Interama (originally known as the Inter-American Cultural and Trade Center) was a planned international exposition which would have been in Miami, Florida. From the start, the Inter-American Center was conceived as a permanent international exposition of the Americas with cultural, educational, and trade activities, thereby combining the features of an amusement park, world's fair and trade fair.
As a permanent exposition, Interama would have showcased the culture, businesses, government and arts of countries from South America, Central America, North America, and parts of Africa and Europe.
Conception
Recognizing Miami's increasing importance as a commercial and cultural hemispheric hub, business and civic leaders proposed the construction of a Pan-American trade mart in Miami as early as 1919 under the leadership of Miami Mayor Ed Sewell. But it wasn't until 1939 that Florida Senator Claude Pepper and other delegates at the Florida State Chamber of Commerce passed a resolution proposing that a Pan-American trade mart be built in Miami.
In 1950, Washington approved a government-sponsored Inter-American Center in Miami, and on October 12 of that year, several Latin American republics signed preliminary participation in the project. In 1951, the Florida Legislature established the Inter-American Authority under the leadership of Dr. W. H. Walker. At the same time, the IAA selected a bay-front site, five miles (8 km) north of central Miami on a site originally intended to be an airport.
New York architect Hugh Ferriss was the main visual interpreter of the first master plans from 1950–1956. Ferriss had previously worked as the official renderer for the 1939 New York World's Fair.
Development
The first plans for the permanent fair were published in a two-page spread in Sunday Miami Herald on June 21, 1950 (Ferris would later publish the very first rendering in his 1953 Power in Buildings). The first plan was the work of a group of architects directed by architect Robert Fitch Smith and including Russell Pancoast. As shown in the two renderings that Ferriss was paid to realize (about $1500), the project had a strong naval theme and seemed inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's postwar civic projects.
Layout and theme structures
The complex consisted of a quasi-circular arrangement of buildings around a one-mile (1.6 km) perimeter long lake and was organized in three areas—Science, Art, Industry—expressing the "culture of the American countries at this time in history." Arriving from the boulevard, counterclockwise, the visitor would encounter the United States and Latin American pavilions to reach the palm tree-lined "Allée of the Arts" heading to the Grand Plaza, the Hemisphere as theme center, the Spire and the Hanging Gardens. Passing the small bridge, one reached the science area with the aquarium, and other research and industry pavilions (on the other side of the outside basin were planned a marine amphitheater, a beach, the Water Gate and the Club Island). According to Ferriss' memorandum, the Spire and its two ascending- descending cars "like many historic shafts, [would serve] as a site-marker. This shaft, however, is conceived and designed as embodying a massive spiral movement; it is as though a number of forces, or of national aspirations, having sprung from the soil of the Americas have now united into one force which spirals, or aspires, upward and in unison." The -diameter Hemisphere was supposed to include a decorative map of the Americas and be the central gathering place. As Ferriss suggested, "The President of ........ will speak tonight at the Hemisphere; someone may say to his girl 'meet you at 8:30 at the Hemisphere (sic)."
Ferriss' colored drawings (archived at Columbia University and the Florida State Archives in Tallahassee) show that in 1954–55 the project was simplified in terms of overall planning, but kept its characteristic semi-circular structure of a lagoon surrounded by concentric layers of exhibition buildings, canals and parking.
Architecture
Ferriss addressed the modernity of the Interama buildings and mentioned in Power in Buildings that the original character of the Center "would be surmised from recently constructed buildings in Florida." For the New York architect, these buildings differed "completely from the 'Spanish-American style'" popular in the 1920s, and by now constituted "an indigenous architecture" developed by the participating architects for the sub-tropical climate.