The Federal Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair presented an optimistic vision of America’s past and future. Its centerpiece, “The American Journey,” was a seventeen-minute multimedia ride with narration written by Ray Bradbury. On the fair’s opening day, civil rights demonstrators protested racial discrimination outside while President Lyndon Johnson spoke at the pavilion. After the fair closed, the building was abandoned, leaving behind a monument to its Space Age vision of America.

I had been an awestruck kid at the 1964 World’s Fair. About a decade later I returned to photograph the abandoned Federal Pavilion and found the words “The American journey has not ended. America is never accomplished. America is always still to build.” Those words stayed with me and eventually gave this larger project its name.