Seeing Things | Shanghai Expo 2010

UK PavilionDaniele Mattioli Heatherwick Studio’s U.K. Pavilion sits atop an artificial landscape at Shanghai Expo 2010.

Once upon a time, back when international travel was a novelty rather than a nuisance, and the Internet was nothing but a sci-fi fantasy, world expositions had a certain cachet. Countries competed to showcase the latest advancements in technology, science and culture in swanky national pavilions. As a young child visiting Expo ’67 in Montreal, I was dazzled by the U.S. Pavilion, a sparkling geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. Perhaps those expos were so exciting because they were all about the promise of the future. But now that we’re living in that future, the idea of an international exposition doesn’t have the same allure.

InteriorDaniele Mattioli The otherworldly interior of the U.K. Pavilion, also known as the Seed Cathedral, features thousands of varieties of seeds encased in the tips of fiber-optic rods.

Leave it to Shanghai to pull out all the stops for this year’s “Better City, Better Life” Expo. Like everything else in the city, Expo is supersized and over the top (or OTT as they say in Shanghai). The site, at just over two square miles, is the largest ever and takes even the most intrepid visitor several days to cover completely. In terms of innovation, Heatherwick Studio’s U.K. Pavilion is by far the most intriguing of the national pavilions. Known as the Seed Cathedral, the building sits atop an artificial landscape and is the only national pavilion that truly integrates concept, container and content. About 60,000 slender transparent fiber-optic rods form both the inside and the outside of the building, which the Chinese quickly christened “The Dandelion” for its furry form. Inside, the glowing, polished tips of the rods, which encase thousands of varieties of seeds that will be dispersed to schools in China at the Expo’s close, create a glamorous, otherworldly vibe that one visitor described as “very Stanley Kubrick.”

Dream CubeBasil Childers During the cinematic finale of the Dream Cube experience, visitors’ movements trigger the transformation of colored LEDs on the building’s exterior.

A smaller site, across the Huangpu River from the national pavilions, is home to a number of corporate pavilions. The standout here is the “Dream Cube,” or Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, by Edwin Schlossberg’s New York firm ESI Design. (Schlossberg, by the way, once worked for Fuller.) It encourages visitors to participate in an impressive multimedia experience made up of cutting-edge technology, dreamlike environments, collaborative social spaces and sustainably designed materials — all of which are refreshingly free of branding messages or logos, and which tell a story of transformation and change. The finale is a 20-minute cinematic journey inspired by the fourth-century Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi’s dream that he was a butterfly — a perfect metaphor for transformation. The Dream Cube and the Seed Cathedral bring some cachet back to Expo. Like Fuller’s ’67 dome, the Seed Cathedral challenges us to think differently about architecture, while the Dream Cube reawakens our excitement about the possibilities of the future in a city that is as futuristic as anything on the planet.

Shanghai Expo 2010 runs through October 31.

Click here to see Edwin Schlossberg talk about the Dream Cube.

Click here to see Thomas Heatherwick talking about the UK pavilion.