WWA’s design for the Polish pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo
The typology of Poland’s national pavilion for the 2010 Shanghai Expo has been developed during a time of vigorous nation-building. Historically, world exhibitions have been about empires and aspiring empires flexing their muscles. The 1937 Paris fair, for example, saw the most dramatic face-off between the German and the Soviet pavilions: both tall structures, adorned with monstrous sculptures that announced the imminent clash between the two powers.
But how does one represent a nation at a time of blurred borders? How does one express national identity at a time when hundreds of millions of people are able to shop for identities? Isn’t it fundamentally dishonest to nurture the idea of a national pavilion when such a building amounts to a combination of ideas, patterns and components derived from different parts of the world? The architects behind the 2010 Polish pavilion have, perhaps subconsciously, made an ironic comment on this notion of identity. They admit that the only way to represent their nation is to design a full-scale fold-out postcard: by translating a two-dimensional, paper-cut folk motif into a three dimensional form.
The commission is the result of a competition held in 2007. Previously, the prize has gone to large, well-known practices. For example, the 2005 pavilion, a blob clad with hand-made wicker panels, was designed by Krzysztof Ingarden, an established Cracow-based architect with a number of sigificant public building projects under his belt. This year, however, Ingarden had to be content with second prize, as the main gong went to a trio of young architects: Natalia Paszkowska, Marcin Mostafa, and Wojciech Kakowski (WWA). When they entered, the first two had not yet completed a building: Paszkowska was about to graduate from Warsaw University of Technology, and had been doing an internship at JEMS, one of the largest practices in Warsaw, while her boyfriend, Mostafa was fresh out of architecture school. Kakowski joined the team as the only certified architect.
The bid for an Expo pavilion is one of the few architecture-related events that make it on to the evening news in Poland, so it was no surprise that the prize going to a less-experienced group caused a stir. It is equivalent to a trainee from Foster’s beating Foster himself in a competition. Indeed, Mostafa and Paszkowska have now taken a leading role in the pavilion’s design, though they have still not yet built any projects. The winning proposal was strikingly simple. An angular boxshape, varying in height, envelops a route cutting through the building, from the entrance, through exhibition spaces and all the way to a restaurant and a shop. The facade is the most impressive feature, though, made from impregnated plywood panels, laser-cut into decorative patterns found in Polish folk paper craft. The art of cutting paper into meticulously detailed ornaments is still very much alive in some parts of the country.
WWA’s design for the Polish pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo
Using a motif of rural provenance may seem a bizarre choice for an exhibition titled Better Cities, Better Life. But one of the aims of the pavilion is to present Poland as a place where the majority of the urban population are firstor second-generation city dwellers, still closely attached to their rural relatives and traditional lifestyles. From this perspective, the pavilion could be viewed as a metaphor for the way the urban and the rural, and the cosmopolitan and the local fuse to create a unique quality in many Polish cities.
The striking and intelligible design immediately won popular acclaim, both in Poland and China. In November 2008 it was chosen by the organisers of the Expo as one of 12 designs advertising the exhibition on the Shanghai metro. The proposal also received a fair share of criticism for its Zaha-esque shape that could make it look outdated before it even breaks ground. Others have complained that the design relies too heavily on the allure of its ornamentation and does not correspond with the content. Though true, the concept for the exhibition had not yet been chosen when the competition was called. The participants, therefore, could either develop the design around their idea of what the exhibition should be, or create an attractive envelope for a variety of programmes. The winning pavilion has successfully achieved the latter by creating an approachable, memorable form.
It is a temporary structure, aimed at attracting visitors for the six-month duration of the Expo and then be easily disassembled. For this reason, it is unimportant that it may look out of date in two years. The architects have no illusions about the attention span of visitors who will be trekking the exhibition grounds. Whether they stop or move on to another pavilion is often determined in the blink of a weary eye.
Grzegorz Piatek is co-curator of the current exhibition, Open: Poland, at RIBA, W1, 7 October-25 November
