After the banality of Hanover and the disaster of London’s Millennium Dome, Switzerland demonstrates that an Expo doesn’t have to be mindless. Rita Capezzuto reports.
Photography by Paul Raftery

This year’s Swiss Expo has done an impressive job in avoiding the usual clichés of the genre. The million or more visitors who flocked to the show in its first few weeks have been spared the apparently inevitable pictures of mountain scenery, alpine pastures, chocolate and outsize Swatches. Switzerland has been staging Expos at irregular intervals since 1883, when Zurich inaugurated the genre. The last one was in 1964 in Lausanne, and the New York Times called it the ‘expo of the century’.

Rather than concentrate on the virtues of neutrality and secrecy in banking, this year’s self-celebration was a carefully considered attempt to reinvent the increasingly tired Expo formula. An international competition was held for the design of five so-called Arteplages: four on fixed lakeside sites, one of them mobile, on a former barge. These were conceived as places where, as their name itself suggests, recreation can be combined with culture.

Each of the sites is dedicated to a dualistic theme – ‘Power and Liberty’, ‘Transience and Eternity’, ‘Nature and Artifice’, ‘the Universe and the Self’ and ‘Sense and Movement’ – an ambitious range that reflects a certain seriousness while going beyond a narrowly nationalistic vision of Swiss identity. The choice of sites, in the canton of Vaud, was shrewd. The area in question, the Three Lakes region above Lausanne, had suffered from the 1980s recession in the precision-engineering industry and needed economic revitalization. At the same time it offered a splendidly scenic setting with three small lakes on which the Arteplages could sit.

The result is four temporary architectural structures, each of them interacting with the waters of the lake, each destined to vanish next October when the exhibition closes, leaving behind nothing more than the odd work of consolidation on the embankment or embellishment to the promenade on the edge of the lakes. The artificial peninsulas that support pavilions and public spaces in Bienne and Neuchâtel will disappear. The two main attractions at Yverdon-les-Bains and Morat, Diller+Scofidio’s Cloud and Jean Nouvel’s Monolith, will be dismantled.

The effect achieved so far, stimulated partly by a varied programme of events, performances and concerts, is one of a certain excited curiosity. Considerable crowds have been attracted to a series of evening events in areas previously little frequented. Switzerland has devised a decidedly more sophisticated plan than recent Expo history could give us any hope to expect. It has split an ambitious programme into sites of manageable size, focusing on a more organic concept in each location. There were problems, of course: the final budget of 1.5 billion Swiss francs was set only after construction had already begun, demanding cost savings that compromised some projects, cheapened materials and diluted designs – a reduction of scope that in some cases was by no means undesirable.

Even so, certain of the pavilions still demonstrate all the uncertainties of Expo taste. At Bienne visitors are treated to the dubious spectacle of the ‘Empire of Silence’, a fatuous representation of the hereafter, complete with Death and an accompanying clutch of spectres moving pointlessly around to the accompaniment of a great deal of sound and fury. Scarcely believably, emerging visitors were treated to World Cup football broadcast live on a large screen. Perhaps it was all some kind of satirical gesture.

In other cases, the individual themes were approached with subtle elegance. At Yverdon the dynamics of the relationship between the individual and the world are developed by means of the senses. One work represents a conversation between two people, each on a monitor, speaking to each other in Europanto, a fictional language invented by the writer Diego Marani that actually elaborates a strategy of non-communication.

At every site architecture is the focal point. Bienne has three towers, a long roof covering the Forum and a propeller bridge that embraces the harbour conceived by Coop Himmelb(l)au. The towers (symbolizing power?), with their zigzag and semi-conical profiles, are empty shells inside silver mesh skins and are devoted to a range of bizarre uses. One is a ‘kaleidophone’ (it picks up noises from the water, ground and sky via suitably positioned microphones and then retransmits the sounds). Fluttering along another tower’s entire height are the traditional red flags of the various Swiss communes, each bearing a white cross and some of them in shreds. It looks like an art installation and is perhaps the most symbolically nationalist moment in the entire Expo. Neuchâtel, which takes up the theme of nature and artifice, is represented by three flying saucers resting on a wooden platform poised above the water. Conceived by the Multipack group, the structures were designed by Jacques Sbriglio, GMS and Atelier Oï.

On a flat marshy terrain at Yverdon is an impressive, truly artificial undulating landscape calculated to stimulate all of the senses. Such is the attention to detail that even the ground particles vary in size to give different perceptions of distance. The artificial hills are hollow, constructed on a frame of wooden trunks (obviously recycled and subsequently reusable) over which a narrow layer of earth is placed. The greatest draw here is the Blur building by Diller+Scofidio, which visitors reach along a walkway on the water after having equipped themselves with protective raincoats. It is an artificial cloud produced by 29,000 jets that filter the water from the lake and vaporize it, producing a mist that envelops the metal platform on which one stands. The mist varies in density and colour according to the general weather conditions: temperature, amount of humidity in the air and the direction and force of the wind. The visitor’s visual disorientation is compensated by the fact that all of the other senses become more acute. The intensity of this physical experience becomes clearer once, having climbed, dripping with water, to the upper level, one regains a view of the surrounding landscape.

From the sensation of Yverdon visitors move on to the more intimate theme of transience and eternity at Morat, where Jean Nouvel has attempted a more direct involvement between Arteplage and city. He has designed a rusting steel cube isolated in the water, hermetic and mysterious. To reach it one must abandon land and experience the slow ritual of approaching by boat. Inside are three forms of contact with Switzerland on three different levels: a rapid succession of topical images projected onto a circular screen; an overview of the actual surroundings via a narrow, screened fissure; and a precious late-19th-century diorama, 111 metres long, of the medieval battle of Morat. With the objectivity of not being Swiss himself, Nouvel has perhaps been able to make the most of the Expo with an exhibit that is impressive without being self-congratulatory.