Shanghai | Expo 2010

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2010 expo designs on course to produce a Shanghai surprise

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Eight, Marks Barfield and Heatherwick Studio have unveiled these designs for the £10 million UK pavilion at the Shanghai 2010 World Expo.

These are three of six practices shortlisted by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in a competition organised by Malcolm Reading Associates. The others are Avery Associates, Draw Architects and Zaha Hadid Architects.
Eight’s entry was a collaboration led by John McAslan and involving high-flying young firms Nord, Project Orange, Brisac Gonzalez, Surface Architects and Carmody Groarke, along with Arup and Wordsearch, the exhibition specialist.
The team’s project uses techniques from the Crown Estate to create a pavilion incorporating Chinese wood.

Wordsearch chair Peter Murray said the team had worked well together despite the usual rivalry between practices. “I’m not quite sure whether it’s because it’s a younger team and they haven’t got quite such big egos or just because the chemistry worked, but it was fantastic.”
Heatherwick Studios meanwhile designed an enclosure that “throws out from all faces a mass of long, radiating cilia, each ending with a tiny light source”, and which sway in the wind.
And Marks Barfield’s design comprises “eight independent yet connected tree structures” featuring overhanging structures and rooftop gardens.

Fonte: bdonline

[JVS]

BIG PICTURE

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/03/shanghai_prepares_for_expo_201.html

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Shanghai 2010 Expo pavilions near completion

26 March, 2010

By Amanda Baillieu

As series of spectacular pavilions is taking shape in Shanghai for the 2010 expo, and Thomas Heatherwick’s design for the UK is no exception, but what message is it sending out?

Even if you take the view that Expos are a waste of money and of no intellectual value, they remain hugely popular as nation-branding exercises.
Britain, which is spending £25 million on its Shanghai pavilion, is not the only country which hopes that jaw-dropping architecture and VIP rooms will tempt Chinese investors and help UK exporters strike up new contacts.
Yet the government’s decision to embrace this Expo with uncharacteristic largesse — the last British pavilion for Japan’s Aichi Expo in 2005 cost a mere £3.3 million — is because this is China.
Not only are there the trade deals that might result, the government wants to correct the image conveyed at the 2008 Beijing Olympics that we are a country of Beefeaters and red buses.



Credit: Schifres Lucas/ABACA/Press Association

POLAND: Wojciech Kakowski’s design is inspired by Polish folk art. The steel-framed building is made from laser-cut plywood.

And for the Chinese hosts, this vast Expo is another demonstration that it’s open for business. Despite a worldwide recession, it is spending £35 billion — more than twice the cost of the Beijing Olympics — on the six-month event, which will include almost 250 pavilions, and is expected to draw up to 70 million visitors.Expos are seen as good laboratories for experimenting with architecture and technology. Many of the pavilions feature smart materials, while Thomas Heatherwick’s design has gone in the opposite direction, using natural light to illuminate the building during the day.
While he will compete against Foster’s UAE pavilion and EMBT designing Spain’s, few disagree that Heatherwick’s pavilion, described as like a giant dandelion about to lose its seeds to the wind, will be the most spectacular.
But Peter Higgins of Land Design Studios, who has been to the last eight Expos and designed the British pavilion for Aichi, questions its value. “The UK pavilion will be spectacular and will be a photo opportunity to die for,” he says, “but will there be a return on this huge investment?”



Credit: China Foto Press/PA

LUXEMBOURG: Built from steel, wood and glass, Francois Valentiny’s pavilion resembles an ancient castle. All materials can be recycled.

He makes the point too, that Britain has upped its budget considerably since the competition in 2007. He says the government was “naive” to expect that it could build Heatherwick’s pavilion for the original £10 million budget, and questions whether it fulfills the overarching brief for Shanghai, which is Better Life, Better City.
“Expos are like experimental cities and so the buildings should also be experimental — by that I mean they should demonstrate sustainability. At the very least, we should be able to flat pack them so they can go somewhere else.”
Alas, this won’t be possible. “The structure won’t really allow it to be brought back to the UK so we are recycling the materials that we can,” says the Foreign Office. But it seems the only part that can be recycled is the 60,000 acrylic spikes which will be distributed to schools across China.
As Higgins says: “Britain has built a beautiful sculptural piece but if it can’t be recycled what is the message?”



Credit: China Foto Press/PA

ITALY: Designed by Giampaolo Imbrighi, and inspired by a traditional game, known in Italy as Shanghai, where 20 sticks are dropped on a table, its materials include transparent concrete.



Credit: Schifres Lucas/ABACA/Press Association

HOLLAND: John Körmeling is the architect of the Dutch pavilion. Happy Street is a colourful assemblage of small Dutch houses.



Credit: China Foto Press/PA

UAE: Foster & Partners’ design for the United Arab Emirates pavilion is inspired by sand dunes. The structure is a triangulated lattice of stainless-steel panels, joined by adjustable nodes, so it can be demounted on site.



Credit: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

SPAIN: Enric Miralles-Benedetta Tagliabue’s Spanish pavilion uses “wicker technology” — panels of woven willow hung off a steel frame inspired by the country’s wicker baskets.

Postscript :

Sources: Spanish pavilion: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images; all others: Schifres Lucas/ABACA/Press Association and China Foto Press/PA.

Fonte: Bdonline

[JVS]

Special Report: Shanghai World Expo

Using Nature and Waste for Walls and CeilingsBy SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP

Published: April 29, 2010

Expo Offers Shanghai a Turn in the Spotlight (April 30, 2010) Most of the eco-friendly building techniques and technologies used throughout the site of the show are well known and proven. These include the use of plants on roofs and walls to help keep buildings cool naturally or the use of light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s, to substitute for customary lights. But some pavilions have gone further to promote new developments and environmentally friendly materials.

The Finnish pavilion, Kirnu, or The Giant’s Kettle, is clad with about 25,000 scaly shingles made from UPM ProFi, a composite blend of wood fibers and plastic. Introduced in 2005, the material is made by the UPM Group, which also includes UPM Raflatac, a leading producer of self-adhesive labels and radio-frequency identification tags. The principal raw materials used are paper and plastic waste from Raflatac’s production processes. The recycled material is hard-wearing and water-resistant, essential qualities for an external cladding.

“Prior to inventing UPM ProFi, there was no use for the byproducts of the label material production,” said Markku Koivisto, director of the ProFi business division. “They used to be incinerated or disposed of in a landfill.”

Using the material on the Finnish pavilion gave a new life to 18 tons of former label waste, he said.

Recycling plastics is also a theme for the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, designed by the architectural firm Atelier Feichang Jianzhu. Dubbed the Dream Cube by the architects, the pavilion’s external facade is made of a matrix of polycarbonate transparent plastic tubes, which also include multi-colored L.E.D.’s. The plastic tubes are made from recycled CD cases — more than 30 million of which are discarded every year in Shanghai alone, the architects say.

Yung Ho Chang, the principal architect, said his office had been experimenting with various materials, including fiberglass and polyethylene, to build houses. Beside the recyclability of certain plastics, their combination of lightness and strength made them less resource-consuming than more traditional materials, he said. “For a one story polyethylene building, no foundation is required since it’s so light,” he said. “We know, because we built the toilets for our office using polyethylene pavement blocks for the structure.”

The Italian pavilion, designed by Giampaolo Imbrighi, uses a new “transparent cement.” Each panel incorporates a matrix of transparent resin rods bonded into the cement, transmitting light without weakening the structure.

“This is a further step towards more eco-friendly building materials,” said Enrico Borgarello, director of innovation at Italcementi, the Italian cement maker that developed the material. “The use of this cement permits a less intensive use of artificial light inside the building because it lets the outside light filter in.”

The resins, in various colors, react differently to artificial and natural light sources, creating a soft, warm light inside the building and a clear bright image on the outside. About 40 percent of the pavilion’s surface is covered by 3,774 of the translucent panels.

The Swiss pavilion, designed by Buchner Bründler Architekten, is enveloped in a mesh of aluminum netting that incorporates cutting-edge solar technology capable of powering L.E.D.’s. The see-through metal curtain holds 11,000 randomly attached cell units, each containing an electronic circuit board with solar cells, two double-layer condensers — high-performance energy accumulators — an L.E.D. and interactive sensors that react to light and activity in neighboring cells. When the light falling on one part of the facade increases, perhaps because of changing sunshine, or camera flashes, the sensors transmit an impulse that causes the L.E.D.’s on that part of the facade to flash, for a longer or shorter time depending on the intensity of the light received. The cell units react to each other so that a flash by one L.E.D. sets off its neighbors, causing chain reactions of flashes to swarm across the curtain facade.

Another building with interesting environmental concepts is the Japanese pavilion, which officials compare to a giant purple silkworm cocoon. It has an intricate exterior layer of flexible solar cells designed to generate 20 kilowatts to 30 kilowatts of electricity. Inside, it showcases a range of small-scale generating and recycling technologies, including a floor that generates power as people walk on it, a window glass that incorporates a thin-film power-generating transparent solar battery, and a waste treatment device that can turn sewage into drinking water.

As part of the exposition’s theme, “Better City, Better Life,” the organizers have also set up an “Urban Best Practices” area. Here, 59 cities, chosen by an international committee from 108 candidates and participating in a world’s fair for the first time, are showing how they are making use of new ideas and technologies in areas like street planning, the reutilization of industrial heritage sites and environmental design.

“We wanted cases that were internationally recognized, and that would be valuable and could be followed by others,” Zhou Hanmin, deputy director of the Shanghai World Expo executive committee, said on a recent visit to Singapore.


in http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/world/asia/30iht-rshanpav.html?scp=2&sq=&st=nyt

[JVS]

April 28, 2010 Permalink

Shanghai's Expo nearly ready

Organizers of Shanghai's World Expo have been holding trial runs this week, before the official opening this Saturday, May 1st. About 70 percent of the nearly 200 participants participated in the trials, and visitors were already encountering long lines. Officials now estimate the 6-month event, themed "Better City, Better Life", will attract up to 100 million visitors, 95 percent of them Chinese. Shanghai has spent 400 billion yuan (58.6 billion US dollars) preparing for the Expo, according to state media - more than was spent on the Beijing Olympics. Collected here are photographs of last-minute preparations in Shanghai as they prepare to welcome the world this weekend. (37 photos total)

in http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/shanghais_expo_nearly_ready.html