The Expo Has Landed(Zaragoza the Neighborhood)

Sombras y Curvas (Interior de la Torre del Agua en Expo Zaragoza 2008)

In a rambling, shambling post this past December, I declared my fondness for World's Fairs and international expositions, ending with a preview of Expo 2008 in Zaragoza, Spain.*   The exposition opened officially this past weekend -- it will run from June 14 to September 14 -- so it is time for a quick revisitation, a random walk through Exponential topics:

Expo 2008, emphasizing a theme of "water and sustainable development," has suffered construction delays and been obliged to cancel or modify some events along the riverfront because of -- O! the irony -- excessive rain and flooding.  Although open less than a week, the event is already producing rumors (reliable or not, I cannot say) of disappointing attendance and unhappy workers.

Marcus Fairs of Dezeen has posted a sumptuous portfolio of photos of the combination Expo pavilion/pedestrian bridge designed by the Pritzker-winning Zaha Hadid.  (Link via C-MONSTER.net.)  The bridge looks very much as though it had just come to rest after buzzing around the quadrant in a Star Trek episode (although not nearly to the extent displayed in Hadid's designs for the proposed Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, Vilnius).  Here is a photo by a Zaragoza resident of the structure as it appeared on June 12:

Zaha Hadid's Bridge Pavilion, spanning the River Ebro at Zaragoza Expo 2008

Visitors' photos from the scene are rapidly accumulating under the Flickr! tag, "expozaragoza2008", including this one (rights reserved hence not reproduced here) showing off the Trekkiness of the bridge to good advantage.

As for other Expo structures, Gizmodo reports (with grainy video) on the Digital Water Pavilion, a structure whose "walls" are made of water droplet generated by some "3,000 digitally controlled solenoid valves," that can be stopped and started to create doors, windows and decorative patterns.  (More details are in an earlier Gizmodo posting, here.)

ExpoMuseum has a broad collection of information and links on the exposition, as well as on its predecessors back to 1851.  (ExpoMuseum creator Urso Chappell now has a blog devoted to international expositional matters, and is en route to attend the Zaragoza Expo later this week.)

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Illustrations: "Sombras y Curvas" and "Pabellón Puente" by Flickr! user Zaragozano, used under Creative Commons license.

* And remember, that December post also includes Bob Dylan's Expo-inspired remake of "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."  The original pre-Expo site touting the Dylan tune seems to have been shuttered, but the MP3 remains available right there, at a fool in the forest.

Comments

[Cowtown Pattie]

Zaragosa the Neighborhood

I am always pea-green with envy over your blog titles.

Well, I never been to Spain, but I been to Oklahoma....does that count?

[Urso Chappell]

Greetings from Barcelona.

I haven't been to the Expo site yet. When I do, I plan to blog a great deal about it.

I wouldn't be alarmed about low attendance figures. Expo 2008 is only expecting 7 million visitors in its short 3-month run (most expos are 6 months). Attendance is typically low the first few weeks (thus the reason I'm visiting now), but picks up in the last few weeks. Aichi, Japan's Expo 2005 was worried about low attendance early on, but easily been their projection of 15 million visitors by having nearly 23 million by closing day.