THE BATTLE OF PEACE AND INDUSTRY.

Expos may be overrated and commercialized, but, as Hanover shows, they can still teach us important lessons.

What are Great Exhibitions for? The first exposition [1] was organized in the Chateau of St Cloud by the Marquis d'Aveze in 1797. It had the express intention of reviving the trade of the old royal factories like Sevres and Gobelins, to try to reduce the distress of the skilled workmen who had fallen into poverty after the Revolution. Though many people had previews of the show (and the pauperized workers benefitted a little from their orders), it was closed just before the official opening date because the Directory banished all aristocrats from the Paris region. [2] But d'Aveze was not easily discouraged. He organized the next show of industries and crafts in the Maison d'Orsay in 1798, as soon as he was allowed to return. It was so successful that the government resolved to have a new one every year, although the next was not until 1801, when a court of the Louvre was used. Eight more French expositions were held before a magnificent temporary palace was erected in the Champs Elysees in 1849.

The example inspired the Society of Arts to try to do something similar in Britain. A committee of the Society organized exhibitions in 1847, 1848 and 1849. Then a young and visionary civil servant, Henry Cole, approached the Society's President, Prince Albert, with the notion of making the exhibition international. The Prince pushed with vigour, committees toiled and organized an abortive competition. Paxton resolved problems of vacillation and delay with his Crystal Palace, in which, as Pevsner remarked, 'he virtually invented the method of prefabrication. [3] The Great Expo was born, and was immensely successful.

Paxton's Palace was seen by The Illustrated Exhibitor as a 'fair edifice, of which a free, happy, moral, educated and enlightened people, shall form the broad and smiling base.' [4] And not just the British: 'all the nations of the world are met together; and the Chinese, the Turk, the Italian, the Frenchman, the Greek, the African and the Briton are this day fighting the battle of Peace and Industry, instead of rapine and bloodshed... Let us break down the barriers of prejudice, which have too long kept men asunder, never to raise them up again.' [5]

Since 1851, there have been 61 world expositions, [6] and they have all inherited much from The Great Exhibition. All have been international, all inspired by belief in the kinship of humanity, and in scientific and industrial progress as the sole means to our improvement; all have tried to amalgamate amusement and education; all have attempted to embody the expo ethos in striking buildings. And all have tried to exalt the power and potential of the host nation. In 1851, Britain was the workshop of the world and the Exhibition was intended to emphasize the fact -- not least by demonstrating that a huge and elegant building could be erected in only six months using the most up-to-date industrial techniques. Expo 2000 is just as determined to demonstrate 'Germany's unique opportunity as a business location', with the Expo itself 'a considerable economic force, sending impulses far beyond Hannover and the year 2000, and Creating. [7]

As well as intending to enhance the prestige of the host countries, and to boost their economies, expos have always had a cultural dimension. Eiffel's tower was the gateway to the 1889 Paris exhibition, and the sadly destroyed Galerie des Machines by Dutert and Contamin was its most wonderful space. Steel (as opposed to the Crystal Palace's iron) controversially laid claim to he the basis of the architecture of the future. [8] In 1893, Chicago's World Columbian Exhibition and in 1904 the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exhibition celebrated the triumph of late nineteenth century Beaux Arts and Baroque, and laid the foundations of the City Beautiful Movement. The Paris 1900 show (which has left us the pompous Grand and Petit Palais), included the Finnish pavilion where Saarinen, Lindgren and Gesellius made a built manifesto for their nation's separate culture and identity. In 1906, Art Nouveau had its great blossoming at the Milan Exhibition (which, incidentally, also celebrated the maturity of the motor car, th e Bugatti family exhibiting with verve in both departments).

Mies built his famous Barcelona pavilion in 1929, but Modernism really triumphed at the 1935 Brussels expo. Yet at the 1937 Paris show, the stripped neo-Classical hulks of the German and Soviet pavilions lowering at each other across the central axis heralded dreadful things to come. The 1967 Montreal expo was one of the last stands of functionalist modernism with the mighty Fuller dome and Safdie's Habitat. By 1970, the Tokyo exhibition was one of the first platforms for an emergent Post Modernism. Both Seville (AR June 1992) and Lisbon (AR July 1998) were attempts to extend and regenerate the city, though at the moment, Lisbon's more modest show seems likely to have much more lasting effects and the Seville site lies largely desolate.

Hanover takes up many of these intertwined traditions. Like Seville and Lisbon, it is supposed to add to the urban infrastructure -- but to the Hanover Messe, the city's trade fair grounds, rather than the historic core. The strategy seems to have more potential for success than Seville's, where a whole city quarter was supposed to be rejuvenated with largely temporary exhibition buildings. At Hanover, the Messe grounds have gained a strip for Expo pavilions to the west and one to the south east. Many of the national pavilions -- for instance the Portuguese (p54) and the Finnish (p68) -- will remain after the show closes on 31 October, and they will he adapted in one way or another to become part of the permanent showground. Other pavilions, like those of the Swiss (p50) and the Japanese (p58), will be cleanly demountable, allowing appropriate infill to be inserted. (All the work on the west side will be demolished, and the site is to be returned to Deutsche Messe AG as an open-air display area). The big per manent exhibition balls of the Messe have been adapted to act as show places for themes (p80), and for groups of stands by the less ostentatious and wealthy nations -- most of the African and South American ones for instance. They will return to normal use after 31 October.

The new landscape infrastructure of gardens, squares and alleys, which has Thomas Herzog's Great Roof (p46) as its set piece, will remain to enhance the previously rather drab Messe site. Also permanent will be the transport links. Jolly little yellow cable-cars glide quietly from one side of the site to the other over the Messe halls. There is a new suburban railway line with excellent little halts by Martin Despang (AR December 1999), and a new station for intercity ICE trains has been built on the Berlin-Hanover line. The airport has a new terminal; the motorways have been widened to a daring three lanes in each direction, and there is a new ring road round the whole site.

Notwithstanding all this heavy civil engineering, the masterplan (by Arnaboldi/Cavadini and Albert Speer & Partners) is informed by Expo 2000's main theme, 'Humankind-Nature-Technology'. At Seville, as Catherine Slessor remarked, 'over the last 22 years since the last major expo in Osaka, the greatest discovery made by modern man is that Western industrial culture is not the panacea for the world's ills that it was once thought to be.' [9] Few nations and designers, she found, had the courage to respond to the 'obvious theme' of the increasingly troubled relationship between man and his environment.

Everything was intended to be completely different at Hanover. As Birgit Breuel, the exhibition's Commissioner General, said: 'It is intended to demonstrate how humankind can use technology, which is there to serve humanity, to create a new harmony with nature.' [10] There is undoubtedly a greater degree of ecological awareness in more of the Hanover pavilions than has ever been seen before. Some demonstrate great architectural imagination in interpreting the theme (particularly Switzerland and Japan). But others are just as dim as ever. The permanent German pavilion (by 'architect and investor' Josef Wund) looms, dour and heavy, over the Expo-Plaza, an agreeable and civilized square by von Gerkan + Marg, otherwise fringed by commercial buildings, the arena, an ecumenical church (p78) and a hotel, all of which are intended to give the place a degree of urban life even when the rest of the Messe grounds are not in use. To the south of the German pavilion is the almost equally large French one, a building so d ull after its passage through the bureaucratic system that its original architect, Helene Jourda, has denied any connection with it.

Further to the south is one of the worst buildings in the whole show. In the British pavilion, mediocrity has been distilled into a form of aggression. Presumably, the thing is intended to show the qualities of New Labour Britain: sensitivity to people and the environment, innovation, technical excellence, architectural brilliance and enlightened patronage. None of these is evident in the large, crudely decorated metal shed, which has apparently been hired off the shelf from a firm of doubtless worthy, though definitely uninspired, German package designers, Goldbeck Bau GmbH. (Nigel Coates, who did the British section at Lisbon, put out a notice that, despite previous Foreign Office claims, he had absolutely nothing to do with the Hanover design.)

The Hanover debacle is the more poignant because, at Seville, the United Kingdom Government hired one of Britain's best architects, Nick Grimshaw, to make an elegant pavilion which incorporated innovatory energy-saving climate control devices (there is nothing so ingenious at Hanover). Even so, Slessor remarked that at Seville the architectural ideas were 'marginalized by the muscle of dull corporate sponsorship'. At Hanover, dull corporate sponsorship is perhaps not so strongly emphasized, but the interior is full of dismal kitsch and naff exhibits like a reproduction of the front door of Number 10 Downing Street, and little panels with pictures of places like Milton Keynes that would not look out of place in a railway station forecourt. It adds up to a depressing, yet very telling demonstration of the hypocrisy of much of the Blair New Labour project. Perhaps the Americans were more lucky. James Wines and Site were commissioned and produced an imaginative design, but it has not been built because, in the r ichest nation on earth, the money could not be found. If it had, perhaps Wines' ideas would have been as eroded by bureaucracy and dim business sponsorship as Jourda's were.

Yet grim and crass as many of the contributions of some of the big economy nations may be, silly as are some of the contributions of others, Hanover does offer several poignant suggestions of finer architectures: more inventive, more ecologically aware, more subtly sensitive to humanity than what we have now. And very diverse, as the pavilions studied in the following pages show. For all its faults, Hanover, stumblingly sometimes, gives hope of better futures, as all expos have been intended to do, since d'Aveze's first efforts. Perhaps, after all, Prince Albert's belief in progress should not be discarded altogether.

(1.) The common shortening of the name to Expo is a tribute to the concept's French ancestry.

(2.) Anon, 'The Origin of Expositions', in The illustrated Exhibitor: A Tribute to the World's Industrial Jubilee, published as a partwork by John Cassell, London, 1851, p23.

(3.) Pevsner, Nikolaus, A History of Building Types, Thames & Hudson, Londoit, 1987, p244.

(4.) Illustrated Exhibitor, op. cit., p2.

(5.) Ibid, p3.

(6.) Since 1928, the Bureau International des Expositions in Paris has, by international treaty, been the official body responsible for recognizing an international exhibition.

(7.) Expo 2000 Hannover, press release, spring 2000.

(8.) Maupassant, Dumas and other distinguished literary figures signed a petition calling the Tower 'hideous beyond repair' and 'dizzily ridiculous'. Pevsner, op. cit., p250.

(9.) AR June 1992, p2l.

(10.) Expo 2000 Hannover, press release, spring 2000.