The History of World Expositions

The Lisbon World Exposition 1998
 


Year: 1998
City: Lisbon
Country: Portugal
Duration: 22nd May - 30th September 1998
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Copyright: Official Catalogue, 1998 Lisbon World Exposition. Pavilion of the Future. Lissabon 1998
Comments

Paula Santos, Rui Ramos und Miguel Guedes:

There is now a growing tendency for world expositions to focus on what they are actually exhibiting. The buildings themselves are viewed more as 'containers' or 'depositories', where what is of prime importance and clearly of interest are the content and explanatory discourse. After all, that's the main reason why people go there in the first place, and why an investment is made from the conceptual and creative point of view.
Originally, we planned the projekt on the basis of that supposition and that what was called for was a succession of rooms, all characteristically strong, designed with predistined functions and marked contours, along the lines of the exposition's main theme. (...)
The idea of the building's form and concept grew as the process matured and was consolidated, progressively getting rid of the notion of an exhibition 'depository'. The design took on a life of its own and gained individual expression that made it relatively independent of any themes and discourses that might be in juxtaposition to it. At the same time it began to take shape as a diverse and structured concept.

Quelle: Official Catalogue, 1998 Lisbon World Exposition. Pavilion of the Future. Lissabon 1998.

Filippo Beltrami Gadola: Der Pavillon der Utopie
The application of a natural, fireproof, renewable, non-polluting material shaped and employed using highly intricate, elaborate technology provides the possibility of an ideology-free form of eco-friendly growth and development: the Utopia Pavilion is a model of a functional/functioning building structure build to last and capable of startling us with its bold design. As well as being able to withstand the marine climate, this structure, constructed out of a series of ribs measuring over one hundred and twenty metres in length, is also highly resistant to tractional and compressive forces and has the same load-bearing coefficient as steel and a higher coefficient than concrete, making it ideal for an area subject to almost constant seismic motion.
The Utopian aspect of the Pavilion lies in its large-scale embodiment of responsible, concrete eco-design capable of providing an effective, economical solution to the demands of a world worried about renewing its energy resources and the consequences and effects of progress, as it follows its seemingly inevitable course. A world that is anxiously awaiting at least some clear signs of a change indirection, if not a drastic turn-around."

Quelle: La chiglia rovesciata. Utopia Pavilion, Expo 98, Lisbon. In: L'Arce, Nr. 126, Mai 1998, S. 77.

Wolfram Weimer: Cries of Fear, Whimpers and the Love Songs of Dolphins (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 18th 1998)

Any attempt to re-capture a world which has escaped us – or even only its oceans – in the grounds of a prettily decorated exhibition is naive and doomed to failure. The attempt, perceptible everywhere in Lisbon, to compensate for the loss of sensory perception by means of modern "virtual" technology only makes it worse. At the Expo, you can surf the Internet on dozens of computers – but for that, you don’t need to go to Lisbon.
Not only does this world exposition make exaggerated use of the Internet, it’s like the Internet itself. It propagates the suggestion of omnipotence, the idea of the world as a village, the fantasy of total availability. Indeed in practice, both the exposition and the Internet all too often degenerate into a meta-world experience of the fragmentary, the technical constraints lending the impression of a grotesquely distorted transfer image.



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