As I waited in line—or queued, as they say in English—I couldn’t help but be reminded of the same experience when visiting Disneyland, especially in summer. Only there, the lines were shorter, with children’s eyes lit up with anticipation instead of crying in resonance, and sweat dripping down their faces.
Waiting in the parallel, winding line, stretching what felt like kilometers, many questions, expectations, and doubts began to surface in my mind. Which pavilion will be the most innovative? Will the national pavilions truly resemble and evoke the countries they aim to represent? Or will they turn into caricatures?
As the wait time passed 30 minutes, I begin to wonder: what am I doing here when there is a “real city” out there waiting to be explored? The real Japan is just a few stops away! Just as doubt began to germinate, the ticketing staff prompted us to scan our QR codes, momentarily subsiding our anxiety. Once inside the “Expo” fantasy land, there were more lines—the kind one finds at LAX or JFK—except outdoors, under tremendous heat.
In 1851, when the first World Expo was organized—made famous in part by Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace—traveling to exotic places meant a journey of more than two weeks by ocean liner. In that context, the idea of “bringing the world to me” made sense. The majority of the population had never seen a Chinese pagoda, rare ivory carvings, the Koh-i-Noor diamond from India, or the latest inventions of the Industrial Revolution.
One cannot help but wonder, in this day and age of ease and fluid global travel, why is the “World Expo” still necessary? One estimate suggests that (pre-COVID) cross territory air travel reached more than 1.5 billion people in 2019. When the latest innovations can be accessed with a tap on a phone, and authentic cultural experiences felt within hours of flight, why do we still create and visit these World Expos?
For architects, there are a few possible reasons. Perhaps to see which designers are producing the most radical and imaginative uses of technology and material as part of their designs—water vapor, sound, air, engineered timber, 3D printing, ESG conditions and so on.
Soon, however, one realizes there is nothing truly “national” about the pavilions, including its innovations or the mode through which they are presented. Switch out the flags in front, and no one would be able to tell the difference. Singapore’s sphere had no more meaning than Netherland’s sitting beside. Authentic national identity, as it turns out, is far more difficult to capture, represent, and make visible and experiential through architecture.
In this sense, perhaps Disneyfication is a more fitting lens for understanding Expo pavilions—except they lack Disney’s theatricality and its capacity to temporarily transport us to real fantasies, the worlds of Iron Man, Toy Story land and others.
Perhaps a more sobering observation emerges at the end of visit: if schools of architecture are not careful, we risk reproducing the same phenomenon—churning out “national pavilions” under the disguise of “thesis design.” Student projects becoming Expo pavilions: isolated showpieces, emphasizing spectacle, novelty, and symbolic representation, rather than deeply engaged, relational or contextually grounded architecture.
Just like you can’t access the pavilions without entering the Expo, you can’t talk about certain kinds of thesis projects without accepting their self-constructed premises, and that, is problem worth debating.
To be continued.