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Business Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Business Times
Do world fairs still matter?
IN MID-APRIL, the 2025 World Expo opened in Osaka, Japan. With an estimated US$66 billion price tag and unique setting on an artificial island called Yumeshima, it's the follow-up to the famous 1970 World Expo held in that city – the first such event in Asia, remembered now for its wild futuristic architecture that conveyed the sweeping ambitions of postwar Japan. Till Oct 13, visitors can step into the national pavilions of 158 different countries, each designed to respond to the fair's theme – 'Designing Future Society for Our Lives'. Sub-themes include 'saving', 'empowering' and 'connecting' lives. Like the comparatively safe architecture of its pavilions, the theme is no match for the grandiose 1970 event, which celebrated 'Progress and Harmony for Mankind'. The starry history of these international spectacles, which trace their roots back to 1851, haunts their modern analogues, says Charles Pappas, a World Expo historian and consultant. The World Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago and the world's fairs that came to New York City in 1939 and 1964 still linger in the collective imagination; few outside of eastern Tennessee are likely to recall Knoxville's World's Fair of 1982, and many more recent expos have been held in emerging-market cities like Astana, Kazakhstan. 'When I talk to an American about an expo,' he says, 'the response I usually get is, 'My grandmother went to one!' or 'They still have those?'' Pappas' new book, Nobody Sits Like The French: Exploring Paris Through Its World Expos, makes the case that international expositions matter, by tracing their effect on a European capital that really went all-in on them: Paris hosted major expos in 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900, 1925 and 1937. (The city withdrew a bid for this year's expo in 2018, choosing to prioritise the 2024 Summer Olympics.) These are presented not only as milestones of industrial capitalism that introduced scores of new products to the world, but also as shapers of infrastructure that transformed Parisian life. Baron Haussmann, Gustave Eiffel and Louis Vuitton, among many others, used these expos as chances to build, invent and promote new ideas. Without them, Paris wouldn't have the tower that serves as its most powerful symbol; the rest of the world might not have known the specific pleasure of eating blue cheese from the caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. Pappas, also the author of the 2017 book Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords: How World's Fairs and Trade Expos Changed the World, recently spoke with Bloomberg CityLab to discuss Paris's historic fairs, Osaka's current one, and why international expos are worth having in an ever-more-fractious world. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity: BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up How did Paris's seven universal expositions change the city? The Paris typically imagined by a visitor traces back to its seven World Expos, starting with 1855. Baron Haussmann at the time had been given the go-ahead by Napoleon III to remake the city, with the expo as the catalyst. Haussmann engineered around 20 per cent of the streets in central Paris, increased the arrondissements from 12 to 20, and took a wrecking ball to about 20,000 buildings which contained roughly 120,000 homes inside them. He replaced them with 34,000 new buildings, housing roughly 215,000 apartments. The ancient winding streets and narrow corridors Paris was known for were removed from the central part of the city. Eighty-five miles of new boulevards would, as the phrase of the day went, 'air, unify and beautify' Paris. Conveniently, as historians often note, this also allowed a wide row of troops to more easily quell social disturbances like the uprising of 1848. Haussmann also substantially increased the water supply and even oversaw minutiae like redecorating bandstands in city parks according to his whims. 'Hausmann Style' buildings – four-sided, cream-colored limestone buildings with mansard roofs – have since become quintessentially Paris. So has its cafe culture, formed by the 85 miles of new boulevards he built. The ripple effect of that first exposition and the remaking of Paris itself solidified what an expo could do and became a reason to hold more of them. Louis Vuitton showcased his luggage trunks at the 1867 expo. The No 14 bistro chair was the first mass-produced piece of furniture and earned a gold medal at the 1867 expo. It was made by a German-Austrian designer, Michael Thonet, but was such a hit at the expo that one cannot separate it from Paris. Pavel Yablochkov's early electric candle – an electric carbon arc lamp – was a hit at the 1878 expo when he put up 64 of them in Paris. Roquefort cheese was promoted at these expos and was marketed at the 1900 expo through reproductions of the caves in which the cheese is aged – what we would call an immersive experience today. Art Nouveau took off thanks to the 1900 expo, remnants of it include Maxim's bistro and Hector Guimard's Metro entrances. Art Deco was prevalent at the 1925 expo and the name itself traces back to the event. And of course, the Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 expo. Were any of the Paris expos initially received poorly or deemed not worth the investment? Expos do not necessarily make a profit, but there is a long-term payoff. The 1984 expo in New Orleans went bankrupt before it was even over. Four decades later, the area of the site – which includes the Warehouse District and a convention centre built because of the expo – has generated some US$90 billion in revenue. Shanghai spent as much as US$90 billion on the 2010 fair, much of which was infrastructure improvements, and was estimated to eventually generate a 10-to-1 payoff. But analysts say they were way off, and it only ends up being 4-to-1. That's still huge. The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 expo. PHOTO: AFP Many saw the payoff of 1855 at the time. The Eiffel Tower, which, although so incredibly reviled when it was first proposed, became everyone's favorite once it went up in 1889. Today, its estimated value is over US$500 billion and generates an estimated US$100 million a year in revenue. The expos changed Paris and became the template for what other cities should do. Are there any temporary structures from these fairs that people would like to see rebuilt, like what happened with the pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition? I don't think there's anything that qualifies in that narrow definition. Grand Palais and Petit Palais were meant to last from the get-go. The Eiffel Tower was originally supposed to last 20 years. There was an effort to dismantle and reassemble it in St Louis for the 1904 World's Fair. But Gustave Eiffel, who designed and built the tower, thought there was still enough bureaucratic opposition in Paris that he might not be able to bring it back. So he didn't dare take it down, and then it found further utility as a radio broadcasting outlet in the early 20th century, providing yet another reason to keep it up. Paris was further ahead than modern expos when it comes to creating buildings to last. Temporary structures were prevalent elsewhere, like in Chicago for the 1893 expo, where plaster structures were assembled to resemble ancient Greek architecture. That's changed in recent years, like at Dubai 2020 where 80 per cent of the structures were planned to be repurposed or reused. Paris initially put in a bid to host the 2025 expo. What would you have wanted to see from it had they hosted it? I don't know how much bureaucratic resistance there would be to new buildings that could be as loved as the old ones. Could something as dramatic and as radical as the Eiffel Tower be built? What kind of architectural boundaries would they have pushed and who would they have brought in to pull it off? Regardless, it probably would have been quite fashionable. The French pavilion in Osaka, designed by Coldefy and Carlo Ratti, shows the kind of elegance Paris would have brought as the host city. What would you say to someone who admires the architecture of Osaka 1970 but is unimpressed with what they've seen online so far from Osaka 2025? I haven't visited yet, but I want to see if it celebrates anything that makes people collectively look to the future. World expos often commemorate disasters the host cities survived; the 1893 expo in Chicago reflected its recovery from the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, and the 1915 expo in San Francisco celebrated the city's revival after the terrible earthquake of 1906. The 1970 expo partly celebrated Japan's post-war renaissance during the heyday of Japan's Metabolist movement. There were a lot of pavilions with organic or organic-inspired shapes. The Swiss pavilion looked like a Cubist swarm of fireflies, the Toshiba pavilion looked like black and orange arachnids. It was cutting edge and had a real joy to it all. I want to walk a fine line and not insult anybody here. There's some really interesting, challenging architecture at Osaka 2025. France's pavilion is cool. Saudi Arabia's, designed by Norman Foster, resembles a traditional Saudi village. The Italy pavilion, designed by Mario Cucinella, looks like something Julius Caesar would be able to recognise. The China pavilion is in the shape of a bamboo scroll and has a section with 3D-printed biodegradable structures to relax in. To build Expo '70, Japan spent about nearly US$16.5 billion in today's figures, upgrading the city's transportation infrastructure and adding a cutting-edge telecommunications network. These improvements helped usher in an era of world-straddling economic growth for the country. And the expo site was roughly twice as big as 2025's. The 1970 expo was the beginning of a trend towards non-Western locations, which will continue in 2030 with Riyadh. Non-Western countries see the value in expos as an opportunity to build infrastructure and launch themselves on the world stage. I expect Riyadh to welcome people in a way it hasn't been known for, as Dubai did in 2020 when it modified its laws to be more Western for things like pot possession and public displays of affection. Whether it's Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates or Kazakhstan, these non-democratic host countries have no illusions about real politics or their place in the world. They know the value of an expo and the soft power it can yield. It's the old 'attraction versus coercion' equation. Milan 2015 was an exception to that non-Western shift. Pope Francis famously said at the time that the event represented a 'culture of waste'. Do his words ring true to expos in general today? They're not a waste of money, time, or effort. But they must be judged by their impact after the fact: Did they change public opinion? Did they help the public accept new ideas and technologies? Did they accomplish what they set out to do? If the answer to those questions is 'yes' then they deserve an 'A' grade. The history of expos fall into three categories: products, progress, and panic. Product expos, which spanned from 1851 to 1939, showed what the industrial world could do and create. That could be seen through early forms of the fax machine at the first expo in 1851, in London, to the introduction of television at New York's 1939 expo. Progress expos showed off what the future would bring, starting with Chicago in 1933, presenting an industrial future that looked a lot better than the Great Depression. General Motors really hit that out of the park in 1939 with Futurama, when they showed what the world would be like in 1960 via a 35,000-square-foot diorama. That continued until 1974 in Spokane, which was the first expo to really focus on environmental problems. These expos point out environmental problems and big decisions that have to be made quickly to fix them. With the prevailing pessimism around the postwar world order, what could make an expo worth the investment in a Western democracy today? Western countries generally think of expos as an item of nostalgia, something whose time has gone by, especially with the Internet making the rest of the world so much more accessible. Cities that host expos profit when they create long-term infrastructure as opposed to a theme park of sorts. Olympics and Super Bowls are too limited and short term to create long-lasting good. BLOOMBERG
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
How Osaka's World Expo Compares to Its Famous Predecessors
The 2025 World Expo opened in Osaka in April with a $66 billion price tag, featuring pavilions from 158 countries. The event isn't generating the same buzz as the first world's fair held in the Japanese city in 1970, which featured a bold, futuristic theme and lots of wild architecture. And to many, these international spectacles are viewed as relics of the past. But historian Charles Pappas argues that world's fairs are still worth having in an ever-more-fractious world. In a conversation with contributor Mark Byrnes, he discusses his new book Nobody Sits Like The French, which makes his case by tracing how the historic fairs of Paris (the city hosted seven since 1855) helped shape the infrastructure that transformed life in the French capital. They also discuss how the current expo stacks up to its more recent predecessors, many of which have been held in non-Western cities. Today on CityLab: Do World's Fairs Still Matter? — Rthvika Suvarna
