Pavilion

 Pavilion, 2013-15

Wood, plaster, acrylic, oil, pencil, dried leaves,

60 x 70 x 42 cm

The Theater of the World

Every city is reimagined and rebuilt as a result of a spectacle. Whether it is to boost tourism, to complete political promises or to encourage nationalism, the architecture of a city is often ornamented to demonstrate progress. Ever since the representation of nations at the World Fair´s from the XIX century, to the post-war urban renovation projects, buildings raise as artificial monuments that later become obsolete even when they disguise the urban reality.

The Theater of the World looks into the work of different artists interested in architecture as a place for political and social representation. Although, more than revealing the failed utopias from the past, this exhibition reflects on the world as stage, where the monuments, palaces, ruins and social housing projects coexist and renovate under the same façade of nation and apparent development.

Artists : Alexánder Apostol,Yto Barrada, Marcelo Cidade, Nathan Coley, Livia Corona, José Dávila, Marjolijn Dijkman, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Angela Ferreira, Andreas Fogarasi, Meschac Gaba, Carlos Garaicoa, Terence Gower Pedro Reyes, Pablo Hare, Heidrun Holzfeind-Christoph Draeger, David Maljkovic, Olivia Plender, Anri Sala, Kostis Velonis

Curated by Andrea Torrenblanca.

Curatorial Assistant Ixel Rion. 
12.6-28.9.2014

Museo Tamayo, Mexico City

http://museotamayo.org/exhibitions/view/el-teatro-del-mundo

Les aventures des hommes et des machines

Ludvik Askenazy, “Les aventures des hommes et des machines”. Edité en 1958 , Maison d'Edition Technique a Prague, a l'occasion de l' Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles, 1958.

The Ghost in the Machine

 The Ghost in the Machine, 2012

112 x 65 x 12 cm

wood, mdf, acrylic.

Model for the Greek Pavilion

Model for the Greek Pavilion (International exposition, Paris, 1937), 2011
115 x 26 x 50 cm
Wood, acrylic,veneer, mdf.

The German pavilion at the 1937 "Paris Exposition international",
designed by Albert Speer

Advertising mast and press box

These pictures were taken at Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm one month before. The Stockholm exhibition in the summer of 1930 manifested a new view on design and architecture known as functionalism. Pure forms, smooth surfaces, bright colors and almost flat roofs were the language of architecture as evidenced by the advertising mast on the exhibition campus. As we can see from the model, the décor could be replaced by advertising message in stringent graphic form.

Architect: Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm 1930
Scale 1 : 100

Atomium : 21st Century Atomic Girls

Ted Benoit, a herald of the return of “clear line”, enjoys composing images that have a certain human presence. Creatively empowered by the expanded horizons of the “Atomium 1958-2008” collection, he has set the cult monument of Expo ´58 in a setting that is as futuristic as it is fascinating.

The creator of Ray Banana came to know the Atomium, through photographs, from 1958 and finally came to visit it in 1982. “It was one of the very first things that I saw on my first visit to Brussels. I even bought one or two of the souvenirs of the time, one of which was a spring-loaded thing, a little helicopter that circled the Atomium; the whole contraption had its own special round box covered in plaid.” Seeing the monument as it really was could only modify one’s perception of it. “Actually, it was great to go down through the tube-shaped struts on foot because, from the inside, it was more like something from Jules Verne than Sputnik.”

For the artist behind two magnificent Blake et Mortimer albums, the Atomium is not inextricably linked to Expo ´58. “Yes of course, and not because it has survived whereas the Expo has not, which gives it an entirely different significance. The Expo only existed in the present; the structure is also part of the past, much as is the remnant of the Statue of Liberty that Charlton Heston discovers emerging from the sands at the end of “Planet of the Apes.” That scene was one of the many starting-points of the “21st Century Atomic Girls”screenprint (along with, among others, an “anodyne” photo of two young girls visiting the Expo, the architectural form of one of the pavilions, and the statuary that was an integral part of the Expo ´58 site)". For the author of Vers la ligne claire, paying homage to the Atomium is not a difficult task, “because the dreams and illusions it symbolised are quite touching. Moreover, as the Atomium is a hollow structure, it chimes with the notion of space which itself is a very interesting concept to draw.”

It is often said that a good image cannot content itself with being merely seductive; it must recount a story or suggest its own unmistakeable melody. “That’s not something that I should explain” says Ted Benoit. “Here’s one approach: the title is a paraphrase of an old King Crimson song – I don’t like it that much, but I was very taken by the use of another track from that album in the film Le fils de l’homme by Alfonso Cuaron. What is conveyed in that film (one of the most fascinating films of recent times) strikes me as being very apt in understanding the years to come. The Atomium is the twentieth century; we are now in the twenty-first century. It helped us to understand the new era, that’s all. Why feature little girls? No idea. That’s its unmistakeable melody.”

Source:www.champaka.be

Vanity Fairs

Shanghai Expo 2010 is the most recent incarnation of the Great Exhibitions that began in London in 1851


Bjarke Ingels Group, The Danish Pavilion for the Shanghai Expo, 2010
Douglas Murphy

A writer based in London, UK. He blogs at youyouidiot.blogspot.com. His first book, The Architecture of Failure (Zer0 Books) is forthcoming.

The Shanghai Expo marks the strange return to prominence of what had seemed to be a dead architectural tradition. Expos, or, as they were originally called, Great Exhibitions, Expositions Universelles or World Fairs, were huge temporary pageants dedicated to the notion of progress, but the last few generations have witnessed their slow decline into near insignificance. They have been the source of a great many of our most memorable architectural images, which is remarkable considering their highly ephemeral nature.

The very first world exhibition was the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Continents’, held in London in 1851. It was organized, in the words of Prince Albert, ‘to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived’. The exhibition building, the Crystal Palace, was a gigantic crystalline web of mass-produced iron and glass, a vast display cabinet containing over 100,000 exhibits, ranging from industrial machinery to raw materials, from fabrics to furniture. More than six million people visited the exhibition in six months; it was one of the most significant early moments in mass culture.

On the one hand the Great Exhibition was a way of symbolically demonstrating Britain’s lead in the industrial race, but at the same time it was an event that was born from ruling-class anxieties about insurgency; conceived in the wake of the failed European revolutions of 1848 and the Chartists revolt, the Exhibition was partly designed to promote class harmony through distraction. Many opposed it on the grounds that it was a target for revolutionaries, but not only did the red hordes fail to materialize, the exhibition united the clashing aristocracy and bourgeoisie behind the banner of free trade, inaugurating a new regime of spectacular capitalism – Walter Benjamin wrote that at the Great Exhibition, ‘the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value’. At the same time, however, revolutionaries would see in the Crystal Palace a symbol of the future just society.

Both Paris and New York would hold their own exhibitions within the following five years, and they would soon be repeated the world over. The iron and glass architecture that accommodated these events reached its apotheosis at the 1889 Paris Exposition with the construction of the Galerie des Machines (the world’s largest room) and the Eiffel Tower, which was and would remain the world’s tallest structure for the next 40 years. But the revolutionary architecture of the exhibitions was soon subjected to a bourgeois aesthetic reaction – the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was entirely draped in beaux-arts frippery, prompting American Modernist architect Louis Sullivan to exclaim: ‘The damage wrought by the World’s Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer.’

Despite the wider rejection of the aesthetics heralded by the early Exhibitions, the Expos themselves were still opportunities to display the most modern styles. The 1900 Paris Exposition marked the brief flowering of Art Nouveau, still visible in the ironwork of Hector Guimard’s Métro stations, while early streams of Modernism were also prominently visible. Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau was included in the 1925 Paris Exposition, along with the incredible Soviet Pavilion by Konstantin Melnikov, while Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s seminal Barcelona Pavilion was the German Pavilion for the 1929 World Exhibition held in the Spanish city.

Although they were inextricably linked to ‘progress’, the Expos could also be scenes of tragic regression. There is hardly a more poignant architectural image than that of the 1937 Paris Exposition, postcards of which show the ghastly kitsch of Albert Speer’s German Pavilion and Boris Iofan’s Soviet Pavilion practically head-butting each other across the Champs de Mars, as the Eiffel Tower looks down sadly, its Utopia in peril. At the same Expo, in the Republican Spanish Pavilion, Picasso’s Guernica (1937) was hung for the first time.

After World War ii, the Great Exhibitions never attained the same level of cultural prominence that they had before; the immaterial qualities of both electronic media and atomic science did not lend themselves to large-scale spectacles of this type. Nevertheless Expos would continue, occasionally still creating seminal works of architecture; Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis’ Philips Pavilion from the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, for example, was a unique, immersive audio-visual environment without equal. Generally however the tendency was that of decline, with some Expo sites even turning into futuristic ruins. The sight of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome from Montreal 1967 transformed into an overgrown skeleton after a fire in 1976, or mvrdv’s now dilapidated Dutch Pavilion from Hannover 2000, is uncanny; the disappearance of something that hadn’t had a chance to properly arrive.

The cultures that the Expos gave original spatial form to are now so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible; both vast shopping malls and super-museums (supermarkets of culture) are typologies that were first accommodated in Great Exhibition buildings. With this in mind the Shanghai Expo seems anachronistic, an old fashioned spectacle of a kind that no longer has purpose – the presentation-as-new of old space. But this is strangely appropriate: the architecture of the Shanghai Expo, its individualism and flamboyance, is eclectic in a way that is almost Victorian in its stylistic incoherence.

Text by Douglas Murphy
Source : www.frieze.com

Dream of Venus Pavillion

1939

1939 World's Fair pavilion, Dali

The Day Dreamer

The Day Dreamer, by Jennens and Bettridge: The easy chair thus appropriately named was designed by H. Fitz Cook,and manufactured in papier mache by the exhibitors

Source : The illustrated exhibitor ... comprising sketches ... of the principal exhibits of the Great Exhibition of ... 1851 London, 1851