Organizers of Expo 2010 have put together a set of five pavilions and a best practices area based on the “Better City Better Life” theme. The Urbanian Pavilion, Pavilion of City Being, and Pavilion of Urban Planet are situated together in Zone A. While the first impression of these names may strike some English speakers as weak translations, the organizers have clearly sought to examine the “Better City” theme in a straightforward and easily comprehended manner.
The Zone A pavilions portray their messages through visual and auditory stimulation rather than the written word. The architecture of these three theaters in particular is reminiscent of Disneyland, combining images with background sound effects—an effective approach that avoids the need for translations for diverse audiences speaking myriad languages and dialects. The soundtracks and images in the wide, multistory exhibits together communicate the essence of city life and the respective themes of the individual pavilions, presenting a desirable experience even without in-depth content.
The Urbanian Pavilion portrays the lives of sample families, including a single-member household, from five cities around the world. The Pavilion of City Being portrays the journeys of city life—for example, through transportation, through water delivery to urban inhabitants, and through functions of other infrastructure systems—as metaphors for the journeys of life itself.
The Pavilion of Urban Planet carries most of the load for communicating concerns for global warming and the proposed solutions. Composed of spiraling platforms centered on a huge globe with projected images of Earth, the pavilion provides a reminder that real-world climate effects occur on a quite different time scale than the few seconds it takes to dramatize those changes.
In other zones, the Pavilion of Footprint serves more as a museum, offering an array of related artistic exhibits, and the Pavilion of the Future is an example of adaptive use of former industrial buildings.
In addition, the Urban Best Practices Area offers more than a dozen case study pavilions of best practices from cities such as Madrid, Shanghai, Xi’An, and Vancouver on a decidedly more human scale than that of the soaring China Pavilion and other cavernous facilities. Portions of the case study structures integrate exposed remnants of structural elements from buildings previously occupying the site.
