Photos courtesy of Tamás Lévai.
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| Theme: Harmony, Creativity, Hospitality |
Client: Special Envoy of Prime Minister |
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Design: Tamás Lévai |
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Exterior Design: Perhaps the only pavilion in the 159-year-history of World Expos designed around an Italian philosopher, Hungary’s pavilion is a forest of nearly 600 hanging wooden rods. Inspired by Umberto Eco's book, "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods," where the Italian academic advocates looking not for the well-trod path but the inaccessible route, the pavilion's rods create a dense thicket attendees must navigate through. Partially hollow, with lights inside that slowly flicker green, red, and yellow out their bottom ends, the rods respond to ambient sound by rising and falling at random, thereby continually creating a new maze.
Pavilion Summary: Harking back to its display of the world’s largest Rubik’s Cube at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, TN, the Hungarian pavilion is the setting for new brain-teasing invention from that Eastern European country. Once visitors navigate their way through a bewilderment of poles, they enter on a part smooth, part cobblestone-like floor that leads to the pavilion’s centerpiece. Displayed on an elevated area like a concept car at an auto show, is a 6.5-foot-tall Plexiglas object with the shape of a mound of mashed potatoes: the Gomboc. Created by two Hungarian mathematicians, the Gomboc is a “homogenous object with one stable and one unstable equilibrium point,” which means it is almost impossible to knock over, much like the Weebles toys for children. Now revolutionizing the study of items as disparate as pebbles and tortoise shells, small-size versions of the Gomboc can be tested at a horseshoe-shaped demonstration counter, where attendees try in vain to knock it over.
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