Geoscience Reference
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and symbol of the pavilion was to represent the life of the city as a tree with
the branches of the tree being streets. However, this idea proved unpopular.
In the fi nal design, the pavilion followed a person's experience in a city.
According to the designers, the pavilion followed the spatial experience of
someone who enters a city, arriving in a city in a train station, taking a
subway to city streets, city garden, and the city square. h ese matched the
sections of the pavilion, which illustrate city life from a “human-scale per-
spective:
entering
the city,
feeling
the city,
reading
the city, and
hoping
a better
city.”
32
As visitors entered the dark space of the pavilion, placards read, “A City
is an Organism throbbing with energy and metabolism.” After the panels, I
was then channeled into a huge room fl anked by old trains. h e back of the
room switched between a giant screen with a train schedule and global stock
prices, fl anked by “vigor stations” associate with various global sites: New
York, Vatican City, Oxford, and Houston. According to the o' cial expo
guidebook, “in a metaphorical way with
high scientifi c technologies,
a city is
compared to a living being consisting of body and soul. Metabolism and cir-
culation are important for it to function properly.”
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h ese metaphors were
visually represented by a fi ve-minute audio-visual show. h e ceiling was
covered in a large number of screens that start as a bright blue sky.
Suddenly a large airplane fl ew over the crowd, which elicited gasps from
the surprised crowd (I watched this scene more than twenty times, and each
time the reaction was the same). h e image transformed to a series of bounc-
ing dots, with an aural accompaniment of trains, then moved into a series of
fantastic lights, and the hyper-
Blade Runner
city views; orange images of
tra' c ran through the skyscrapers as the city shrank in size, surrounded by
a series of circling blue lights, exploding fi nally into lights that end up as a
visual of circuits and computer bits as numbers (fi nancial information and
markets) distilled into a rainbow of lights, individual water blobs, each with
organic self-contained cities.
