A great beginning: Crystal Palace

The very first of the world expositions revolved around a great building, in terms of size and stature. There were not yet national pavilions, and when in 1851 the first such Expo opened in London in the midst of Hyde Park it took place in a “Crystal Palace” erected in line with plans by Joseph Paxton. The edifice was so breath-takingly modern that to this day it is revered as the paragon for a form of architecture reduced to its bare bones. Contemporaries already debated whether the building was a huge step toward a new architecture of the Industrial Revolution, applauded it, and at times were critical of it, one example being Gottfried Semper. In London it was not just an outer skin for exhibits that had arisen, but the very symbol of a new age. On show were products from just short of 30 countries. Austria, for example, chose as its champion mechanically made furniture by Thonet. The participating nations presented their wares in their own sections, to which end the bright interior was in part subdivided by dark curtains. While official architecture in the mid-19th century was still stuck firmly in historical shapes, the Crystal Palace and the industrial buildings popping up everywhere constituted the first prototypes of Modernism.

Big, bigger, Expo: the Eiffel Tower and Galerie des Machines

The architecture in 1998, the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, was even more daring. The Eiffel Tower stood 325 meters tall, making it the highest building in the world, and “Galerie des Machines”, with a footprint of 422 by 114 meters and a maximum height of almost 50 meters was by far the largest covered structure made by human hand. Since the Paris World Expo of 1867, next to the exhibition halls proper a kind of theme park had arisen. There, the participating nations were represented not by their latest products but by their respective traditional architecture. Imitations went so far that in 1873 at the Vienna World Expo part of Venice’s canals and gondolas were reconstructed. In the heyday of Colonialism, “Negro villages” complete with genuine inhabitants were also highly popular.

Change and Self-Contemplation:
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion

The grand era of the Pavilions of Nations commenced in 1929 in Barcelona. At quite a late date, if you think about it. As the beginning of the century had already witnessed the first dedicated building exhibitions. In 1901 and 1908, pioneering buildings had been erected on Darmstadt’s Mathildenhöhe, including the world-famous Wedding Tower, a pure symbol, as had been the Eiffel Tower. In 1925, Paris hosted the “Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes”, a “miniature World Expo”, with buildings by Le Corbusier and Konstantin Melnikov that were to become key milestones of modern architecture. Only two years later Stuttgart celebrated the opening of the Weissenhof Estate with another large exhibition. Before the inhabitants moved in, the houses were open for viewing. In such a climate of spectacular stagings of the ‘New’, in 1929 the German Pavilion for the Barcelona World Expo arose. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created an almost purpose-free house that served only as a place to be visited by the King of Spain during the opening ceremony. Otherwise it represented nothing other than itself – and therefore the stunning principles of a new form of architecture and a new sense of space. In a study that was to become one of the classics of architectural sociology, Juan Pablo Bonta succeeded in showing that the pavilion initially was as good as ignored and only later emerged as an icon of Modernist architecture.

Demonstration of power and rivalry: Albert Speer’s pavilion

This was driven not least by the course German history then took: Modernism’s model country presented itself in a quite different manner in 1937 at the Paris World Expo, which was to become a portent warning of the massive conflict that was soon thereafter to push Europe into the abyss of disaster. Instead of Mies’s sense of instability and openness, Albert Speer’s pavilion of the “Third Reich” as a gesture of power carved in stone rivaling the Soviet Pavilion opposite. Given the way such architectural muscles were being flexed it could have seemed obvious to assume things would not end well. But in the shadow of the super-powers posturing, architectural change was also in evidence in Paris. Jaromír Krejcar designed the Czechoslovak Pavilion – a bright high-tech steel-and-glass affair, Josep Lluís Sert masterminded the Spanish Pavilion. On show there were among other things Pablo Picasso’s response to the German Luftwaffe’s bombing of the civil population of Guernica. Alvar Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion is one of the rare cases in which not only the outer appearance has lodged in people’s minds: The organically shaped wooden walls pre-empt the special Nordic version of a Modernism with a human face.

New York visions of tomorrow: Futurama by General Motors

In 1939, the World Expo moved to New York, focusing not on the nations but on industry. The real crowd-puller was General Motors’ “Futurama”. On a kind of conveyor belt, visitors were whisked past a huge city Diorama that presented them with an astonishingly accurate forecast of America in 1960: Skyscrapers and highways paved the way for Auto City. Shell also contracted Norman Bel Geddes, who had designed the “Futurama”, to create a gigantic city model for the company.

Media spectacle: Le Corbusier’s Philipps Pavilion

At the 1958 Brussels World Expo it was a different branch of industry that invested big money in grand gestures. Now, it was no longer the auto or oil industry that was the avant-garde, but electronics corporation Philipps. The latter commissioned the world’s most famous architect Le Corbusier, together with composer and architect Iannis Xenakis to build a pavilion that would house an audiovisual installation. This building should bekame a world-famous landmark. Germany opted for a pavilion world devised by Sep Ruf and Egon Eiermann as a counter-symbol to the Speer architecture in Paris in 1937. The light Modernism was not the only option for the West. Neo-Classicist Edward Durell Stone clad the US Pavilion with an ornamental curtain, prompting Sigfried Giedion to sense the betrayal of Modernism. “Playboy architecture” was the accusation of the High Priest of avant-garde architecture.

Lego bricks and tens: Moshe Safdie, Frei Otto and Rolf Gutbrod

Expo 1967 in Montreal remains to this day lodged in people’s minds thanks to the residential complex made of prefabricated concrete cells in the city designed by then then 29-year-old Moshe Safdie using a mass of Lego bricks. The Americans presented a Buckminster Fuller geodetic dome, the acrylic bubble of which burned down quite spectacularly in 1976 during renovation work, only to be rebuilt. Frei Otto joined forces with Rolf Gutbrod to create a kind of dummy run for the Munich Olympic stadium in 1972. The German Pavilion’s tent-like structure was torn but in Vaihingen outside Stuttgart to this day the trial structure stands, essentially a life-size model used to prove the feasibility of the tent idea before work went ahead in Montreal.

Robots and lamp bulbs: Kenzo Tange’s Expo Plaza

The Expo in Osaka in 1970 was the highpoint of post-War technological fervor, a last celebration of the future before the oil and ecological crises became the prevailing issues of the 1970s. Kenzo Tange and Arata Isozaki erected a giant steel mega-structure, the “Expo Plaza”. A total of 64 million visitors flocked to the show (not topped until Shanghai with 73 million) to see the huge robots and brashly colorful pavilions for themselves. Germany presented a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen in a dome created by architect Fritz Bornemann. The Swiss also eschewed self-adoration in the form of presentations of goods made in Switzerland and instead opted for a pavilion by Willi Walter that simply amounted to a huge, sparkling and resonant tree made of thousands of light bulbs and aluminum rods.

Firmly under the sign of sustainability: the World Expos from 1992 onwards

The idea of the Expo as one giant architectural spectacle got lost during the course of the next decades. Expos such as that in New Orleans in 1984 had to contend with financing difficulties. Sevilla 1992 and Lisbon 1998 both used the Expo more or less skillfully as a form of event-driven urban development project. Expo 2000 in Hanover promised sustainability: A large part of the exhibition took place on the existing trade-fair complex and a few country pavilions were then meant to be dedicated to new uses. But one of the icons, the Dutch Pavilion created by MVRDV with its staggered landscapes, now stands on the grounds, completely dilapidated, serving only as a popular photo theme for fans of neo-Romantic ruins. Less ecologically damaging was Shigeru Ban’s Japanese Pavilion, made of pressed rolls of recycled paper – they had to be reinforced with wood and then sealed with a fire-protective coating, however. Peter Zumthor’s Swiss Pavilion differed from many of the others, where you had to wait in long queues to get in, as it was quite literally perforated with entrances and therefore pleasantly easy to visit. It was made of stacked wooden boards and reached a height of nine meters on a footprint of 50 by 50 meters. And the German Pavilion in Hanover … well, let us keep our silence. “German values” were represented not that far away in Wolfsburg by the Volkswagen corporation’s “Auto City”: A project that is just as ideological and spiced up with architecture as the 1939 “Futurama”.

Oh sober, vain contemporary

Expo Milan set out to do a lot of things differently. But the team at Herzog & de Meuron was not able to get its way, as Jacques Herzog recently revealed in an interview with Florian Heilmeyer for Uncube magazine. The images currently doing the rounds suggest it’s going to all be Vanity Fair again. Where Herzog & de Meuron had proposed quite the opposite. Of course, Expo 1970 was also a colorful cornucopia of buildings cashing in on all manner of capers. The difference being that back then the world gazed in innocent astonishment. And we’re long past that point and for years have been witnessing Expos as zombie-like zest forced upon us by those who feel we should set our eyes on messages that are as rapid as they are vapid.