Now open: “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America”

The exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America opens today at the Harry Ransom Center. Running through January 6, 2013, the exhibition explores the life and career of American stage and industrial designer, futurist, and urban planner Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958).

Read what T Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Metropolis magazine have to say about the exhibition and Bel Geddes.

More than 300 items in the exhibition reflect the broad range of Bel Geddes’s interests and work and demonstrate how he shaped and continues to influence American culture and lifestyle. A polymath who had little academic or professional training in the areas he mastered, Bel Geddes had the ability to look at trends and the contemporary environment and envision how they could affect and alter the future.

“When you drive on an interstate highway, attend a multimedia Broadway show, dine in a sky-high revolving restaurant or watch a football game in an all-weather stadium, you owe a debt of gratitude to Norman Bel Geddes,” said exhibition organizer Donald Albrecht, an independent curator and curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York.

All materials in the exhibition except two loaned items come from the Norman Bel Geddes archive at the Ransom Center.