The theme of the exhibition - "Better City, Better Life" - implies an appeal to ecological urban planning and the principles of "sustainable development", to the idea of a "city of the future" that provides its residents with an optimal standard of living. But it was not very clearly realized in the Shanghai EXPO: its space of more than 5 km2 on the banks of the Huangpu River was previously occupied by residential areas and an industrial zone. All the buildings that existed there (a total of 270 enterprises, including the huge Jiang Nan shipyard, which employed 10,000 people, as well as the houses of 18,000 families) were demolished. The now erected pavilions will also be dismantled after October 31, 2010 - the closing date of the exhibition, and although it was assumed that their projects had to take into account such an outcome, this is unlikely to be an absolutely "green" decision. Then offices and shopping centers will be erected on this territory. As a result, several cycles of construction and demolition will take place (in addition, it is necessary to take into account the construction of new structures for evicted citizens and factories in another part of Shanghai), and it is this sphere of human activity that is the leader in environmental pollution, and the lion's share of this pollution falls on China … Of course, it is possible to build and dismantle it using ecological methods, but there is no reason to hope for their large-scale application in this case.
Despite this, the 2010 World's Fair is intended to restore prestige to this type of event, which has gradually lost its attractiveness since the 1970s. In its course, Shanghai should appear as another "world capital", and for this purpose the Chinese authorities spent about 50 billion dollars: before the EXPO, the city underwent significant reconstruction, first of all, its transport system was expanded and modernized. With the same energy, the host country asserts its position on the territory of the exhibition complex itself. Central to it is its Oriental Crown National Pavilion, a 60-meter structure reminiscent of traditional temples and gates, fitted with bright red concrete dougun brackets (usually made of wood and on a much smaller scale). This approach - combining ethnic tradition with modernity in different proportions - turned out to be key for the pavilions of many other countries (in total, 192 states presented their expositions, of which 97 erected their own buildings, the rest occupied sections in common buildings, for example, African; 50 public organizations such as the UN and the Red Cross).
But China is also ready to show that it is keeping pace with the times: high-tech solutions distinguish its other buildings. Expo Boulevard, the main axis of the exhibition complex, is covered by the “world's largest membrane roof” with an area of 100 mx 1000 m (a project by Stuttgart engineers Knippers Helbig). Interactive façades adorn the Dream Cube pavilions (Shanghai corporate pavilion where the city advertises itself as the center of global business), created by ESI Design and FCJZ, Information and Communications, commissioned by leading Chinese mobile operators, and Magic Box, dedicated to the Chinese state company State Grid (project Atelier Brückner, Stuttgart). Expressed in this way, China's advanced positions in the field of future technologies forced many participating countries to also turn to them in their pavilion projects, and there, it seems, were generally more successful than in ethno-stylizations. It is to this line, combining the achievements of NTP with the simplicity of the solution, that undoubtedly the best EXPO pavilion belongs to the British project of Thomas Heatherwick: a huge cube called the "Cathedral of Seeds" is covered with 7-meter transparent "needles" of plexiglass, at the end each of which is sealed with one of the seeds of 60,000 different plants allocated for this purpose by the Kew Botanical Gardens. After the end of the exhibition, all of them will be donated to the Chinese side. The background for the pavilion is a small dark gray "valley" imitating the wrapping paper in which the "gift" arrived in Shanghai.
Great Britain seems to be the winner of the World Expo, staying on the verge between popular and elite, highly original and attractive, but unfortunately, this cannot be said about many other leading countries in international development. Below any criticism is the US pavilion, built with sponsorship money (since the 1990s, the state has been forbidden to allocate significant funds for the EXPO) designed by the Canadian architect Clive Grout: it resembles a hangar or a suburban shopping center, and its key exhibit is removed in Hollywood, the film is about "sustainable development." The German (Schmidhuber + Kaindl) and French (architect Jacques Ferrier) pavilions are banal: the first of them is in the spirit of “digital architecture”, the second is in the mainstream of “eco-chic”, with a classic roof garden. The architects of the Italian pavilion (Iodice Architetti and others), whose facades are partially made of transparent concrete, clearly overestimated the effectiveness of this material: otherwise, their project resembles the most simplified variation on the theme of Daniel Libeskind's work.
Much more successful in the line of neo-modernism were more modest countries - Austria (elegant volume in the colors of the national flag, SPAN and Zeytinoglu bureaus), Australia, Canada (multifaceted lattice wooden facade; engineers Snc-Lavalin, architects Saia, Barbarese & Tapouzanov), Finland (white "boulder" by Jkmm workshop), Denmark, which brought from Copenhagen the famous "Little Mermaid" (pavilion-track for cycling; bureau BIG), Mexico, which turned its building into a green public space under colorful umbrellas (architects Slot), Brazil, whose pavilion, green in every sense of the word, was built from recycled wood (architect Fernando Brandao), South Korea, which built its pavilion from cubes with the letters of the Korean alphabet - Hangul (bureau of mass studies), and, of course, Japan. She managed, without resorting to ethnic and traditional allusions, to build a recognizable, extremely "national" pavilion - a lilac "spaceship", which is the most technologically advanced structure at the EXPO: thin and flexible solar batteries, three "eco-pipes" collect rainwater and sunlight to illuminate the interior; the floor surface in the interior generates electricity when the weight of the visitors passing through it is affected; its exposition is dedicated, among other things, to new eco-cities under construction in Japan.
But a considerable part of the participants, who also refused to refer to the tradition, changed their sense of proportion, which caused considerable damage to quite worthy ideas. This can be said about the Netherlands, which built a pavilion in the form of "Happy Street" (that is its name) from small houses, placed in a kind of "roller coaster". This decision by architect John Körmeling is intended to draw attention to the fact that the (best) city starts from the street, but is rather perplexing, as does the sun-capturing “veil” of the Swiss pavilion (Buchner Bründler Architects), the tree-like structures of Norway (bureau Helen & Hard) and the "magic castle" of Luxembourg (architect François Valentini, François Valentiny).
The appeal to the ethno style, which became an alternative to neo-modernism at EXPO-2010, became the basis of a considerable number of pavilions that were very successful in their decision. Among them, the leadership belongs to the restrained construction of Poland, which embodied the folk tradition of carved paper decorations in wood (architects Wojciech Kakowski, Wojciech Kakowski, Natalia Pashkovska, Natalia Paszkowska, Marcin Mostafa, Marcin Mostafa). The same line includes the Russian pavilion, which transferred the ornamental motifs of traditional textiles into a more durable material (by the Paper Architectural Team), and the Serbian pavilion, whose facades repeat the carpet pattern (architects Natalia Miodragovic, Natalija Miodragovic, Darko Kovachev, Darko Kovacev).
However, as the exhibition showed, the use of national tradition is fraught with much more danger than the potential banality of modernism. Examples of this are a copy of the stupa in Sanchi, which serves as the pavilion of India, and a smaller version of the fort in Lahore - the pavilion of Pakistan, the Iranian "palace" at the World Exhibition for the first time; its pavilion combines classical forms with elements of national architecture), and the intricate structures of Thailand and Nepal.
It should be noted that many participants treated the theme of the exhibition formally: the principles of "sustainable development" are reflected in their pavilions only in the form of green roofs or solar panels installed above, which seem like an extra "tick" in the exhibitor's questionnaire.
