Had they found it among the several hundred structures that covered the 5.28 square kilometer site, they would have begun their tour of a century and a half of World’s Fairs in a small theater where, at the front, toy-like models of past World’s Fair architectural icons, such as the Eiffel Tower, were set below a model of the inverted pyramid that is the China Pavilion, the intended, lasting architectural symbol of Shanghai’s Expo.
Architecture -- experimental, monumental and derided -- has always been a key legacy of World Expos.
In part, it’s an easier legacy to quantify than the social and educational legacies of these monstrously expensive events. But signature architecture is also often a part of a much more tangible legacy: the redevelopment and re-thinking of a city’s physical development and layout.
In the case of Shanghai, the China Pavilion -- perched so high over the architectural icons of other Expos -- represents a massive investment in infrastructure and redevelopment that dwarfs the efforts of past Expos, and will influence development and quality of life in Shanghai for decades to come.
Indeed, if only for the development and timely opening of two subway lines that fed the Expo grounds, it could be said that the Expo had a lasting, important effect upon crowded Shanghai.
But the subway lines were only a part of the physical transformation of the city. In addition to rail, the city opened a new airport terminal, made substantial road improvements and, most important, cleaned up 5.28 square kilometers of riverbank that, for a century, had hosted shipyards and steel mills.
For a few years, that cleaned-up land served as the Expo site (including the build-up and tear-down), and in decades to follow, it will be neighborhoods, commercial districts and parks.
The city will be transformed.
Of course, Expos aren’t just about infrastructure. At their best, they’re about ideas, wonder and influence.
More on CNNGo: Complete Shanghai 2010 Expo coverage
The architects and landscape designers who created the “White City” for Chicago’s World’s Colombian Exposition in 1893 -- among them, Louis Sullivan and Frederick Law Olmsted -- had an out-sized influence on U.S. architecture and landscape design that couldn’t be guessed at the time.
At Expo 2010, perhaps the most influential design of the entire event was not a pavilion, but Houtan Park, the exquisite and innovative Chinese-designed riverside park that won the highest award given by the American Society of Landscape Architects.
One afternoon, only a few weeks after the Expo opened, organizers bussed an entire convention of Chinese urban planners from a convention within driving distance of Shanghai to see Houtan Park.
Expo organizers and government officials correctly viewed this park as a landmark in Chinese landscape design, and hoped that it could influence thinking across China.
How did the experience of seeing this park influence Chinese urban planners? Only time will tell -- just as it was impossible, in 1893, to know how the landscapes and buildings of the World Colombian Exposition would influence U.S. cities in the decades to come.
Critics of the 2010 Expo tend to look at it in contemporary terms. But in contemporary terms, Expos have been derided since the early 20th century.
- More on CNNGo: China Pavilion is back
The real measure of an Expo’s influence is not whether a journalist enjoyed visiting a national pavilion, but how it is viewed, and still experienced, decades later.
In Paris, they still enjoy the Eiffel Tower; in Chicago, the parks and some of the buildings from 1893 still attracts visitors on the weekends; and in Shanghai, the former grounds and infrastructure will inform and improve the lives of Shanghainese for decades to come. The Shanghai 2010 Expo mattered.
