Technology and representation: architecture culture at Expo 58

In the historiography of architecture and engineering, international exhibitions are often characterized as laboratories for architecture and advanced construction. However, the conditions of representation and building at world fairs - using architecture as mass medium and subject to various regulations, strict budgets and timing - are not encouraging to experimentation. Nevertheless, international exhibitions can be considered as places and moments revealing to a contemporary, broad architecture culture; not only among professionals, but also with the public at large. Obsessed with progress and with the future, world fairs trigger discussions on the appropriateness of specific architectural choices, authorship, authority, the experience of architecture, rhetoric and representation.This paper focuses on the architecture culture exposed at Expo 58, the first post-war world fair (Brussels, 1958). Contemporary specialist press identified the fair's architecture as a festival of structures and witnessed a rapprochement between modern architecture and the public. In the host nation, the fair is remembered as the moment when everything, architecture especially, became modern. A closer look at the over 120 pavilions, representing over 50 nations and companies, indeed reveals that the central issue no longer was whether to build modern or not, but that the site functioned as a demonstration of the worldwide dissemination of the modern movement, not only with the architects, but also with the official commissioners. A first demonstration of a post-war world at peace, Expo 58 not only enabled comparison between nations through their production, architecture and rhetoric of representation, but also highlighted the many slippages between architecture and narrative, and the political and ideological views of their observers. The paper argues that the discourses on technology in architecture are key to both the specialist and popular voices in the fair's architecture culture, most explicitly in the context of the Cold War.https://sah.conference-services.net/reports/template/onetextabstract.xml?xsl=template/onetextabstract.xsl&conferenceID=3143&abstractID=682273