Exhibitions and Expositions

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Expo '70

Organized in Ōsaka, Japan, in 1970, this was the first modern international fair held in the Orient. The exposition adopted as its theme “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” About 70 nations participated, more than 110 pavilions were erected, and more than 64 million people attended. Highlights were the Japanese Garden, which combined ancient Japanese and modern horticultural techniques, and Festival Plaza, the fair center for the performing arts, which utilized computerized stage facilities and equipment.

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Recent Fairs

Expo '74, the first world's fair to have an environmental theme, opened in Spokane, Washington, in May 1974. It was situated in a park that had been reclaimed from industrial uses. The 1982 world's fair at Knoxville, Tennessee, had the theme “Energy Turns the World.” Exhibitors included advocates of nuclear energy and of solar energy. In May 1984 New Orleans opened its world exposition in a refurbished dock and warehouse area on the Mississippi River. In 1986 Vancouver, British Columbia, held Expo '86, a world's fair on the theme of transportation and communication. Expo '92, held in Seville, Spain, and based on the theme “The Age of Discoveries,” coincided with the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's first voyage to America in 1492.

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Exposition Architecture

Great international expositions, since their inception in 1851, have engendered significant developments and innovations in architecture. The building styles have usually reflected contemporaneous popular modes; the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, on the other hand, froze American public architecture in its eclectic Beaux-Arts image for generations. The world's fairs that took place during the 1930s, in contrast, ushered in modern architectural styles; the fairs since World War II have been built in diverse, even experimental, styles, but with a consequent loss of cohesive unity.

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19th-Century Exposition Buildings

The first great exposition building, the Crystal Palace, housed the entire 1851 London exposition in one immense structure. Sir Joseph Paxton, its architect, was famous for his elegant conservatories and greenhouses; in essence, the Crystal Palace was the largest greenhouse ever built. Paxton used prefabricated glass units framed in wood and cast iron, supporting them on a cast-iron skeleton. This permitted the entire building to be taken apart and reassembled in Sydenham, a London suburb, where it remained until it burned down in 1936. For the next quarter century all major expositions were housed in enormous glass and iron sheds, such as the cantilevered rotunda of the Vienna exposition of 1873, the gigantic Salle des Machines of the 1889 Paris exposition, and the main building—still standing in Fairmount Park—of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. The 1889 Paris exposition also gave that city its world-renowned symbol, the soaring Eiffel Tower. A stunning achievement, it was designed by the engineer Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel.

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The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, although architecturally uninventive, was remarkable for other reasons. Its architects, headed by the famous firm of McKim, Mead, & White, created a new park on an undeveloped lakeside tract in Chicago. The numerous temporary plaster palaces housing the exhibitions were carefully integrated with the site to create the dazzling “White City.” One of the palaces was recreated in masonry after the fair as the Field Museum.

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20th-Century Exposition Buildings

The buildings for the 1900 Paris exposition were exuberantly art nouveau in style, as can be seen in two surviving halls, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, both still used for exhibitions. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, firmly Beaux-Arts despite its pioneering use of electric lighting, gave St. Louis its impressive Art Museum.

The otherwise unremarkable Barcelona International Exposition of 1929 produced one of the most important buildings in modern architecture—the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's famous Barcelona Pavilion, which defined the International Style in architecture and gave it worldwide exposure. Designed as Germany's official reception hall (not as an exhibition hall) at the fair, the pavilion achieved its look of sleek, spare elegance through Mies's subtle use of such luxurious materials as plate glass, chrome, and polished marbles and onyx in several harmonious colors.

Chicago's Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933-1934 marked the dominance of modern architecture in world's fairs; of equal importance was the striking use of powerful washes of colored light to transform the buildings and their setting at night.

A huge new park, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, was created for New York's World's Fair of 1939-1940. Every element of its design was carefully coordinated; zones of color were laid out, radiating outward from the pure white of the trylon and perisphere to buildings in every hue of the spectrum. The fair's architectural distinction was evident in its 60 foreign pavilions, of which 22 were freestanding structures by such internationally renowned architects as Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil and Henry van de Velde of the Netherlands.

The expositions that followed World War II were built in progressively extreme interpretations of modern architecture. At the Brussels’ Fair of 1958, Edward Durell Stone's circular, columned U.S. pavilion was among the more memorable creations. Seattle retained from its Century 21 Exposition of 1962 several buildings for its civic center, including the Space Needle, the splendid opera house, and Minoru Yamasaki's elegant science museum. New York's 1964-1965 World's Fair, judged less than distinguished by many architectural critics, did have such happy exceptions as the beautifully proportioned Spanish pavilion. Montréal's Expo '67 was the most architecturally stimulating of the post-war fairs; the American architect Buckminster Fuller's U.S. pavilion, a huge geodesic sphere, remains as a permanent structure, as does Habitat, a housing project of stacked, prefabricated units by the Israeli architect Moshe Safdie. Japan's Expo '70 in Ōsaka included the Japanese architect Kenzō Tange's vast three-level Theme Hall and the Canadian architect Arthur Erickson's Canadian pyramidal pavilion of four monumental mirrored wedges framing a multitiered plaza.

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