For architect Mina Chow, the pictures portraying her parents at the 1964 New York's World Fair capture all the spirit of hope and optimism they had at the time. Newly arrived immigrants who wanted to be Americans, Chow's parents spent their time visiting iconic landmarks from the Statue of Liberty to the Lincoln Memorial, but their pictures at the World Fair seem particularly special as they represented the future hopes of the couple and of the country where they had moved in.
More World's Fairs followed, with the Montreal and Osaka ones becoming canvases for innovation, science, national pride and global promotion, with the USA being represented in the former by a building by Buckmister Fuller and bringing to the latter a lunar rock. Yet things changed as the years passed and the USA started not caring anymore about these global events.
Chow decided therefore to investigate the matter in a documentary - "Face of a Nation: What Happened to the World's Fair?" - on today at the Cinépolis Chelsea (260 West 23rd Street, NYC), as part of the ninth edition of the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF), curated by Kyle Bergman.
The documentary opens with Chow talking with her parents about the reasons why people move to another country - getting a better education, finding better jobs and opportunities and helping their families left behind at home. Going to the World's Fair was a life-changing experience for Chow's parents as it presented them with a view of what the global world was going to be.
Jack Masey, exhibition and museum designer and Director of Expo '67 and Expo '70 was in charge of selecting the designers and overlooking the projects for the USA Pavilions, and shares with Chow the same enthusiasm her parents seemed to have in the '60s. Positive and optimist, Masey firmly states in the documnetary that it is important for countries to join a World's Fair to present themselves to the others and do away with mistrust and suspicion, reducing in this way the possibiliy of conflict.
Maybe thinking that America didn't have to explain itself to the world, the US gradually started forgetting about the fairs, in 2000 the US didn't go to the Hanover Expo in Germany; in 2001 the USA membership was withdrawn from the organisation for World's Fairs because the country stopped paying its dues.
Chow decided to investigate matters and went to visit the 1st World's Fair in China. With over 73 million visitors, the Shanghai World Expo broke all attendance records for any event in human history.
The fabulously grand China Pavilion combined traditions and the future with a building that genuinely stood out; France opted for a romantic jewel box-like pavilion that opened onto a green garden; Spain went for a building made of a sustainable material, wicker, while the UK presented a high-tech seed cathedral. The USA pavilion was instead a huge flop: unpleasing to the eye and cold, it was a sort of commercial factory-like environment in which visitors were obliged to watch badly shot phoney and annoyingly ingenuous arrogant videos. It stood out as the most uninspiring places of the entire exhibition, representing a national humiliation on a global scale.
Little by litle Chow discovers the truth behind this flop, a truth made of ignorance, apathy, budget cuts (the funds for the fairs come from the private sector) and the State Department’s deception to the American public.
As Jack Masey tells Chow making money seems more important than anything else, but not considering the World's Fair as a serious event has so far damaged the reputation of the USA. The documnetary also features additional interviews with prominent architects such as Frank Gehry, and Biber Architects, the firm that designed the USA Pavilion at Milan's Expo, that provides insights into fundraising processes for fairs.
Chow may be idealistic, but she is passionate about the research behind this project and about the questions that the film ends up raising about immigration, America's role in the world and the perceptions of the country abroad. The American indifference towards World's Fair mirrors indeed a loss of vision and values, but also a loss of interest in building global relationships.
Food for thought for many of us, but above all for the current US President Donald Trump - not all decisions, especially on a global scale, can indeed be taken with arrogance and hate. In a globalised world, culture and architecture, as Chow reminds us, can help forging stronger bonds between different countries and a better future for everybody.
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