On the first weekend of June 2015, I have travelled to Milan and visited the Expo 2015. This has finally prompted me to start a blog, where I will be posting about my general impressions, as well as my reviews of the individual national pavilions. Come join me for a journey into the bizarre, as I document a modern World’s Fair, an atavistic perpetuation of a 19th Century nationalist tradition that somehow lasted to this day (yes, even more than in the Olympics).
What the hell is Expo 2015?
It’s a real, live, honest-to-God World’s Fair.
A World’s Fair is a kind of large exhibition that came out of the Industrial Revolution as a means to showcase developments in science and technology. Their origins lie in Medieval agricultural fairs, except rather than showing the latest and the greatest in pre-Industrial crop techniques, they were showing all the cool new developments in technology. France started it in the late 18th century, but it were the British, who in 1851 had the brilliant idea that they could have a technology fair…..for the whole world.
Since then, World Fairs had been held at more-or-less regular intervals of 5 to 10 years, moving from city to city. In 1928, the Bureau of International Expositions was created to introduce a touch of much-needed corruption and bureaucracy to the whole thing.
During that time, the various Worlds’ Fairs showcased inventions like the telephone (1876), the fluorescent lamp (1893), the Ferris wheel and the escalator (1900), the X-Ray machine (1901) and IMAX (1974). They featured innovative entertainment like the Paris Summer Olympics of 1900, and the assassination of US President William McKinley. Occasionally, they’ve bankrupted the cities they were held in (Seville, 1992), but they’ve also left behind some permanent structures, some of which might be familiar to you:
An oil tower (1889):
A Martian Tripod (1962):
A beachball skeleton held up by fountains (1964):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ushing.jpg
And the mangled corpse of Lady Liberty (1878):
This Expo, thus, has big shoes to fill, especially coming on the heels of the last major one, which took place in Shanghai in 2010 and looked like this:
The theme of the Expo is, “Feeding the Planet. Energy For Life,” thus making it, ironically, the world’s largest and most expensive agricultural fair (and coming full circle to its origins). Except rather than showcasing the largest turnips, they are focused on sustainable agriculture for the future, with a motto of “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life.” Naturally, important promoters of sustainable agriculture like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are sponsors.
The Expo itself had some trouble coming into existence. Being a large international event, and held in Italy, no less, it had faced the typical levels of corruption (seven ministers and senior managers were arrested for bribery), which led to budget overruns (it ballooned to around €13bn) and construction delays (to the point that €3m has had to be spent on building camouflage structures to hide the unfinished pavilions for the opening), and, of course, violent protests on opening day. Typical stuff, in other words. If you would like to know more, Oliver Wainwright of the Guardian has an excellent article on the tale of woe that was the road to the Expo [ur=http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/ ... ravaganzal]here[/url]. (Seriously, read it, it’s good).
That said, they had manage to cover up all the problems quite well, so not only were most people there ignorant of the problems, it was actually a lot of fun, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experience (and might come back again).
Read more here, because posting photos individually to the board is a pain in the ass.
Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin
