About this app
Found, not built?
The world’s fairs of 1851 to 1915 put up whole cities of domes, towers, and statuary, often in under two years, then took most of them down. This app gathers the photographs and the dates on record for 16 fairs and 25 buildings from the same era, and lays out the questions worth asking about them.
The main lens is the research of Michael Kruse on the My Lunch Break YouTube channel, plus a few researchers on X, credited by handle. Their points are summarized here in our own words; watch or read the originals for the full case.
Every photograph is public domain or openly licensed, from the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons, with its credit, licence, and source link. A few photos also have a colour version marked Hypothetical colorization: those colours were added for this app with an AI image model and are a guess, not a record.