Las Exposiciones Universales. Cinco enfoques estructurales

Abstract

When, on the occasion of Expo Seville 1992, Frei Otto declared that a World Expo is an opportunity to experiment and show the ways to the future, almost 150 years had gone by since the first World Fair held in London. Over the course of this long period, the World Expos took on a leading role as testing grounds for new structural materials and typologies; moreover, thanks to the fact that the experiences garnered in the World Expos were then applied to buildings that were created beyond them, they have become veritable sources of innovation that have risen to the forefront as an intrinsic component in the history of architectural structural systems. This paper offers a synthetic vision of some of the structural contributions of the World Expos, distilling the scope of an analysis of such a large and fruitful period of structural development into five basic categories: trial and error, fantasy and utopia, typological seeds, the typological set, generation of codes and scientific production.