Shanghai Expo 2010 Turns Spotlight on Nations

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.

Courtesy of Julie Makinen, New York Times