cityofsound

Shanghai Expo 2010: universal narratives vs. universal values in the corporate pavilions

Back in May, I visited the 2010 Shanghai Expo. I was in China to help lead a creative cities symposium in Hong Kong and then as a speaker (with Finland’s/Kone’s Anne Stenros, The Young Foundation’s Geoff Mulgan, Shanghai academic Wenhui Shan and others) on a 'social life of cities' panel at Cisco's Partnership for Urban Innovation conference in Shanghai.

The Expo is old news now, in a way, as it's been covered elsewhere in depth (and breadth) and is coming to an end any day. Of course it is wonderful, thought-provoking, banal, confronting and inspiring all at once. Most of that coverage has focused on the architecture and other experience of the country pavilions, not unreasonably. There are some extraordinary buildings and spaces, for sure — such as Heatherwick's UK pavilion (the winner), the Netherlands, the Danish pavilion by BIG, Austria's, China's, Switzerland's, Spain's and Australia's— and I'll follow this with a few notes on what I saw of all that.

But it's worth noting that the country pavilions are only one part of the show. The site is vast, and they cover a good proportion of it, but there are also pavilions for cities, regions and themes, such as Urban Best Practices (which features your correspondent, of which more later). There are also pavilions for corporations and industries. You'll wander past a vast building with just 'OIL' written on it, for instance. 

I thought I’d write about two of these corporate pavilions, however, featuring some EXCLUSIVE (possibly, maybe) footage from both, as these experiences may be as revealing of 2010 as any other part of the Expo. In particular, I’m still trying to understand why the future city visions in both the General Motors and Cisco pavilion experiences share almost exactly the same narrative.

'Nairn's London' by Ian Nairn (1966)

(A half-written entry on Ian Nairn's book 'Nairn's London' had been lying dormant for almost a year. However, a conversation on Twitter last night between myself, Kieran Long (of the Evening Standard), Justin McGuirk (of The Guardian), Charles Holland (of FAT), and Owen Hatherley (of Owen Hatherley and more besides) prompted me to finish off the sentences and hit 'publish'.)

The Economist’s Christmas special (2009) had a typically fascinating article about being an outsider, an emigrant, a foreigner, and the role and practice of writing in terms of understanding the nature of a place. The article described the effect on perception that 'being a foreigner' may have:

"Foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”." ['The Others', The Economist, December 17th 2009]

Unrelated to this, Owen Hatherley and I had a very brief email correspondence a while ago about whether one could capture the essence of a city - or perhaps an essence of the city - in a brief visit, as with his research-fuelled excursions for Building Design (which are turning into a kind of retrofitted Pevsner for the 21stC) or my own scribbles garnered from a mere 24 hours in Geneva or Seoul, or 48 hours in Seattle or Turin or Milan, or a few days in Boston/Cambridge, or several intermittent weekends in Barcelona, and so on. Can you detect and describe an essence of place from a brief visit? I’ll leave it to you to decide, though I think that—with practice, and research—you can indeed quickly conjure an essence of a city, which may even be a decent facsimile of how many people perceive the place. (Somewhat like The Dishonourable Kirstie Allsopp’s 11 seconds rule on Location Location Location, though not really.)

Ian Nairn's book Nairn's London is quite the opposite—a rich book derived from a life spent amidst the city, a city which he clearly worshipped even as it was changing around him. It's the ultimate inside job. And although written from the point-of-view of the insider, I'd argue it manages to transform the "banality of the everyday" into a "super-real, evocative, true biography" of a city, too.

Finlandia: the greatest architectural mistake ever made? Aalto's benign errors

I've been to Helsinki a couple of times this year. It's one of my favourite cities - civic, compact, cultured, curious, crafted. Charming but not overly so. Pale yellows, pale greys, pale whites, pale blues. Sea-borne and wrapped in rock and forest. Jugend and modern, eastern and western. Solid sometimes stolid. A quiet riot of componentry. Literate in most senses, especially in design. Cold and beautifully bleak, crisp in spring and soft and warm in summer, and so on and so on.

I've visited many times yet for some reason I'd never got round to visiting Finlandia, the concert hall designed by Alvar Aalto.

It's a quite fabulous structure, perhaps even the equal of Utzon's Sydney Opera House though certainly less well-known. in fact, it's a similar structure to Sydney, though without its soaring shells - which I admit is a little like saying it's like Miles Davis without a trumpet, but still.