Make people understand

The UK Pavilion is one of the most special and popular pavilions in the 2010EXPO, BUT it is also one of the most criticized pavilions.

The UK Pavilion is called “Seed Cathedral”, inside of the building, there’re more than 217,300 seeds are preserved in the cathedral. From the outside of the pavilion, the UK Pavilion looks like a dandelion blossom and about to slightly fly away. The special toughened glass sticks make the whole building shining and full of mystery. Most visitors are praising it as a visual miracle, or it is not only a building, but a new architecture with innovative technology.

Because of the seed cathedral theme, the UK Pavilion is not as various installations as the other countries’ pavilions; it’s purely simple but on the other hand hard to understand. Many visitors were astonished by the architecture style buy confused by the seeds. The Chinese textbook has one text The Power of Seed which is describing some mystical characters of seeds. But the Seed Cathedral is obviously not showing the scientific theories, but leading people to think. Unfortunately the majority cannot get the idea. Quickly walking through the cathedral then sitting outside is the main rhythm of the visitors.

The same problem also happens to several Best Urban Practice Areas. The Freiburg hall printed out a lot of sight and text banners, almost no installations of objects. The feeling is from the text reading and computer searching, which doesn’t make more fun than reading an introducing pamphlet.

Pavilions have different purposes to show, some of them want to present their culture and history while they’re still unfamiliar for Chinese people, which is just like a tourism exhibition; but there’re also some countries want to make differences, but the risk is, if the content is too abstract needs to be thought over, the cursory observation is apparently not touching the basic idea of seed inside the amber.

For the organizers, how to make people easily get the ideas and have sort of thinking is a question should be balanced. So the content ought to be not that heavy, but the design of the experiencing installations could be complicated for participating.

Very much people can only visit 4~5 pavilions in one day, they want to queue for the most popular ones from their friends’ comments or mass discourse. Most of the comments are about interesting or not, not many details; people talk about the ones they understood and kept in memories, others are just gone right after the visiting.

While most of Chinese people are first experiencing EXPO, how to handle the agenda is impossible to be perfect. But would be another type of evaluations different from before.