EXPO 67 “Greatest International Exhibition In History”

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31362, 6 May 1967, Page 5

EXPO 67 “Greatest International Exhibition In History”

(Reprinted from “Newsweek” by arrangement) Problems at Expo 67? Well, yes. Its builders weathered Montreal’s coldest winter in 33 years.

Its security division broke up a plot by a French separatist group to bomb the British pavilion and disarmed a bazooka rocket placed by anti-Castroites near the Cuban pavilion.

Its public-relations staff contended with published charges of housing frauds, discriminatory hiring practices and nepotism in awarding contracts.

• Its cultural-events people had to provide special kitchens to satisfy the culinary tastes of 25,000 international performers; the King’s i Troop of Britain’s Royal Horse Artillery, for l example, asked for one tea stove for every 20 riders.

Its operations division scraped together accommodations for nearly 700 performing horses while seeking a solution to their waste. (Canadian mushroom growers volunteered to assume this load—but federal health authorities decreed that foreign manure could not be used on domestic mushrooms.)

Mishaps Multiplied Mishaps multiplied. It was found that the gas jet that shoots flames from the mouth of “Uki” the sea monster was so powerful it would have scorched participants in the nearby trans-Canadian Canoe Pageant A garbage truck carted away a rare piece of freeform sculpture on the assumption it had been broken off a bulldozer. “This,” said Colonel Edward Churchill, director of Expo installations, “is like waging a small war.” The war is over. At 4 p.m. on' April 28, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mr Lester Pearson, lit Expo 67’s symbolic torch to the accompaniment of cannon salvos, the ringing of church bells and siren salutes from all the ships in Montreal Harbour. More than 1200 fireworks exploded above the twoisland site, outlining the flags of Expo’s 62 participating nations. And as a 33-piece band played “O Canada,” the $1 billion centrepiece on Canada’s 100th birthday cake unlocked its turnstiles to the first of an expected 35 million guests, including Queen Elizabeth 11, President Johnson, General de Gaulle, Premier Kosygin and a 25-year-old cook who roller-skated 3041 miles from Vancouver.

What they will find Is worth the trip—even on skates. In an age when such extravagances have become almost commonplace, the glittering, 1000-acre Expo may well be, as its organisers modestly propose, “the greatest international exhibition in the history of the world.” Not A Fair To begin with, Expo is not a world’s fair but a "Universal and International Exhibition of the first category,” a distinction somewhat akin to that between the Common Market and the United Nations. “A world’s fair is a commercial marketplace,” emphasises Robert Shaw, deputy commissioner general of Expo. “An international exhibition deals with ideas and values.”

What makes a fair an official World Exhibition is the sanction of Paris’s International Exhibitions Bureau, the meticulously-strict governing body of such shows. New York’s recent fair, for instance, lost 1.E.8. approval, the participation of many

major nations and $2l million. Expo, whose financial losses will be underwritten by the Canadian Government, conformed to 1.E.8. regulations, thereby luring a record threescore nations to the fair, including several from the Communist camp.

“The Hot Line”

The Soviet Union, whose $l5 million, swept-roof pavilion is linked to the United States’s glowing geodesic dome by a bridge already dubbed “The Hot Line,” is Expo’s biggest spender next to Canada. Czechoslovakia has invested $l4 million in a soft-sell show aimed at winning the hearts of Western businessmen. Cuba recently dispatched a shipload of 250 chanting, flag-waving loyalists to staff a cigar-box-shaped pavilion that depicts, in the words of its press attache, “the youthful spirit of the Cuban revolution, its openness, gaiety and rapid development in all aspects.”

As with all such spectacles, Expo 67 offers a smorgasbord of selections.

For The Gourmet

Visitors to the fair can enjoy Sir Laurence Olivier in “Othello” or ogle stripper Candy Kane, “The Girl Who Drove the West Wild”; eat a seven-course meal in the French pavilion and then experience _ weightlessness in the U.S.S.R.’s Cosmos Hall; observe Alexander Calder’s twenty-story stabile called “Man” or one of the world’s,

three stuffed dodo birds; ride Chinese sampans, Arabian dhows, Mexican flower boats and Venetian gondolas; and sample Siberian pelmeny (brioche stuffed with beef), Norwegian rokt reansdyr (smoked reindeer), FrenchCanadian tourtieres a la biere (seasoned pork pies cooked in beer), Czechoslovakian tereza (cabbage rolls with Bryndza cheese) or a new Swiss creation called chocolate fondue (broken chocolate bars in thick cream doused with Cointreau).

Few expositions, however, have invested more effort in establishing a unifying theme. Expo 67 is “Man and His World,” inspired by the title of a book by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French aviator and philosopher. “To be a man,” wrote SaintExupery, “is to feel that through one’s own contribution one helps to build the world.”

No Gimcrackery Expo’s planners have brilliantly realised the nobler aspects of “la condition humaine” while steadfastly shunning commercial gimcrackery (“No exhibitor

here,” said Shaw, “is going to put up a sign that says, ‘We grind the world’s best ballbearings’ ”). Seventeen thematic pavilions portray man as creator, producer, provider, explorer and member of the community. “Man the Creator,” for instance, has gathered more than 200 art works from museums from London to Leningrad. Tbe result may be North America’s most diversified exhibition: a Rembrandt self-portrait sits near Willem de Kooning’s starkly distorted “Woman II”; Rodin’s “Balzic” contemplates the sleek geometry of “Zig VH” by asbtract sculptor David Smith. In “Man the Explorer” visitors can watch divers at work in an underwater laboratory designed by oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau or walk through a three-storey reconstruction of the human cell that looks like a prop from the film “Fantastic Voyage.” “Man in the Community” evokes the jarring aesthetics of modern life through pop-op effects, including a Venus de Milo with mechanical arms.

Best Designed All world’s fairs serve as laboratories for architectural experimentation: London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 left behind the Crystal Palace, the Paris fair in 1889 produced the Eiffel Tower. While the face of Expo has drawn a few slurs—one critic called it a “disparate miscellany”—most judgments lean toward that of a British critic, David Wainwright: “Expo 67 promises to be the best-designed world’s fair ever staged.” Mr R. Buckmaster Fuller’s “skybreak bubble” housing the U.S. exhibit is the most dramatic of the 3000 Fullerinspired goedisic domes currently extant. By day it sits like a colossal beachball, its 4700 aluminised shades automatically shifting position—to adjust temperature—in response to changes in the sun's rays. At night, illuminated from within, it casts an amber glow visible from atop Montreal’s Mount Royal. From afar, the 158-unit apartment complex called Habitat 67 exerts no more visual appeal than a jumble of children’s blocks. Once inside, however, a visitor reaI Uses that Moshe Safdie's

Habitat represents more of a philosophy than a place. Each concrete block has been precast on the site and hoisted on to one of the three 13storey pyramids by a crane, forming a one-tofour-bed-room apartment whose cantilevered roof doubles as a terrace for the apartment below. No window confronts a neighbour’s window—and all provide a staggering view of Expo, the St. Lawrence river or the sprawling Montreal skyline. Elsewhere, West Germany’s translucent plastic “tent,” supported by eight steel masts standing as tall as 120 feet, suggests a practical design for Arctic or desert dwellings.

Left Unfinished The shape of Great Britain is a cantilevered slab of stark white concrete and a 200-foot tower whose top is deliberately left uneven as a symbol that the British still have “unfinished business” in the world. Also emblazoned on the tower is a threedimensional Union Jack, a touch hardly likely to enchant sensitive French Quebecois. As for the Soviets, they hired an Italian construction firm to build their glasswalled box with its ski-slope roof; later, the same firm constructed the Italian pavilion —a pocket version of the Russian design. The art of film may never

be the same after Expo. At least 50 pavilions are experimenting with cinematic tricks of every type. Images will shoot along walls, bounce off ceilings and wrap themselves around prisms, globes and plastic blocks; conveyers and carousels will whirl audiences through multi-screened labyrinths. Viewers, for instance, can sit in the centre of a 360-degree screen as a Montreal Canadiens hockey game sweeps around them. All of it may signal the death of monovision, the triumph of “polyvision.’’

Planners And Builder

The man who conceived Expo 67 is the Mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau. The man who sold it to 62 foreign exhibitors is Commissioner General Pierre Dupuy. But the man who actually built Expo is Colonel E. Churchill, a vigorous Canadian Army officer with the kind of military mind required to assemble a world exhibition in four years (most have taken five to seven years). “I went into it all with a feeling of absolute fear,” said Colonel Churchill. . What calmed him down was the enlistment of a computerised control system called the “critical path.” A computer digested data about every phase of Expo’s construction set deadlines for each, and then warned when delays in one phase—say, the installation of> sewers—would jeopardise the completion of another phase—the planting of hyacinths. Colonel Churchill left little to the fates, even plotting the probable weather during Expo’s life by checking local airport readings for the last 20 years (his prediction: 16 days of thunderstorms, 51 per cent sunshine, a temperature mean of 60.2 degrees).

Colonel Churchill’s most notable contribution, however, may turn out to be his ceaseless concern with the intangibles. Somehow, other fairs have alienated many a visitor with one week’s vacation, a footsore wife, three bored kids and a thin wallet Colonel Churchill paid several visits to the New York fair, for example, and concluded that it ’Tacked a relaxing aesthetic environment.” Accordingly, every Expo

exhibitor was required to set aside at least 40 per cent of his site for landscaping and enforce an 85-dedbel ceiling on noise. A criss-crossing network of lakes, canals and more than 150 acres of parkland also helps to soothe the fair-strained psyches. Throughout the exhibition site, electronic tote boards announce which . pavilions have waiting lines, while reservation booths dispense advance tickets to the more popular free shows. At the first sign of a queue, closedcircuit TV cameras flash an alarm to an underground control centre, which dispatches a jeep bearing troubadours, jugglers and other timepassers to the critical area. Expo is not expensive. For a couple and one child, a full day’s fun should cost less than $3O, including admission ($2.40), two rides in the amusement area (La Ronde) and a moderately priced lunch (food prices must be posted outside all of Expo’s 140 restaurants and snack bars). A free, air-conditioned express services the site, while minirails weave around each island.

In the long run, of course, Expo 67’s reputation will hinge on the quality of its shows. Every world exhibition has its clinkers and sleepers, but if pre-fair form holds true, Expo’s biggest spenders will be offering its best shows. The desire to organise and participate in world exhibitions has never seemed stronger. At Expo 67, for instance, one would expect to find all of the major powers. But countries like Chad, Uganda and Mauritius must really believe to scrape up the price of participation.

Reasons Of Pride Why do they come? For reasons of pride: “Even though the mass of Chadians are indifferent to our participation,” says the Chad ambassador to the United Nations. “The government is very proud and very honoured.” And economics: “Anything that will bring us tourists and investments is worth the trip,” says Uganda’s commissioner general. And a quest for national identity: “We’ve come to put Mauritius on the map,” says the director of the Mauritius exhibition. “The other day someone asked me if it was off the coast of Hawaii.” Combine these motivations with man’s natural proclivity for periodically pausing to assess where he has been and where he is going, and the rationale for world’s fairs is more understandable. And so, perhaps, is the towering billboard that stands by Montreal’s Dorval expressway. For weary Expo 67 visitors heading home, it is a simple reminder: “EXPO 7ft—Osaka, Japan.”