualisation is photographed above in its frame on his patio at Mount Tabor. It has a compulsive, even obsessive sense of detail, all of it accurate, none of it approximated. See how sparkling is the Amusement Zone, known confusingly as the Gay Way, a range of up-to-date European amusement features radiating light but clear in structure. |