Talk:Unisphere

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I found the following on an the orphaned article New York World& - can someone incorporate it eventually:

Constructed for the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair, the Unisphere is the largest globe of the Earth on Earth. Built by United States Steel, it stands about 12 Stories tall with a 20 foot high base. The location of the Structure is in Flushing Meadow-Corona Park, Queens, New York where you will find it behind the Queens Museum, in the same location that it was during the fair.

Design for the Unisphere took several days using the computers of the time to do the calculations. It is an open structure with the supports,which are stainless steel, clearly showing. Also, the Earth is unbalanced so they had to find the right type of pedestal for it to stand on. It is on a twenty-foot high, three-prong pedestal. The land masses are also Stainless Steel. The designers also considered the moist winds that periodically blow across Long Island and Queens.

Built for a World's Fair, it is among great achitectural company. The Paris World Expo brought us the Eiffel Tower. The Seattle World's Fair brought us the Space Needle. Even the Queens Museum was built for the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, and that once housed the U.N. General Assembly before they moved to their present location.

It was designed with the idea that this was how we look from space, and to show a unified Earth. In the middle 1960s, the so called "space race" was on. This was one of the main themes of the 1964-1965 World's Fair. After looking at several designs, Robert Moses, the president of the fair, wanted something that would state the idea in a simple manner. The idea came for a large globe that did not show land borders. They named the structure "unisphere", which means "Peace through understanding", and was one of the slogans of the fair. The Unisphere is designed to resemble what Earth would look like to people from other worlds, I don't assume whether there are or aren't any here. Surrounding the globe at various angles are three rings that represent the flight patterns of orbital satellites.

The Unisphere is an example of the World's Fair ideal of the future, unity, and technology. It stands as an example of man's achievements on this globe, and a symbol for the ideals many of us strive to achieve, "peace through understanding".