Featuring 145 countries, international organisations such as the United Nations and the European Union and non-government organisations including Oxfam, Save the Children and the World Wide Fund for Nature, Expo Milano 2015 opens today under the title "Feeding the planet, energy for life".
The organisers of the six-month-long event are expecting to host more than 20 million visitors to Milan’s 1.1-million-square-metre exhibition site, and expectations are high following the success of the 2010 Expo in Shanghai.
Not only did Shanghai attract a record-breaking 73 million visitors, but it was also widely regarded as a return to form for an event and a format that had lacked a sense of purpose and identity since the last great headline-capturing Expos in Seattle (1962), Montreal (1967) and Osaka (1970).
In much the same way that the 1970 Osaka Expo, the first to be held in Asia, heralded the emergence of Japan as a new economic power, commentators are now looking forward to Dubai Expo 2020, the first to be held in the Middle East, and are speculating about what it will mean not just for the city but for the UAE as a whole.
For the UAE-based architect and academic Yasser Elsheshtawy, Expos blend ideas of national identity and brand building with diplomacy and propaganda, and provide the perfect opportunity to understand how countries use spectacular pavilions – expotecture – to represent themselves on the world stage.
For Emiratis, that process started in 1970 when Sheikh Zayed, the founding President of the UAE, commissioned a pavilion, which took the form of a fort, from the Abu Dhabi-based Egyptian architect and town planner Abdulrahman Makhlouf.
“In 1970, the UAE had yet to be formed as a nation, it had not been developed from an urban perspective and neither had its cities, so it made sense to use a symbol that would easily communicate both the country and Arabia,” Elsheshtawy explains.
“The fort was a very convenient symbol, and the pavilion was a way for Abu Dhabi, and by extension the UAE, to show that it was becoming a nation on the world stage.”
So powerful was the image of the fort in the national consciousness that it formed the basis for the design of the UAE national Expo pavilions at Seville in 1992 and Hanover eight years later.
“After the large-scale copy of Al Jahili Fort that was used in 2000, there was a realisation that the UAE needed to move beyond the image of the fort. I think that was also a reflection of the fact that as nations modernise, they tend to move beyond the use of such direct symbols,” says Elsheshtawy.
“That made the design of the Shanghai pavilion in 2010 a really radical departure. The authorities hired a world-class architectural firm and that made the notion of simply copying a fort too simplistic.”
The designers of the 2010 UAE Shanghai pavilion, Foster + Partners, are also responsible for the design of this year’s national pavilion in Milan, and both structures look to the UAE’s landscape for their inspiration.
As a strategy, the use of landscape metaphors allows the UAE to speak about itself in more abstract terms, such as sustainability, but for Elsheshtawy the use of such references in national pavilion designs is still a matter of copying.
“It’s a step in the right direction, but I don’t think things have moved far enough,” he says, looking forward to Dubai Expo 2020. “I think that the next step in dealing with these types of structures and buildings is to take some risks.
“When you look at the UK pavilion in Shanghai, which was designed by [Thomas] Heatherwick, it was just this brilliant structure ... it was something that dealt with universal themes as opposed to something that is a more direct symbol. I think that has to be the next step.”
Yasser Elsheshtawy's book, Representing the UAE: World Expos & the Search for Identity 1970-2015, is being published by Brownbook and Cultural Engineering, the curators of The Giving Tree exhibition, part of the UAE avilion exhibit at the Expo Milano 2015.
nleech@thenational.ae
