TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042792/0427430.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 11.0 KB | 225 lines

                                                                                DESIGN, Page 52

All's Fair in Seville


A splashy Expo '92 opens this week with a focus on both past
and future. The best buildings don't include one from the U.S.

By KURT ANDERSEN/SEVILLE


    For all their polyvinyl sheen and electronic gadgetry and
spiffy biomorphic shapes, world's fairs are 19th century
spectacles. They are celebrations of human (or, anyhow,
bourgeois capitalist) confidence, of mechanical ingenuity, of
rationality, of progress. The first was staged in London's
Crystal Palace in 1851, just as the 19th century was really
becoming the 19th century. At the Philadelphia Centennial
Exposition in 1876, Edison exhibited his phonograph, Bell his
telephone and Underwood his typewriter.

    The 20th century has amply demonstrated machines'
nightmare side and thus tended to extinguish that kind of proud,
dizzy, uncomplicated hubris. Its last full flowering was a
generation ago, when the four full-fledged world's fairs of the
postwar era took place back to back, almost continuously: 1958
in Brussels, 1964-65 in New York City, 1967 in Montreal and 1970
in Osaka. And then, in the neo-Luddite, small-is-beautiful era
since, we have had nothing -- or nothing but piddling,second-and
third-rank expositions that reflected (and self-fulfillingly
confirmed) the tapped-out, lowered-expectations zeitgeist.

    It may not be morning in America anymore, but in Europe,
with communism spent and the trans-Channel tunnel imminent,
there is still just enough of the upward-and-onward spirit to
produce a real old-fashioned (that is, circa 1970) fair in
Seville -- although, in line with recent fashion, it is not
called a world's fair but Expo '92.

    Because a certain kind of modernizing hopefulness fuels
such extravaganzas, prospering, postfascist Spain was the
inevitable next place for such an event. The Spanish government
spent billions on the fair and attendant public works, including
a new high-speed bullet train that makes the trip from Madrid
to Seville in less than three hours. Like any world's fair, Expo
'92 has its fetching gizmos. The 231 IBM touch-screen computer
monitors scattered around the 538-acre site are truly useful:
a visitor, presented with an aerial photo of Expo, touches
anything in the picture and gets a closeup view of the area
touched -- and then, with another touch, a still closer view of
a particular pavilion or theater. Restaurant reservations can
be made on the screens, video messages left for family or
friends.

    But unlike all recent world's fairs, Expo '92 is not
single-mindedly focused on wowing people with visions of the
technology-intensive Utopia just around the corner. It is a
comparatively backward-looking affair, a pageant of past
progress. The official theme is "The Age of Discoveries," and
that pretty much means European colonization, featuring
full-scale replicas of Columbus' ships. In Europe, Eurocentrism
is not yet a bad thing.

    Of course, any modern fair is obliged to give frequent lip
service to a kind of chipper one-worldism (110 countries have
exhibits -- an all-time world's fair record!) and to
environmental sensitivity (organizers planted 300,000 shrubs on
the site!). Moreover, the gee-whiz, spick-and-span perkiness
found in New York's Flushing Meadows in 1964 is strikingly
evident in Seville. At any moment, one expects to see teams of
Esperanto-speaking U.N. technicians in lab coats disembarking
from Hovercraft to brief James Bond.

    The sense of mid-'60s retro time warp seems almost
deliberate. The omnipresent piped-in music is a dated, Muzaky
mishmash. Outside the vast white Pavilion of the Future sits the
pan-European Ariane 4 rocket. There is a heliport and, of
course, a monorail.

    The fair's green themes seem more with-it. Hungary's
folkish, quasi-ecclesiastical pavilion was built out of
Hungarian lumber by an imported team of Hungarian carpenters;
it has a solitary, mysterious-looking hydroponic oak tree
growing inside. The Netherlands' eco-pavilion is exemplary,
novel and fun. An open steel superstructure crisscrossed by
escalators and ramps, this not-quite-a-building is wrapped, as
if by a Whole Earth Christo, in perpetually waterlogged canvas
netting, meant to cool the interior by 10 degrees or more. Expo
'92, like the 1939 and 1964 world's fairs, also has its
obligatory giant globe, in this case a 70-ft. "bioclimatic
sphere" that pumps out a fine cooling mist over a vast stretch
of outdoor space.


    The place is chockablock with fountains, almost all of
them officially described as new-age outdoor-air-conditioning
systems. Water gushes and gurgles almost everywhere. Architect
Nicholas Grimshaw's pavilion for the United Kingdom, a fine,
robust example of the high-tech style at which the British
excel, is the grandest, sleekest Expo aquatecture of all: the
whole plate-glass facade, 60 ft. high and 235 ft. long, is a
waterfall. A lovely, quirkier glass-wall waterfall, the work of
the New York architecture firm SITE, defines a promenade along
one of the Expo avenues. For almost a quarter-mile, the
20-ft.-high serpentine glass zigs and zags sensuously,
paralleled by an artificial creek that catches the falling
water.

    The Chilean pavilion has a 60-ton iceberg in an indoor
pond. But it's the well-conceived, meticulously wrought
Norwegian pavilion that triumphs in the ice-water category. In
fact, Norway's building, a witty, sublime little Constructivist
jewel box designed by Oslo architect Pal Henry Engh, is among
the best at Expo.

    It consists of three objects -- a tower, a tube and a
black box. Visitors enter through a silver-and-black-striped
tower. The interior walls are 29-ft.-high, 6-in.-thick ice
sheets, making a perfectly Scandinavian space -- frigid,
shipshape, elegant and grave, a well-engineered mini-fjord. On
into the 12-ft.-wide tube, which contains the exhibition space.
Outside, the tube resembles a giant clothes-dryer ventilation
duct and sits in a pool atop a black plinth -- and inside the
plinth, in turn, is an aquavit-and-herring restaurant.

    Although the Norwegian pavilion was not cheap (about $15
million), its very temporariness gave license to the designers
to make it strange and wonderful, the perfect folly. But
something is odd about the pavilions at this exposition: unlike
the unmistakably fake, giddily impermanent stage-set structures
of previous world's fairs, these seem curiously normal, like
buildings one might encounter in Miami or a well-to-do Arizona
suburb. Over the past decade or two, as stylistic jags and
economics have made buildings in the real world flimsier, zanier
and culturally mongrelized, real-world architecture has pretty
much converged with world's fair architecture, and Expo '92 can
be judged by virtually the same standards by which one judges,
say, Houston.

    Expo does not suffer in the comparison. There are a dozen
works of intriguing, even distinguished architecture. Some of
the 100-odd buildings seem commissioned by clueless bureaucrats
inclined to toll-booth architecture, and several by
well-intentioned arts-and-crafts types, but the surprise is how
many compelling, even cutting-edge buildings have been put up.
And there is not much correlation between national wealth and
pavilion quality. A few small countries can be very proud, and
some big, rich countries ought to be embarrassed.

    Like, for instance, a certain North American superpower.
When the Expo turf was carved up in 1985, the U.S. was given
the second biggest site. Architect Barton Myers produced a
respectable design, but Congress dithered and finally
appropriated a measly $13 million to build it. In the end,
Myers' scheme, except for a few details, was dumped. There are
no roof, no sides, no back, only a front wall consisting of
cheap wire mesh nailed to cheap metal studs. Inside sit a pair
of geodesic domes previously used in trade shows, two huge Peter
Max murals that look like souvenir-shop curios enlarged to
billboard size, and a homely sub urboid house that is meant to
be typically American but seems quaint at best.

    It is hard to believe that this exceedingly lame showing
is the product of the Reagan and Bush administrations; what
good is blue-chip Republican Babbittry if it can't mount an
impressive world's fair pavilion? Elsewhere at Expo, the Berlin
Philharmonic will play, and Ingmar Bergman will direct Peer
Gynt; at the U.S. pavilion, Arnold Schwarzenegger will stop by
in September to judge a bodybuilding contest.

    World's fairs have traditionally been epicenters of
earnestness. Expo '92 must be the first with strong whiffs of
deliberate irony and in-your-face perversity. The Red Cross, of
all people, has erected one of the edgiest, most bizarro world
pavilions of all, with red steel I beams shooting past thin
white metal uprights at queer angles, red brick walls zigzagging
crazily. Deconstructivism, a fading fad, has found its perfect
project not a moment too soon: according to an Expo spokeswoman,
the architecture is an allusion to the Red Cross's role in
assisting victims of earthquakes.

    Other pieces of Expo have altogether different ambitions;
they are neither good nor bad, exactly, but something else --
Disneyish. The Saudi pavilion, a fake Arab ruin into which a
fake nomadic hovel has been inserted, is like a second-rate SITE
rip-off -- except that SITE actually designed it. The South
Pacific pavilion is a compound of grass huts (or was -- it
burned down last week, but is to be rebuilt promptly). New
Zealand's conventional steel-and-glass facade gives way at one
end to a rugged Pacific promontory, complete with recorded ocean
noises, artificial stones and plastic seabirds.

    Disneyland opened in 1955, at the dawn of the last great
Age of World's Fairs, and Disney World opened in 1971, at its
close. Neither date is a coincidence: the existence of Disney
theme parks on three continents has diminished, if not spoiled,
the once-in-a-lifetime thrill of international expositions.
Florida's Disney World in particular is a world's fair manque,
complete with Utopian subtext, we're-in-business-to-help-people
corporate pavilions and a giant sphere; and now, alas, Expo '92
may be experienced as something of an imitation. "It's sort of
like Disneyland," an Expo '92 flack unhesitatingly said to a
group of visiting journalists just before the first of the
expected 18 million paying customers arrived.

    The fun of Disney parks is a function of their homogenized
high quality, their benign totalitarianism. Expo '92, on the
other hand, has real aesthetic lows and real highs, jewels,
junk, surprises, quirks, genuine diversity. Disney parks won't
serve wine or beer, and operatives shut the gates tight by 9 on
weekdays. In Seville the fair stays open until 4 a.m., night
after bibulous night. Children may not have as much fun at Expo
'92 as they will at Euro Disney, but in Seville the hubbub is
heartening and authentic, full of life as well as production
values.