Agricultural Building, Northern Exposure, 1893, in Columbian Exposition Album, Rand McNally & Co., 14.
2026 Fall Exhibition
America Takes the Stage: From the White City to Whitehall
ON VIEW NOVEMBER 10, 2026 – MAY 30, 2027
Guest Curator Mosette Broderick, Author, Historian and Professor of Architecture, New York University
In the summer of 1893, Chicago unveiled the World's Columbian Exposition, a "White City" of grand neoclassical buildings, innovative technology, and manicured landscape that declared America's arrival as a cultural equal to Europe. Designed by architect Daniel H. Burnham and landscape visionary Frederick Law Olmsted, the Fair attracted 27 million visitors seeking the wonder of a meticulously crafted American dream.
Henry Flagler was watching. A decade later, he would transpose that vision southward, creating Palm Beach as an American resort destination for wealthy northern travelers seeking escape from the cold. Using his railroad empire and grand hotels as infrastructure, Flagler positioned himself at the center of his own creation, and in 1902, built Whitehall as his permanent residence, constructing it in the architectural language of the Fair itself.
Both the White City and Whitehall were exercises in curated fantasy: temporary and permanent monuments to American ambition, wealth, and aspiration. Both were designed to draw Americans inward, to prove that world-class culture and spectacle need not require a transatlantic voyage. Both harnessed architecture and landscape as tools of persuasion, transforming raw land into destinations that felt timeless and European, yet distinctly American.
This exhibition explores how the ephemeral magic of Chicago's Fair inspired Flagler's enduring vision for Florida, and how Whitehall stands today as the only permanent monument to that transformative moment in American cultural history.
This fall, the Flagler Museum invites you to experience that vision firsthand. America Takes the Stage: From the White City to Whitehall opens November 10, 2026, tracing the arc from Chicago's dazzling 1893 Exposition to the sun-drenched grandeur of Palm Beach, and revealing how one man's encounter with America's greatest architectural dream became the world you are standing in today.
2026 Fall Exhibition Lectures
From Chicago to Palm Beach: The Legacy of the 1893 World’s Fair by Geoffrey Baer
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2026
5:30 PM Cocktails; 6:00 PM Lecture
PBS television host and Chicago historian Geoffrey Baer takes audiences on a virtual tour of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and its breathtaking “White City.”Designed by Daniel Burnham and legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the Fair was a wonderland of architecture, planning, and progress – one that largely vanished within a year of its closing. It’s influence, however, endured. Baer will trace how the Fair inspired the City Beautiful movement and transformed the way cities were imagined and designed, with a legacy that can still be seen at Whitehall and throughout Palm Beach. Along the way, he will explore some of the Fair’s more unexpected contributions to American life, from the Ferris Wheel to familiar products introduced there, revealing how an ephemeral exposition left an extraordinary and lasting imprint on the modern world.
The White City and the Making of Modern America: An Alternate History by Gerald Larson
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2026
5:30 PM Cocktails; 6:00 PM Lecture
Gerald Larson, Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Cincinnati and author of The Skyscraper and the White City, offers a provocative alternate history of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Larson will explore architect John Wellborn Root’s original—and unrealized—vision for the Fair: a colorful, architecturally diverse environment oriented toward Lake Michigan that would allow visitors to encounter competing visions of American architecture. Root’s sudden death in 1891 changed everything. His partner, Daniel Burnham, instead created the unified, classically inspired ensemble of stark white facades that became the celebrated “White City.” Drawing on his extensive research into Root’s work, Larson will examine why Root’s ideas were abandoned and how that decision shaped the Fair’s legacy. He concludes with a provocative question: Had Root lived, might he, rather than Burnham, have become the “Father of American city planning”?
Designing the American Dream: Then & Now by Alice Rawsthorn
TUESDAY, JANUARY 19, 2027
5:30 PM Cocktails; 6:00 PM Lecture
Award-winning design critic and author Alice Rawsthorn—described by MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli as “the best design critic in the entire world”—brings an international perspective to the enduring legacy of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Based in London, Rawsthorn was a foreign correspondent and architecture critic for the Financial Times before writing a weekly design column for The New York Times. Her books, including Design as an Attitude and Hello World: Where Design Meets Life, have been published in more than a dozen languages. At the Flagler Museum, Rawsthorn will explore the Fair’s impact in its own time and its continuing influence on design, architecture, art, and technology. Looking from the White City to the present, she will consider how its ambitious vision of the future resonates with the profound transformations occurring today in our lives, values, and ecology.
