The decision in principle that Russia would participate in EXPO-2010 was made more than four years ago, but concrete work on its implementation began only in 2008. Then OJSC "GAO" All-Russian Exhibition Center "and the Mirax Group company held an architectural competition for the best design of the national pavilion. 23 teams took part in the competition, 5 of them - Bureau Moscow, PTAM Mikhail Khazanov, TOTEMENT / PAPER, Boris Bernasconi's bureau and JSB Ostozhenka - were then invited to participate in the second round, and a project called Russia reached the final Boris Bernasconi and the "Buyan-grad" TOTEMENT / PAPER concept (chief architect - Levon Airapetov). A third round was also supposed, in which the finalists had to finalize their proposals and answer questions and practical comments from the jury members, but due to the crisis and internal disagreements of the organizers, it did not take place. At the beginning of the past, the management of the All-Russian Exhibition Center announced that the design of the Russian pavilion was entrusted to the TOTEMENT / PAPER bureau, and at a time when all the participating countries were already starting to build their expositions, Russian architects undertook to do the almost impossible - to finalize the project and create a building that will adequately represent the country at the World Exhibition. The task seemed impossible, and many critics predicted a grandiose failure for Russia in advance, sarcastically calling Shanghai the second Vancouver, but to the credit of the organizers of the exhibition, and especially the architects, the pavilion turned out to be a bright and multifunctional complex, worthily representing our country at EXPO-2010.
It must be said that the pavilion invented by TOTEMENT / PAPER was originally an ensemble of more than ten towers, but their role in the overall composition of the building has changed more than once over the past two years since the competition. In particular, the architects initially interpreted the exposition as a three-part space, consisting of a park at ground level, a common roof for all dominants and a void between them. The bases of the towers were lined with wood and buried in the soil, symbolizing the roots of a great power, the upper platform united their ends and represented a triumph of modern structures and technologies, and the free space between the green floor and ceiling, surrounded on all sides by towers, became that city in miniature, in which modern man lives. This concept not only responded well to the EXPO 2010 motto “Better City - Better Life”, but also reflected key archetypes about the world order for both cultures: the Chinese triad Earth, Man, Sky - “Taiji” - coincided with the ideas of the ancient Russians about the Mother -Earth and Father-Heaven, who created everything in the void between themselves. The Russian pavilion also referred to the image of a huge, endless country, on whose territory many peoples live, carefully preserving their traditions - each of the towers was decorated with national decor. The TOTEMENT / PAPER project attracted the jury with its laconic and at the same time ambiguous composition, but the experts had questions about how realizable the structure proposed by the architects was. So the project got a consultant - the world famous engineering bureau ARUP, who confirmed its "consistency".
When the architects started working with stage designers, a 1000 square meter cubic volume with exhibition halls appeared between the two platforms. Its entire front plane was divided into 1103 parts - according to the number of cities in Russia, and each city was given an area depending on the number of inhabitants. Each of the squares turned into a screen onto which a film about the city was to be projected, and the facades of the cube thus became a giant mirror reflecting the "Present" of Russia. Later, this idea, unfortunately, was recognized as too costly and complicated, but the metaphor of the facade as a mirror in the project survived - the volume of the main exhibition hall is clad on the outside with plastic panels with a mirror effect. Thin and mobile, they sway with every breath of wind and make the cube, hiding in the arms of the twelve towers, like a living and fragile creature.
Thus, the threefoldness remained the basis of the compositional solution of the Russian pavilion. It consists of three main elements: a block of twelve L-shaped white and gold towers, a cube measuring 50x50 meters, and an internal installation "flower city" dedicated to the children's view of the future of modern cities. The towers are built along the perimeter of the site in such a way that all the letters L with their "legs" are directed to its center - on their bases lies the volume of the main exhibition hall. The architects themselves compare the plan of the pavilion with the sun and roots of the "World tree" of the ancient Slavs, on the branches of which the heaven of life rests. The towers, which have ultra-modern broken shapes and white-red-gold decor, on the one hand, refer to the historical images of Russian architecture (the completion of one of them unambiguously resembles the domes of St. Basil's Cathedral), and on the other, they symbolize fast-growing modern megacities with their skyscrapers of nonlinear architecture … The most important element of the "present" in the pavilion, perhaps, should be considered a natural park with lawns and reservoirs - whatever civilization is, it is possible only in a harmonious union with nature, and the architects managed to demonstrate this union.
