Century of surprise

Browse through an album of old photographs, and you will find that Americans at the end of the 19th century look anything but modern. Men were still sporting top hats and bowlers, while women were decked out in long dresses and elaborate bonnets. Many new buildings of that era now also seem like relics from the past. Twentieth-century world's fairs presented visions of the future, yet the showpieces constructed for the fairs in Chicago (1893) and St. Louis (1904) still followed classical traditions taught in the leading architectural schools of the previous century.