All text reproduced from World's Fair magazine, Volume VIII, Number 3, Copyright 1988, World's Fair, Inc.
Expanded and revised version January 2000, by Arthur Chandler.

To the visitor entering the fairgrounds through the Porte d'Honneur, it must have been immediately apparent that national differences and political agendas had triumphed over any international spirit of solidarity among decorative artists. The British pavilion, designed by Easton and Robertson, was indeed a tasteful and forceful example of the Art Deco style. But inside the building, when visitors came to inspect the display of photographs showing current architecture in Great Britain, they found that the English were erecting buildings in quite traditional styles.

Italy, however, was only attempting what almost all the other pavilions, save one, tried to accomplish: the making of a national pavilion that was explicitly symbolic of the nation that it housed. In the Netherlands building, the effect of this kind of confident nationalism was almost comic. The Dutch had used good honest traditional brick to erect what looked like an inverted tulip athwart interlocking planes in the Mondrian style. At the base of this tulip were stylized waves, and a little brick schooner plows the waves over the word "Hollande," which stands out from the planes in sharp relief. Inside, de stijl furniture, in the manner of Rietveldt and Wouda, pointed towards the kind of abstract furniture design favored by the Bauhaus school and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Most of the national pavilions denied, in their regional shapes and themes, the very internationalism that the exposition was trying to promote. The results were sometime sober (England) pugnacious (Italy), or ever rollicking (the Netherlands). But the overall effect was the same: a proliferation of regional styles, but nothing that suggested the emergence of a style for all humanity. The great classical traditions that had held together public architecture since the Renaissance were gone. "Away with the architraves, pillars, and antiquated temples of the aristocratic past," these national pavilions seem to say. "The universal human community will produce its own style, appropriate for its own age, here in the twentieth century!"

Melnikov's Russian Pavilion

It was the Russian building, however, that most accurately forecast the future. The Revolution of 1917 and the announced mission to lead the world into the classless society of the future gave the Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov a moral reason to reject both the classical and regional architectural traditions. The resulting building forecast the international style that would not emerge fully for two decades: regular glass rectangles set into unadorned horizontal and vertical supports. Inside, the sparse Decor emphasized worker solidarity. Peasant art was on display as a sign of eternal rural vigor in the Russian landscape. But it was Rodtchenko's workers' club that showed the vision of the urban future for Russia: hard, geometric chairs without cushions facing a common table designed to hold magazines and pamphlets. On the walls are posters proclaiming the good of the Soviet Republic, and racks of periodicals for workers to read. The Soviet pavilion announced clearly that the Russian view of corporate life in the twentieth century that would eventually, inevitable, capture the higher echelons of political and economic power in the world.

NOTES

8 Quoted in Scarlett and Townley, page 46