At the end of this year, the venue for the 2020 EXPO will be determined in Paris. In addition to the Russian Yekaterinburg, four more cities apply for this role - Dubai, Sao Paulo, Ayutthaya, Izmir. The most important part of the application book, with which our country took part in this honorable competition, was the architectural and urban planning concept of the Expo territory in Yekaterinburg, developed by the ABD architects bureau.
The exhibition is not only a major international event, but also a very effective way to stimulate the development of the city and the region in which it is held. That is why the ABD architects project envisages not only providing EXPO with all the necessary facilities, but also a strategy for their use after the event. The biggest changes after the end of the exhibition await the expo park itself: some of the pavilions will be dismantled and disposed of, some will turn into office or cultural space, but housing and public buildings will be included in the city's housing stock.
As a site for placing the Expo Park, Yekaterinburg offered the architects two sites to choose from: one in the immediate vicinity of the airport, the other not far from the city center, on the bank of a large natural pond. The preference was given to the bank of the Verkh-Isetsky pond, not only because this place is potentially more attractive, but mainly because new housing, roads, public buildings and landscaped landscaped spaces are needed in the city, and not outside of it. This place has other advantages as well. For example, the symbolic border of Europe and Asia is not far away, and this landmark can be made part of an open-air exhibition. There is also a high hill in the immediate vicinity, and on its top you can place an observation deck, from which the future expo-park will appear at a glance.
The transport scheme of the territory of the future exhibition was developed taking into account the already adopted project for the development of highways in Russia. The architects proposed to build a bridge across the pond, thereby closing the small transport ring of Yekaterinburg. At the same time, this will ensure the best accessibility to the exhibition area both from the north and from the south. The bridge will be two-level; in addition to the highway, it is planned to lay a railway line along it, which will connect the exhibition with the airport. The motorway from the bridge, in turn, will come to a traffic junction that will connect it with the Moscow highway running from the west and the street leading from the city center. Near the road junction there will be an extensive parking lot and a transport interchange terminal, the latter uniting under its roof metro and railway stations, a bus station, shopping areas and a conference hall with a hotel.
The main entrance to the Expo Park is located in the immediate vicinity of the transport terminal. In addition, the exhibition area can be accessed from the city bus stops, directly from the city center and from the Expo Village. In addition to its own metro station, EXPO is planned to be connected to the heart of Yekaterinburg by a tram line, and a helipad for VIPs will be built nearby. Inside the Expo Park, only environmentally friendly transport will be used - an electric bus, the route of which covers the entire exhibition area along the perimeter, and a water tram. For the tram, the authors propose to dig an annular canal, which will naturally fill with water from the pond.
The existing streets of Yekaterinburg set the main axes of the newly designed territory of the Expo-Park and its residential quarters, which, according to the architects, will ensure the most organic integration of the developed area into the existing structure of the city. However, this is only one of the tasks facing the authors of the concept. A variety of factors were taken into account in the layout of the exhibition area. This is the uniformity of the distribution of points of attraction and services for visitors, and the ease of orientation in the exhibition space, and the availability of each individual pavilion. There will be 103 pavilions at the exhibition, they will form squares, and these squares, in turn, like beads on a string, will be "strung" on the main pedestrian axis, which runs from west to east.
As usual at the Expo, the large participating countries will build pavilions on their own, while the more modest powers will take part of the so-called joints that the host side will build. In addition, the exhibition will feature many corporate and thematic pavilions, as well as pavilions of the federal districts of Russia. The latter are planned to be built along the main alley - the ceremonial esplanade, which originates from the main entrance. Its perspective will be closed by the pavilion of Russia, which is supposed to be made in the form of a bridge symbolically connecting Europe and Asia.
Behind the Russian pavilion, the axis of the esplanade will be continued by a developed pier, which is conceived as a platform for light shows and fireworks. The entire territory of the exhibition is divided into daytime and evening zones. When the work of the pavilions ends, visitors move to the embankment. Designed as a large natural park, it is filled with many facilities for evening events: an expo arena, an amphitheater, a cinema, a multimedia and several multifunctional venues.
The theme "EXPO-2020" is already known - "Global mind" - and, of course, first of all, it will be reflected in the expositions of thematic and national pavilions, but the authors of the concept also tried to show it in the external appearance of the exhibition complex. A crystal was chosen as a key architectural image for this purpose - the broken edges of the pavilions and the white color of their facades, according to ABD architects, will not only create the desired associative array, but also emphasize the Uralic origin of this "mineral". However, the design of specific objects of the exhibition is still in the future, say the architects of ABD architects, very much hoping to start it after the positive decision of the International Exhibitions Bureau.
