Word: expo
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Like, for instance, a certain North American superpower. When the Expo turf was carved up in 1985, the U.S. was given the second biggest site. Architect Barton Myers produced a respectable design, but Congress dithered and finally appropriated a measly $13 million to build it. In the end, Myers' scheme, except for a few details, was dumped. There are no roof, no sides, no back, only a front wall consisting of cheap wire mesh nailed to cheap metal studs. Inside sit a pair of geodesic domes previously used in trade shows, two huge Peter Max murals that look like souvenir...
...hard to believe that this exceedingly lame showing is the product of the Reagan and Bush administrations; what good is blue-chip Republican Babbittry if it can't mount an impressive world's fair pavilion? Elsewhere at Expo, the Berlin Philharmonic will play, and Ingmar Bergman will direct Peer Gynt; at the U.S. pavilion, Arnold Schwarzenegger will stop by in September to judge a bodybuilding contest...
World's fairs have traditionally been epicenters of earnestness. Expo '92 must be the first with strong whiffs of deliberate irony and in-your-face perversity. The Red Cross, of all people, has erected one of the edgiest, most bizarro world pavilions of all, with red steel I beams shooting past thin white metal uprights at queer angles, red brick walls zigzagging crazily. Deconstructivism, a fading fad, has found its perfect project not a moment too soon: according to an Expo spokeswoman, the architecture is an allusion to the Red Cross's role in assisting victims of earthquakes...
Other pieces of Expo have altogether different ambitions; they are neither good nor bad, exactly, but something else -- Disneyish. The Saudi pavilion, a fake Arab ruin into which a fake nomadic hovel has been inserted, is like a second-rate SITE rip-off -- except that SITE actually designed it. The South Pacific pavilion is a compound of grass huts (or was -- it burned down last week, but is to be rebuilt promptly). New Zealand's conventional steel-and- glass facade gives way at one end to a rugged Pacific promontory, complete with recorded ocean noises, artificial stones and plastic seabirds...
...three continents has diminished, if not spoiled, the once-in-a-lifetime thrill of international expositions. Florida's Disney World in particular is a world's fair manque, complete with Utopian subtext, we're-in-business-to-help-people corporate pavilions and a giant sphere; and now, alas, Expo '92 may be experienced as something of an imitation. "It's sort of like Disneyland," an Expo '92 flack unhesitatingly said to a group of visiting journalists just before the first of the expected 18 million paying customers arrived...