Sowing a seed

Thomas Heatherwick’s captivating pavilion in Shanghai was the ideal setting for UK architects to introduce themselves to the Chinese market, says Sunand Prasad

As with so many things in modern China you have to get past the mind boggling scale before you can start to think. Staging the Shanghai Expo has cost £40bn. A larger number of people than the UK population will have visited by the time it closes in October. In the seven years since the city won the bid, 2.6km2 of buildings were cleared along the Huangpu river, relocating 18,000 families and 270 factories including a shipyard of 10,000 workers. Six new subway lines have opened in the last two years, 4,000 taxis added and 1.7 million volunteers trained to help visitors. The 5.3km2 site on both sides of the river accommodates around 250 pavilions.

The experience of visiting such a large expo with its layout designed to highlight individual pavilions and manage crowd flow, is like wandering around a hyperinflated suburb without a car. The sight of one outlandish architectural essay after another is certainly gripping – the Corten fortress of the Australian pavilion, the Italian pavilion apparently encased in mesh that’s actually semi-transparent concrete, the serene Finnish, absurdly bombastic Russian and banal US ones. And there are some unexpected delights. The Vanke pavilion – in the area reserved for non-national exhibitions – comprises four giant cones some this way up, some that, appropriately clad in temporary shiplap chipboard. Between them they create a calm and breezy space from which to enter various razzle-dazzle displays. In many ways this area has the best content, with a number of cities presenting case studies on the city theme, including London within an updated BedZED.

Compared to older international trade expos, the pavilion as a type has lost some of its excitement, no longer seen as an opportunity to experiment and innovate in architecture and structure for future application.

Coincidentally, I was in Montreal in June and saw Buckminster Fuller’s US pavilion from the 1967 Expo. A familiar icon, it is nontheless still electrifying; of a lineage stretching forward from the Crystal Palace (1851): through the Galerie des Machines (1889), Aalto’s Finnish Pavilion (1936), the Dome Of Discovery (1951), and le Corbusier’s Phillips Pavilion (1958) for example. These buildings were not only different but also genuinely new and pathbreaking.

The British pavilion at Shanghai is utterly captivating, beautiful and very popular – with 15,000 visitors a day, three times that expected. Thomas Heatherwick’s great stroke of inspiration was to create a space within the pavilion that absents the expo, a respite from the multimedia din. The more functional parts are cleverly tucked in under the folded rug on which the ‘dandelion’ sits. That is where we held the event to showcase the work of the 14 architects on the RIBA-UKTI trade mission.

Trade missions, including those promoting professional services, have a long history. But this type of unashamed collective effort to get jobs abroad is of course, far from familiar territory for architects.  Around a £1bn of architectural services were exported from the UK in 2007. That is out of a total for the creative industries of £16.6bn, 4.5% of total UK exports. Although hundreds of UK practices have international work, for the remaining thousands it is difficult to know how to start, even if they want to. As the reality of globalisation as an everyday fact sinks in, the UK architectural profession will seek more of its workload from other parts of the world.

The idea for this mission came from an RIBA symposium in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics. A group of British architects – ‘missioners’ in the parlance – would go to Shanghai during the expo, not only to meet potential clients and local government agencies, but also to hold a design charette with local participants that would tackle the issues highlighted in the symposium ‘Cities for Future Fulfilment’ – the destruction of historic urban fabric and the survival of communities through breakneck growth; the balance of cars and pedestrian; environmental sustainability and global branding. And that is pretty much what happened except with fewer lofty issues and more learning of the realities of designing in China today. Plenty of fulfilment too, as well as possible commissions now emerging. It will help us review the effectiveness of such ventures in helping the profession find work.

Sunand Prasad is a partner at Penoyre and Prasad and a past president of the RIBA