Expo’67 was a Modern utopia, and both Fuller’s and Safdie’s buildings serve as exemplary representatives.
Marcus Miller Expo’67 and the weight of utopia
Bob de Moor, “Balthazar,” in Tintin #24, 1967, p. 43
photo in Robert Fullford, Remember Expo, (photographs by John de Visser, Harold Whyte, Peter Varley), McClelland and Stewart Limited,Toronto, 1968, pgs. 6-7.
f ollowing the classic utopian model, the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal was literally ‘no-place’, and in an important sense was outside time. Many locations in the city were considered for the future fair as local municipalities lobbied for consideration. In the end the scheme proposed by the expansive Mayor Jean Drapeau prevailed and the site for Expo’67 emerged in the middle of the St Lawrence River on synthetic islands 1 . An extremely ambitious period of construction and preparation ensued and Expo opened to great fanfare in the spring of 1967 2 . Commentators around the world praised the organisers for their stunning achievement, but no one seemed to notice when six months after the turnstiles had registered their last visitor, and the euphoria of Canada’s centennial summer exhausted itself, Expo’67 was almost completely demolished 3 . Luckily, two of the most radically utopian buildings produced for Expo are extant: the geodesic dome of the American Pavilion designed by Buckminster Fuller and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat’67 4 . While the two projects are glaringly dissimilar in terms of form, material, structure, profile, height, weight and program; both buildings in fact proposed radical solutions to the challenges of mass culture. Interestingly, both took on iconic value as architectural emblems of Expo’67 and more generally, of the entire era 5 .
1 Twenty five million tons of landfill excavated for the construction of the city’s new subway system was used to create Ile Notre Dame and expand Ile Ste Hélene. A running joke referred to the ludicrous mistake made in hiring a Dutch engineer, practiced in the arts of land reclamation for a part of the world so obviously endowed with wide-open space. 2 Colonel Edward Churchill, Director of Installations for Expo used computer projections and an iron hand to meet deadlines. Builder of airfields for General Montgomery during WWII, his threats to push pavilions into the river if their construction fell behind schedule earned him a daunting reputation with engineers, architects and contractors. 3 Remarkably, almost all the buildings, mass transportation infrastructure and services were demolished, precluding any possibility of making a practical contribution to the urban infrastructure of Montréal. 4 The American Pavilion was donated to the City of Montréal, and after an inauspicious dormancy lasting nearly 20 years (a fire in 1976 burned the acrylic skin leaving both the steel geodesic struc- ture and the interior platforms in tact) the interior structure was refurbished in 1995 to house a new environmental museum dubbed the Biosphere. Habitat’67 on the other hand enjoyed a slow but steady improvement of circumstances following the closing of the fair.Today it operates as condomini- ums and is the centre-piece of a growing residential zone. 5 It would appear that to date, the most popular application of the geodesic dome is as an architec- tural logo, representing Disney theme parks around the world.
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