This isn't a photo of a real highway. It's a model created twenty years before America's first Interstate was built.
Who made it? Norman Bel Geddes, the most important designer you've never heard of.
He also predicted malls, revolving restaurants, and self-driving cars...
Norman Melancton Geddes, known as Big Norm, was born in 1893 in Michigan. He married Helen Belle Schneider in 1916 and changed his name to Norman Bel Geddes.
He started out as a theatre set designer, first in LA and then for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
But in 1927 Bel Geddes founded his own industrial design studio - he had discovered a personal design philosophy and a vision of the future.
And he soon applied it to just about everything, from radios to dressing tables:
He was also interested in architecture, and made a submission to the 1931 competition to design the Ukrainian State Theatre.
He even designed a circus building for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey...
And, when pondering restaurants and the amusement industry, Bel Geddes proposed a revolving restaurant at the top of a tower:
Even calendars and filing cabinets and dictaphones interested him.
Bel Geddes saw opportunities for design everywhere; he knew that everything around us is a result of design, whether intentional or not, and wanted them to be designed properly.
He seemed to have a unique mixture of creative boldness, profound optimism, and sharp perception.
In a 1932 book called Horizons he predicted the rise of the mall: a huge, climate-controlled building in which cinemas, banks, restaurants, and shops would gather under one roof.
In 1942 he designed and oversaw the creation of a huge installation called the "War Maneuver Models" for Life Magazine, in which land and naval battles all across the world, from the Pacific to Europe, were envisaged on great scale and highly accurate detail.
Perhaps, above all, Bel Geddes was fascinated and excited by automobiles.
He worked with Chrysler, among other companies, and designed "cars of the future" like this one. He also designed fuel trucks for Texaco - one of his few vehicular designs that went into production.
Bel Geddes also designed huge aeroplanes and ocean liners, all in his trademark streamlined design, larger than life and focussed on progress, modernity, comfort, safety, and convenience.
His radical ideas, though rarely built, were immensely popular.
Running throughout all of Bel Geddes' work is a feverish optimism and faith in progress.
He knew times were changing and that technology was responsible for this - his desire was that this rapidly approaching future should turn out the right way and fulfil its potential:
Thanks to his visionary designs, his boldness, and his talent for PR, Bel Geddes was in many ways responsible for the streamlined look of mid-century America.
A shift away from the geometric decadence of Art Deco to the smooth, curved, unadorned Streamline Moderne.
Of course, all these curves would be replaced in the decades after WWII by the straight lines of Modernism, the child of Bauhaus, brought to America by the likes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.
His version of the future looks rather nostalgic and even naive now.
But one of Bel Geddes' predictions was absolutely correct.
In 1936 he approached Shell Oil with the idea of creating a "City of Tomorrow" for one of their advertising campaigns.
They liked his proposal and so he created both models and concepts for them:
General Motors noticed this, and saw in Bel Geddes a man with sufficient talent, energy, and audacity of vision to convince the world that the car was the future.
So at the 1939 World's Fair in New York Bel Geddes was asked to design the GM exhibition.
Its name? Futurama.
And it was a vast installation: a one-acre model with 500,000 buildings, 1 million trees, and 50,000 cars.
It depicted several American cities in the year 1960, with large stretches of farmland and mountains between them, all connected by immense highways.
Spectators sat in moving armchairs fitted with microphones and had Futurama narrated to them: a vision of America in 1960, where motorways could stretch from city to city, over farmland and gorges and rivers, connecting the country with "safety, comfort, speed, and economy."
Over five million people attended Futurama. It had not only shown them just how much the car could (and even should) guide the future of America's urban and rural landscape - it had given them a clear idea of what it would look like.
Bel Geddes was shaping popular imagination.
National road networks had been in progress since 1916, but none of it was standardised or on the scale of what lay ahead: the Federal Highway Act 1956.
$100 billion and three decades later came an Interstate Highway System almost identical to the one imagined by Bel Geddes.
In his 1940 book Magic Motorways Bel Geddes explained Futurama - both why it was so popular (proposing a solution everybody faced) and his own hopes for it.
Bel Geddes was optimistic about highways; he thought they would create a safer, happier, more prosperous, unified world.
It was in this book that he seemed to predict self-driving cars, in a chapter titled "Eliminate the Human Factor in Driving".
Ever-concerned for road safety, Bel Geddes pointed out that even if technology improved, humans didn't. The key, then, was to remove them altogether.
And in the closing chapter of Horizons, from 1932, we find a rallying cry that sums up Bel Geddes' whole outlook.
Visitors to Futurama in 1939 were given this badge. And it's correct. Norman Bel Geddes knew before anybody else what the cities of the future - built or rebuilt around cars - would look like.
But the question remains: is this future as bright as the one he hoped for?
