Words by Herbert Wright

USA

Architecture James Biber Architects
Area 3250 sqm

If anyone missed the Expo's food theme, there's a knife, fork and plate replacing the stars in the American pavilion's massive flag signage above the expo's axial boulevard, the Decumano. Obvious it may be, but it does show the Americans are taking the theme seriously.

President Obama talks about food for every table from a big video screen at the top of a ramp to the airy first floor and, as ever, just his telepresence warms the pavilion up. The whole place is a vast, open, rectangular barn, and the long east wall is made of vertical hydroponic farm patches on hinged panels that curiously pivot. The top level is an open terrace with a cafe, under steel girders.

As James Biber of New York-based Biber Architects explained to Blueprint: 'Recent US Pavilions tend to be hermetic, opaque. That seemed less and less American.' By contrast, this is 'open, very porous, multivalent'. He dismisses the wooden pavilion trend as as 'a knee-jerk reaction to sustainability'.

Biber is essentially a high-tech architect and this building puts its steel structure out for all to see, not unlike Biber's Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee (2008) (although that is opaque).

There are even shiny ventilation pipes erupting through the boardwalk flooring, which uses wood from Coney Island. The waving farm panels aside, the metal is also tempered with a small aquatic garden and, at the back, oak trees.