Holland

Architecture & Area See text
Carlo Ratti was meant to be designing the Dutch pavilion -- the online world is awash with images of a 1,600 sq m sustainable-farming pavilion, featuring a huge, tilted agricultural field with self-driving tractors navigating over its surface. The fact that this pavilion has failed to materialise (and who knows what 11th-hour catastrophes may have befallen it) may go some way to explaining the low maintenance offering we have from Holland, though it scores highly in sociability and reusability.

With the theme 'share, grow, live', Holland presents not so much a structure as a festival landscape. Mobile food vendors offer Dutch food and drink delicacies (including seaweed burgers), interspersed with small learning pods filled with information on advances and innovations in Dutch farming technology and animal husbandry. Further information soundbites are provided on blue and green lollipops scattered around the planting, learning ponds, and seating areas. It is clear you are being encouraged to sit and enjoy the food, the ambience and maybe engage in conversation with one of the friendly pavilion helpers/guides.

At its heart is a small stage with an all-day programme of live music. At the end of the site is a cluster of containers, one of which is offered as a possible 'growtainer' -- mobile miniature allotments that, it is suggested, could be placed in car parks or disused sites. In this way, we're told, people could even 'pick up some fresh lettuce on the way to the supermarket'.

Continue for Slovakia or read:

The making of Wolfgang Butruss' UK Pavilion

Milan Expo 2015: From Blueprint's point of view