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Geller reports from Shanghai World Fair

May 26th, 2010 · 12 Comments

I fear that Michael Geller is starving to death on his visit in China, due to a lack of internet connectivity. Here is compilation of a couple messages he has sent out this week and I’m adding a link to his blog post at the Vancouver Sun.

This is quite the popular place for Vancouverites these days, for those who didn’t know. The city of Vancouver sent over its sustainability demo house that it had open at the Olympics and a veritable parade of people from here are making there way over. Among them, Roger Bayley of Merrick Architecture, the design manager for the Olympic Village, is there talking about it as a model of sustainability. But now, heeere’s Michael.

Hello  family and friends…sorry there are no interesting blogs yet, but I cannot write my blog from Shanghai….nor can I get into facebook or twitter!  So I will have to make alternative arrangements.  However, I can say the Shanghai Expo is quite fantastic, and almost surreal….I’m not even Chinese but I am proud for them.

The Expo site is significantly more spread out than our Expo 86 property, (about 7.5 times the size) and the pavilions are much, much more impressive.  It is more reminiscent of the Expo 67 site, where each country built it’s own pavilion, rather than use a ‘standardized’ approach. I have just sent in my first Vancouver Sun story, which will hopefully appear shortly, with pictures, and I’ll get something up on my blog somehow.

In the meanwhile, here are a few photos of the Czech Pavilion which features a map of the old city of Prague…in hockey pucks, the Canada Pavilion, in wood, of cours, and some of the other colourful and unusual sites.  There’s so much to see! (sorry, pix not included here – Eds.)

(next day)

This fair is just like the Olympics, EXPO 86 and the SFU Sustainability course combined…but .with better food.  There is so much to see and write about, it is very difficult to communicate the scale and breadth of ideas. 

Yesterday I spent time at the German Pavilion, the Pavilion of the Future and the Vancouver/BC Wood case study….more about these later.

In the meanwhile, you should seriously think about getting a plane ticket and heading on over to the fair before the end of October.  June would be a good time…it’s not expensive…the fare on Japan Airlines is under $1,000; there are many 5 star hotels offering rooms for as low as $125 a night…it costs $15 to $24 a day to get in…depending on whether you are over 60, and everything is quite reasonable by Canadian standards….something to think about. 

Blog link is here

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