NY Times: Shanghai World Expo 2010

From: New York Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/global/31expo.html?scp=1&sq=Shanghai%20Expo%202010&st=cse

"Special Report: Shanghai Expo 2010 Turns Spotlight on Nations," by Julie Makinen. NYT summary:
"National pavilions at the world's fair are likely to influence visitors' decisions about vacations, study abroad and business dealings."


May 30, 2010
Shanghai Expo 2010 Turns Spotlight on NationsBy JULIE MAKINEN
HONG KONG — Two years ago, athletes from more than 190 countries came together in Beijing, vying for international acclaim on basketball courts and balance beams at the Summer Olympics. Now, a rematch of sorts is occurring in Shanghai — but this time, the competitors carrying their national flags are the architects and designers of hundreds of pavilions at a 184-day marathon of image and commerce, Expo 2010.

The ultimate winners of this contest will be decided not by referees with stopwatches or judges with scorecards but by the 70 million people — mostly Chinese — who are expected to attend the modern world’s fair before it ends Oct. 31. The impressions they take away are likely to shape such decisions as where they will go on vacation, where they will study abroad, what countries their companies will do business with and even what kinds of food they will eat.

“While the Beijing Olympics gave China the chance to host the world and show the world what China is, at Expo, the Chinese people are the guests and the various nations are playing host, showing China what the world is,” said Urso Chappell, who runs Expomuseum .com, a Web site documenting the history of such events, starting with the 1851 Great Exhibition in London.

“It’s a great opportunity for countries to dispel old myths or create new ones,” he added. “I doubt the average Chinese person ever thinks much about Luxembourg, for instance, but they have a really playful pavilion, and that’s going to certainly leave a lasting impression on those who see it.”

With a theme of “Better City, Better Life,” the Shanghai Expo is loosely organized around the idea of sustainable development. There are “urban best practices” pavilions showcasing cities like Vancouver, British Columbia, and Hamburg and corporate pavilions from companies like Coca-Cola and Cisco. But the main attractions are the national pavilions, which range from modest to imposing, simple to lavish, representational to abstract.

Some, like Britain’s, are the product of national competitions, significant government outlays and years of planning. Others, like that of the United States, were cobbled together at the last minute and funded by the private sector. Macao’s is shaped like a rabbit. The United Arab Emirates’ entry resembles a sand dune. Japan’s has been nicknamed “purple silkworm island.”

By far the most buzzed-about pavilion among both architects and the public is Britain’s “Seed Cathedral,” designed by Thomas Heatherwick. The structure is a six-story cube pierced by about 60,000 thin, transparent rods that extend from it like porcupine quills and sway in the breeze. During the day, the rods — each 7.5 meters, or 25 feet, long — act like fiber-optic filaments, drawing natural light into the building. At night, they project light from inside the structure outward, making it glow like a spiky marshmallow. Locals have dubbed it “the dandelion.”

Each rod, moreover, contains seeds of different plants collected in the Millennium Seed Bank Project, an international conservation effort of the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Before beating out architects including Zaha Hadid, John McAslan and Marks Barfield in the pavilion design competition, Mr. Heatherwick was perhaps best known for art installations.

The British government is touting his project as “a striking, visual demonstration of the U.K. as a creative and innovative nation.” Or, as Sir Andrew Cahn, director of U.K. Trade and Investment, which promotes Britain abroad, has said, it is an effort to show the Chinese that Britain is about more than “cobblestones and fog.”

At earlier world’s fairs, the key draws were often exotic products from distant lands and gee-whiz inventions like the Ferris wheel and the alternating current system of electricity. In today’s world of globalized trade and rapid communications, some architects say, there is a higher premium on the form of the Expo pavilions.

“All pavilions face a content problem,” said Yung Ho Chang, the architect of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, known as the Dream Cube. “These days, what can you put in a pavilion that will be a real experience, that people can’t find on the Internet? That’s why people are putting so much energy into the architecture, and the ideas.”

Michael Speaks, dean of the University of Kentucky College of Design, said the Expo offered the chance to see exciting projects from several young firms, particularly the pavilions from South Korea, Austria and Denmark.

“There’s a real difference between countries trying to represent what they’ve already done and countries trying to prototype what might be possible,” Mr. Speaks said. “Some choose to make a big square box and show movies about what happens at home. The most successful pavilions are about prototyping new ideas.”

Austria’s entry, designed by the Vienna-based architecture firms SPAN and Zeytinoglu, is a curved structure clad in 10 million porcelain tiles that allude to the long tradition of chinaware exported from China to Europe.

“It’s a coming to fruition of a digital design aesthetic, and a way of fabricating, that’s been emerging in the last six to seven years,” Mr. Speaks said, noting that Vienna had been in the vanguard of the trend. “It’s become easier and easier to create digital files and make a machine directly output those things. The result of that is much more formally organic shapes not using off-the-shelf materials or components.”

South Korea’s entry is by the seven-year-old firm Mass Studies, founded by Minsuk Cho, who studied in Seoul and at Columbia University in New York.

The design assembles the letters from the Korean alphabet into a cubelike structure, thus using signs to create the space. The exterior appears pixelated, with black-and-white alphabet squares alternating with colored ones created by a Korean artist, Ik-Joong Kang, that will be sold off piece by piece when the Expo is over to raise money for charity.

Inside, the exhibition is oriented around an abstract map of a Korean city that expresses the convergence of mountains, water and a dense metropolitan area.

The structure, Mr. Speaks said, is an updating of a discussion launched in the 1970s by the seminal book “Learning From Las Vegas,” co-written by the architect Robert Venturi, which looked at how the signs and images adorning buildings can be more important than the buildings themselves.

“What they’ve done here is reverse that or make an argument of that,” Mr. Speaks said. “Here we have images as form — they’re not representing something, they are the form. And that’s just one of the things going on with this building. It’s more evidence that Seoul is emerging as a design capital.”

Previous world’s fairs have left their architectural marks on their host cities. The Eiffel Tower, the Space Needle in Seattle and the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco all began as attractions at such events before becoming landmarks.

If the Expo were being held anywhere but China, it might not be a very big deal, Mr. Speaks said. But given the state of the global economy, and China’s rising economic might, “every architectural firm, from small to big, wants to be in the game in China,” he said. “This is a way that architects and countries can announce to China what their capabilities are.”