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Recent Visitors
Celebs, shows may be saving grace for lacklustre Canadian Pavilion
2010. 9 April
by Aileen McCabe
(canada.com)
Everyone is an architecture critic. Why not? So many of the national pavilions at the Shanghai Expo are peacocks waiting to be admired - or not - and it would probably drive their creators nuts if everyone didn't have an opinion.
During a recent media tour of the Expo site, the herd of photographers didn't even have to name their favourites. They stood inside the Australian Pavilion, with its waves of weathered steel ``the colour of "Australian dirt," and shamelessly used it as a perch to take pictures of the nearby Swiss confection instead.
The rooftop chairlift and Alpine meadow, and the sparkling red soybean curtain caught everyone's eye.
When the photographers had exhausted every angle, they turned their lenses on the graceful Polish Pavilion that looks like a giant Chinese paper doily.
Some reporters and photographers even skipped the mini-tour of Australia's pride and joy to dash across the plaza to snap the Spanish Pavilion, amusingly clad in various shades of straw matting.
It's too soon to say which pavilions will cause the biggest stir when Expo opens on May 1, but Britain's ``Seed Cathedral,'' almost bristling with its 60, 000 transparent rods, is definitely the early favourite. And Denmark, with its curvy bicycle path of a pavilion is so fresh and fun, it's high on most everybody's early list.
The huge Canadian Pavilion, clad in red cedar and polished steel, went in another direction than the glitzy Europeans who are claiming the early buzz.
``It's classy,'' said a Canadian photographer who shot it this week. ``The wood is beautiful.''
An employee at the Spanish Pavilion, who works in and among all the edgy European pavilions, has seen the Canadian Pavilion many times now and seems surprised himself when he says: ``You know, it's one of my favourites. It's cool.''
American architecture critic William Bostwick, writing on his FastCompany. com blog, differs - although he seems to have toned down his criticism of the Canadian effort since January, when he called it ``awful.''
``It's a half-assed riff on the already stale trend of jagged angles . . . covered in tacky, '70s rec-room-style wood panelling,'' he wrote.
More recently, however, he's just lumped it in with the widely criticized U. S. Pavilion and called them both ``middling entries'' in the Expo design sweepstakes.
Late last year, public relations firm Ogilvy Worldwide in Shanghai polled 14, 337 Chinese to find out what they thought about the Expo pavilions. The results were interesting.
The survey found only about 38 per cent would factor in what a pavilion looked like before deciding whether to visit it or not. For 50 per cent of those polled, the most important consideration for visiting was their familiarity with the country.
It meant that in a Top-10 list of most anticipated pavilions, the poll put the U.S., France and Japan on top of the heap - despite the less than stellar reviews all of them are getting for design.
The Canadian Pavilion - with its mediocre to bad reviews - was ranked No. 9 in the survey.
The perceived problem with the Canadian effort is its lack of a hotshot architect. It was designed by Cirque du Soleil, which is the equivalent of a mortal sin if you are among those who think a World Expo should be the showcase for a country's leading architectural lights.
Certainly, many Canadians take that view. How could they not after Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome and Moshe Safdie's Habitat '67 helped make the Montreal Expo one of the few world's fairs people still talk about?
Putting design to one side, Canada did two things exceptionally well when it signed on for the Shanghai Expo.
It hired Mark Rowswell, also known as Dashan, to be commissioner general, and it gave Cirque du Soleil free rein to run the pavilion's cultural programs. Given that an Expo these days is, in reality, little more than a giant exercise in national branding, and never forgetting the finite number of things the Chinese know about Canada, it is what you call leading with your aces.
It is a world Expo - but this show is for the Chinese.
It's not about China primping for the world; it's about the world spending the next six months primping for the Chinese.
The vast majority of the 70-plus million visitors will be Chinese. Most of them will be from China's big industrial cities and, by Chinese standards, are considered to be fairly well off. It means for the nations participating in Expo, most of their visitors will be potential tourists, exchange students or investors.
For Canada, the plus is they will all know Dashan. He's a fixture here. He's called ``the best-known foreigner in China.'' His popular cross-talk routines on Chinese television made him a superstar - already when he comes onto the Expo site, the Chinese workers stand and stare.
The Cirque is not as widely known, but in the area around Shanghai, which will provide the largest pool of visitors to Expo, it has name recognition. And, its acrobats will have broad appeal. They provide a form of entertainment the Chinese recognize and enjoy.
Michael Darragh, who is writing an Expo blog for Ogilvy, commented recently:
``Personally I am impressed with the Canada Pavilion and it will be a destination to be entertained, which may just be the tonic for hot and exhausted Expo visitors seeking an alternative to international (propaganda) branding.''
Not so faint praise.