Essay: Progress and Harmony for Mankind

Osaka Expo, 1970

By Crystal Bennes
The Fuji Group Pavilion. (Photo courtesy Bill Cotter)
Flying in on the fanciful coat tails of space age optimism and 1960s socially-minded utopianism, the Osaka Expo 70 can be considered the last of the great, experimental expositions before finite resources and techno-progressive pragmatism began to dominate the agenda. Crystal Bennes investigates an Expo future vision that revolved around Buckminster Fuller spheres and Metabolist cells.
Taro Okamoto’s “Tower of the Sun”. (Photo: Henry Petermann)
Defined by a pervasive sense of architectural risk-taking and experimentation, both in its ideology and design, it’s hardly surprising that, forty-five years on, images of the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka look as fresh, even futuristic, as ever. The first Expo to be hosted by an Asian nation, the theme of Osaka 70 was “Progress and Harmony for Mankind”. Leading a team of 11, including fellow Metabolists, Kikutake Kiyonori and Kurokawa Kisho, as well as artist Taro Okamoto, a key figure of the Japanese avant-garde, Kenzo Tange was the man responsible for the suitably progressive masterplan.

Tange rose to prominence in Japan with his design for the 1955 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, as well as stadiums for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics often described as some of the most beautiful structures built in the twentieth century. By 1960, he had begun to shift focus from individual buildings to urban development, designing ambitious plans to redevelop Tokyo’s infrastructure and housing on a grand scale.

“Tower of the Sun” detail (Photo: Flickr/m-louis* CC BY-SA 2.0)
If post war Japan offered few opportunities for Tange to realise such plans in reality, the 1970 Expo presented at least an opportunity to test some ideas on a larger platform.

Inspired by the vaulting, unifying roof of Joseph Paxton′s 1851 Crystal Palace and propelled by Buckminster Fuller’s developments of Alexander Graham Bell’s space frame, Tange’s most visible Expo contribution was a giant roof for the Festival Plaza – at the time, the largest space frame structure ever constructed. For Tange, the vast frame was a symbolic link between the Festival Plaza and the other structures, unifying this spatially, while allowing pavilions their own visual identities outside the frame. Conceiving of the Expo as a festival “where human beings can meet, shake hands and accord minds”, he saw the plaza as an important central site for such activity, “contributing to the development of this festival of human harmony”.
The Toshiba IHI Pavilion, designed by Kurokawa Kisho. (Photo: Flickr/m-louis*)
Artist Taro Okamoto, bearing the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in mind, was conscious that the Expo should engender participation rather than mere spectatorship. Like Tange, he saw the Expo as a “festival” where his “monstrous” monument, The Tower of the Sun, could shock visitors out of the complacency of everyday life: “While Tange Kenzo’s Grand Roof was mechanistic, I created something totally primitive and let it break through the roof… I think ‘anti-harmony’ is real harmony.”

One of the most visible architectural influences across Expo 70 was that of Metabolism, which was formulated a decade earlier by a group of architects including Tange, Kikutake and Kurokawa. Rejecting the fixed proscriptions of form-follows-function modernism, the Metabolists, inspired partly by biological concepts, sought to respond to ever-changing urban environments with systems of interchangeable components. Kurokawa’s contribution to the Expo was textbook Metabolism. His tree-like Takara Beautilion was a steel-framed structure with the “potential to extend, or replicate horizontally and vertically depending on necessity”.

Elsewhere, architectural and structural experimentation seemed to encapsulate the spirit of the early, post-space-age period. The US effort, with its exhibition of Moon rock from the Apollo mission, is one obvious expression. Based on Frei Otto’s experiments with pneumatic structures, architects Davis, Brody, Chermayeff, Geismar, de Harak Associates covered an 80 x 142 metre super-elliptical structure with a translucent fiberglass fabric – held up by nothing more than its own internal air pressure.
Kiyonari Kikutake's Expo Tower. (Photo courtesy Bill Cotter)
The Takara Beautilion, designed by Kisho Kurokawa & Ekuan/GK. (Photo: Flickr/m-louis*)
The Sumitomo Pavilion, designed by Sachio Otani. (Photo courtesy Bill Cotter)
1.
Yutaka Murato and engineer Kawaguchi also experimented with pneumatics to striking effect. Their enormous Fuji pavilion, comprised of 16 arches of inflated plastic tubes, was the largest air-inflated structure in the world at the time. Buckminster Fuller’s Octet Truss system inspired more than just Tange’s space frame, and many pavilions took the form of a geodesic dome – notably Fritz Bornemann’s spherical concert hall for the West German pavilion and the nine half-domes of Sachio Otani’s Sumitomo Fairy Tale pavilion. In other cases, innovation emerged for unusual reasons, such as E.A.T.’s project by physicist Thomas Lee and artist Fujiko Nakaya to cloak Tadashi Doi’s faceted Pepsi pavilion dome – which they loathed – in artificial clouds.

2.

3.
All photos on this and following page: Henry Petermann

4.
5.

6.

7.
1. Abu Dhabi and Kuwait pavilions
2. View towards the site’s amusement zone: “Expoland”.
3. Laos Pavilion
4. USSR Pavilion, designed by Mikhail V. Posokhin.
5. Mexico Pavilion
6. Netherlands Pavilion by Jaap Bakema and Carel Weeber.
7. Cambodia Pavilion
Photo: Henry Petermann
- Crystal Bennes is a writer, curator and artist based in Finland and a contributing editor to uncube. Along with Cecilia Lindgren, she is co-editor of independent culture and urbanism magazine, Pages Of, and contributing editor of Icon magazine. She runs the blog Development Aesthetics and is one third of the London Research Kitchen.
The Osaka Expo is often considered the last of the great, experimental expositions. If there’s truth in such claims, it’s interesting to consider the reasons why. Many architectural historians view the 1960s as a golden age of socially-minded architecture, a time when architects were thinking how people could live better lives and how architecture could involve itself in the realisation of such activity.

And yet, if the 1960s were a golden age – and Osaka its apex – such goldenness was only possible due to a certain degree of ignorance. The period immediately following the Expo saw the 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth, an influential report simulating exponential economic and population growth in a world of finite resources, and then came the 1973 oil crisis. In this new era, informed by scarcity and increasing recognition of the impossibility of infinite growth, focus shifted away from experimental, futuristic social utopias towards networked, techno-progressive pragmatism.

The following Expo, held in Spokane, Washington, USA in 1974, was the first to take up an explicitly environmental theme, and marked the beginning of the end for the spectacular, structural-engineering-driven showpieces that were the hallmark of Osaka. While on the surface innovation and experimentation continues to be encouraged, the reality is that – for better or worse – sustainability, technological interactivity and networked systems have become the new face of “experimental” expo architecture. I

About Crystal bennes