Phil Patton offers reading recommendations relating to “Visions of the Future”

In conjunction with the exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, the Harry Ransom Center hosts “Visions of the Future,” the tenth biennial Flair Symposium. The Flair Symposium honors the ideals set forth by Fleur Cowles and her landmark Flair magazine.

From November 1-3, the Ransom Center will bring together historians, architects, industrial designers, and visionaries in the fields of science fiction, film, theater, and future studies to explore the ways the future has been imagined over time.
Author and curator Phil Patton will moderate one of the symposium panels, “Motorways in the Twentieth Century and Today.”

Patton is the author of Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway, Autodesign International, and Made in USA: The Secret Histories of the Things that Made America. He has worked on several exhibitions, serving as Curatorial Consultant for Different Roads: Automobiles for the Next Century (The Museum of Modern Art, 1999) and Co-Curator for Cars, Culture, and the City (Museum of the City of New York, 2010). He writes for The New York Times and teaches at the Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts.

Below are some of Patton’s reading recommendations relating to the symposium theme. Mentioned authors Paul Daniel Marriott and Tom Vanderbilt are also panel participants for “Motorways in the Twentieth Century and Today.”