Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (original) (raw)
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Ashgate, 2015
Wouter Van Acker and Christophe Verbruggen offer an introductory view of the phenomenon of world exhibitions, characterising them as catalysts as well as indicators of progress. They see exhibitions as meta-media combining various semiotic systems to create and exhibit modernity and various perspectives on time and space. Moreover, their contribution stresses the isomorphic nature of exhibitions, with interdependent and reciprocal influences resulting in an exhibition repertoire. They illustrate their view by analysing the diachronic and synchronic national and international networks of the fair organised in Ghent in 1913.
2012
Between 1855 and 1900, Paris was the site of five major expositions: 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, and 1900. These temporary agglomerations of stuff not only served to showcase scientific and technological innovations. They were stimuli to the embedding of science and technology in the fabric of modern life on a long-term basis. Their construction not only altered the development of the city’s infrastructure, but through the design and content of their scientific and technologically based exhibits, the five expositions helped to restructure time and space. This paper will explore some of the ways in which this dynamic played out in the Parisian context. The commissions charged with overseeing the 1878, 1889, and 1900 fairs saw them as opportunities to push urban development in new directions—and by the end of this period to introduce innovations that ushered in a highly mechanized vision of Paris1. Among these inventions were novel fiscal arrangements that wedded democratic Republican gov...
Making history, making placecontextualising the built heritage of world expos 2010 and 2015
Built Heritage, 2024
Be it the 1873 World's Fair in Vienna, which established the city's status as a link between the Occident and Orient, or the very first Great Exhibition in 1851 in London, which showcased the then British empire to a global public and the world to its domestic visitors. World's fairs have been and are still an indispensable part of a shared human history as well as an indicator of a country's economic and cultural relevance on a global scale. They are undoubtedly politically motivated drivers of collective memories and, in turn, nation-building processes. This is why they are not only publicly discussed and thoroughly documented in archives but also often manifested in buildings that long outlast these events and themes but continue to tell their tales. This article elaborates on the ways in which world's fairs (or expos) have been used as catalysts to develop cities and how they themselves-though ephemeral phenomena-ultimately found their way into urban landscapes and historiography. Moreover, based on his own empirical studies on the last two expos of Shanghai (2010) and Milan (2015), the author elaborates on the placemaking procedures that precede and follow these mega-events, reflecting on the ensuing public discourse to (de)legitimate them, its limitations, and effects on the urban legacy of the aforementioned expos. He then presents an overarching discussion on their built heritage.
Dix-Neuf, Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, 2020
My article discusses how the universal exposition is displayed in the Petit Palais museum in Paris. The Petit Palais’ articulation of its own relationship to the Exposition of 1900 raises important questions about whether or not the full and complex history of the exposition can be on display in the same space reserved for national pride and mass tourism. Through a reading of the permanent installation at the Petit Palais, I examine what the universal exposition reveals about grappling with legacy.
World Exhibitions: a Gateway to non-European Cultures?
2012
The organisation of international exhibitions is a striking phenomenon of the mid 19th century that lasted until the late 1930s and, in a different form, until today. These exhibitions were the heirs of the national exhibitions of industrial products that appeared in the late 18th century in France and Britain, becoming international for the first time in London in 1851 and universal in Paris in 1855, when they expanded their program, beyond the products of agriculture, commerce and industry, as before, to intellectual presentations and particularly the fine arts. To accommodate these and the thousands of exhibitors and millions of visitors1, coming from all countries, it was necessary to develop large, imposing buildings and magnificent palaces, pavilions and galleries2. It was necessary also to modernise the host city, for example, by developing new means of transportation such as the Metropolitan in Paris to convey the public to the exhibition. Their impact on cities was great: t...
Re-Branding Post 1945 Paris: Exhibiting Powers and Contemporary Art
2010
This paper will examine the expanded role Contemporary art has assumed in rebranding Paris, France’s flagship capital, as a cutting edge, technological, innovative and competitive global city. Paris has effectively incorporated contemporary art into the fabric of the whole city with exhibitions such as those originating at the Grand Palais spreading to venues throughout the inner and outer ‘quartier’. France has used arts and culture to claim supremacy in the world whether colonial or local for centuries with Paris the ultimate ‘brand’. Post WWII Paris however, saw this brand diminished and claims to artistic supremacy replaced by New York. In an effort to regain some relevancy Paris, and by extension France, began the process of re-branding concordant with political, economic and technological advancement through the fervent promotion of contemporary art. Contemporary Paris through contemporary art aspires to a transnational and post-national site of spectacle; a leading locus for ...
First Monday, 2013
Held in Chicago to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 has been one of the first events of a kind later defined as ‘media events’ (Susman, 1983). Set up in a liminal period for American life, this ‘event’ was a ‘rite of passage’ paving the road to modernity out of traditional life, as Henry Adams recognized when he defined the Fair as “the first expression of American thought as a unity.” I suggest the Columbian Exposition is a worthwhile case study for this special issue from a historical point of view. The Fair was indeed one of the first cases in which the interplay among urban planning, communication technologies and marketing strategies — a mark of the contemporary production of urban space (McQuire, 2008) — can be observed. I would also suggest it is important from a genealogical point of view because it contributes to unveil the conditions of emergence of such interplay as the outcome of a process of interactions among several social actors which had the task of marketing an imaginary of the city adequate to the new economic and social conditions of America (Harris, 1990). I will therefore attempt to show how the Chicago World’s Fair was both a place where to trace back the genesis of modern American urban life and an opérateur of such emergence, given the fact that the experience of its ideal city life contributed in shaping the imaginary at its foundation. Through a description of the Fair I show how the representation (a literal ‘staging’) of a temporary ideal city — a land of enchantment freed from pain and poverty, with beautiful marble–like buildings, basins, theatres, palaces of consumption, spectacles, entertainments and wonders — was strategically conceived to produce actual effects on the imaginary of the public. As Lewis Mumford (1934) and Louis Sullivan (1949) recognized, the ‘liminal’ characters of the fair became ‘permanent’ features of modern cities and their everyday life through the staging of illusory (but with real consequences) effects.