With only six months to go weird, wacky and wonderful structures are beginning to take shape in Shanghai’s Puxi and Pudong districts.
In the first of a series, Ashford Pritchard and Deborah Erwin chronicle two of the good, the bad and the ugly examples of architectural endeavour that will adorn the banks of the Huangpu River at the World Expo Shanghai China 2010.French Pavilion
Each participating nation is charged with the task of articulating their authentic and differentiating qualities. Given France’s broad and historical fondness for all thing cultural, and its renowned wine, art, fashion, music and architecture, it is fitting that the French Pavilion is christened La Ville Sensuelle. Designed to appeal to all five senses this temporary structure will house art and sculpture exhibits for sight, gourmet restaurants for taste, fragrant gardens for smell, and expansive pools for touch and sound.
Jacques Ferrier of the eponymously named firm supplied the design for this 6,000 sqm structure. With E50 mil at his disposal, the architect wanted to go beyond the brief for a temporary structure. Instead, he sought to create a reusable building that would represent architecture of the future. Therefore, apart from its support columns, the pavilion’s layout may be easily reconfigured since there are no solid walls.
The four-storey block is caged within steel lattice. Inside, a sizeable void serves as a courtyard; its surrounding walls are overrun with vegetation, as is the roof level. The ground floor is flooded with a jigsaw of geometric basins, which skirt the perimeter and fill in the courtyard. Entry points are punctuated by long escalators that transport visitors to the top level so that unobstructed vistas may be enjoyed. Guests can then amble down the interior’s sloped floors which subtly link the building’s sections.
In addition to creating an urban oasis, the structure was also designed with sustainable intentions, for fear of appearing out of sync with current and future industry priorities. Natural light and ventilation are maximized. A token display of photovoltaic panels runs along one side of the roof, supplying a mere 15-20 percent of total energy required by the building. Rainwater is collected by the gardens and ponds, but only sustain existing plant life.
As a whole, the building isn’t unattractive, but it doesn’t exactly radiate inventiveness. Although promoted as a green beacon, the pavilion’s steel-clad façade fails to reveal its verdant elements from without since its leafy surfaces are couched within. Furthermore, the building’s steel grid sheath resembles the one used in French architect Thomas Coldefy’s design for the Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI).
United Kingdom Pavilion
The UK Pavilion goes under the moniker “A Pavilion of Ideas”, and according to John Dennis, project director for the British participation in the World Expo, will be “utterly original and shows our boldness to offer a Britain with creativity, diversity and innovation.” The British turned to avant-garde design visionary Thomas Heatherwick of Heatherwick Studio to realise this not inconsiderable goal.
His approach to the pavilion was to conceive a space that would stand out as British without relying on what he descirbes as “kitsch on a national scale.” The challenge: to stand out in a giant exposition where there will be over 200 countries exhibiting, each trying to outdo each other. Constraints included a limited budget of US$19.55 mil (approximately half that of many other western participants), and the brief of creating a pavilion ranking in the public’s top five favourites.
His response was to open up much of the 6,000 sqm site, one of the largest plots at the Expo. The structure does this through a sloping podium, featuring gardens and lawns that will offer comfortable places for visitors to rest and relax in the theme of a traditional British country garden. Astride the podium is what Heatherwick calls “the World’s most hairy building.” The six-storey creation is in the shape of a cube, with thousands of spines that appear to hover in the air, swinging in the breeze and tipped with tiny, coloured lights that display various images.
In fact, each of these 70,000 spines is covered with fibreoptics that during the day absorbs sunlight, funnelling it into the structure while at night-time lighting up to create a moving sculptural icon. These spines carry through to the interior of the cube, where each end will feature an embedded seed from The Millennium Seed Bank Project, an international conservation effort to preserve seeds for future use. The seeds and the pavilion demonstrate the concept of sustainability, the diversity of nature and urge people to protect the environment for future generations. The novel and thoughtful design approach make the United Kingdom pavilion a testament to an ecological-minded future, rather than one that merely incorporates green features and materials as lip-service to sustainability.
