 EXHIBITOR @ EXPO 2010:
DAY EIGHT |
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| Take a virtual ride on the Switzerland Pavilion’s chairlift. It brings visitors up and over the top of the pavilion, which is covered in plants and tall grasses. Riders get a bird’s-eye view of Expo 2010 and the Shanghai skyline. |
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| This is a brief interview with Manuel Salchli, deputy commissioner general and pavilion director for Switzerland. |
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| The Urban Planet Pavilion won our Expo 2010 Award for Best Use of Technology because of this massive dome-shaped projection surface. This video shows how the presentation atop the dome, dubbed “Blue Earth,” depicts the world morphing from a pristine oasis into a barren wasteland and back again. |
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| The second story of the Russia Pavilion is designed around the works of 20th century children’s author Nikolay Nosov. A wonderland of giant flowers and trees in Crayola hues, the pavilion uses a trio of Nosov’s titles — “The City of Flowers,” “The City of Sun,” and “The City of Moon” — for its exhibit sections. |
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| This is a clip from a promotional film submitted by the producers of the Window of the City presentation. The recipient of our Expo 2010 Award for Best Presentation, Window of the City combines all the trappings of a smash-hit Broadway musical with some mind-blowing high-tech effects. |
From the Alps to the Shanghai skyline, Expo was a series of ups with few downs for us yesterday. The Swiss pavilion offers the iconic chairlift to the pavilion's roof, where crickets and birds have now made their home in the rolling mounds of fragrant grasses and plants that cover it. Outside, meanwhile, 10,000 fire-engine-red solar cells that cover the pavilion like a sequined veil will be sold off to guests after Expo closes.
The Russia Pavilion was like a rec room designed by Tim Leary, with purple mushrooms the side of Smart cars, massive flowers as big as elephants, and floating spacecraft extolling Russian achievement in the space. If that was a child's fairytale, then the Urban Planet Pavilion was a novelist's masterwork. Designed to accommodate millions of Chinese, many of them rural, the pavilion is dedicated to explaining the crisis of urbanization. It forces you to see the challenges, which are explained on a long walk up an angled floor — so your body feels the taxing situation as you're learning about it. Divided into traditional Chinese themes of earth, air, fire, water, and wood, the areas use graphic representations to tell their story, like the 15-foot-high tube of swirling water with 40 or so spigots, each representing a different country and its water usage. (The spigots, cleverly, are sized according to how much H2O the country gulps down.) At the structure's peak, you come across a 100-foot-diameter globe that morphs from picture-from-space realism to a liquid-metal state to a mass of circuitry symbolizing the telecom grid to a scorched and barren surface — all before evolving into a post-carbon world of tranquil greens and restful blues. The display is so mesmerizing, it's as if you're a satellite hanging over the earth, watching it shift and shape through the ages.
Later in the day, we had the opportunity to watch the Window of the City presentation. The expo's theme show takes place in a biomorphic-shaped structure in the shape of an eye. There, audiences watch, mesmerized, as a stage that holds a cross between an Imax screen and a giant snow globe — with more wire-fu than a Jet Li movie — offers a fairytale interpretation of Expo’s “Better City, Better Life” theme. We had to have our jaws surgically removed from the floor. Just imagine what many audience members, who may never have seen even a simple live-stage performance before, must have felt.
We ended the day up on the 32nd floor of the Grand Hyatt with Errol Ahearn of GES. Here, in the Vue bar, where you can order a swimsuit off the menu to use in the open-air hot tub, we sipped cocktails while gazing out at the LED-lit city. To say it was a great day would be a serious understatement.
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