Milan’s Expo is one of the most controversial world’s fairs ever staged in Europe. Oliver Wainwright inspects the pavilions of the 140 participating countries and assesses what the Italian city has to show for its seven-year struggle

A four-storey high rug of twinkling LEDs proclaims the glories of Turkmenistan’s textile traditions above a rain-soaked scene, casting a pinkish glow across the golden arches of the neighbouring McDonald’s. Across the way, a half-finished Nepalese pagoda towers over a faceted glass dome of Belgian produce, while Russia thrusts a gargantuan mirrored canopy into the air, aggressively cocked like a missile next to Estonia’s wooden shed. A bugle call is the signal for a Korean marching band to strike up, trumpeting the arrival of the country’s futuristic white space-blob, just as an Argentinian drumming troop thunders into action next door.

Sprawling across 110 hectares on the outskirts of Milan, this crazed collage of undulating tents, tilting green walls and parametrically-contorted lumps can mean only one thing: Expo 2015, latest in a long and controversial tradition of “world’s fairs”, has landed.

“We’ve tried to build a stage where all the actors can make their voices heard,” says its design director Matteo Gatto, fresh from touring the Italian prime minister and the pope (who has his own, relatively restrained, pavilion) around the frenzied fairground. And Gatto appears to have achieved his aim: the 140 participating countries and brand sponsors are screaming their presence at full volume.

In the centre of Milan, however, others have been making their voices heard in a different way. As the fair opened on May Day, thousands took to the streets to protest, while violent splinter groups smashed shopfronts and torched cars. “The Expo is a machine for burning public money,” said one protester, carrying a “No Expo” banner. “It promised to bring jobs and boost the economy, but it’s being run by voluntary labour and has wasted billions on pointless infrastructure.”

Expo claims to be a celebration of slow food and healthy eating but is sponsored by giants like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s Activist

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The United States pavilion: Expo 2015’s official motto is ‘Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life’. Photograph: Ye Pingfan/Xinhua Press/Corbis

“It claims to be a celebration of slow food, local agriculture and healthy eating,” added another activist, carrying an anti-globalisation placard. “Its official motto is Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life, but it is sponsored by corporate giants like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. The whole thing is beyond a joke.”

Expo 2015 has been one of the most controversial world’s fairs ever staged in Europe. It has been plagued by escalating budgets, seeing total expenditure balloon to around €13bn, including the costs of building new transport infrastructure to service the site, 10 miles from the centre of town. It has suffered interminable construction delays, meaning €1m has had to be spent on building camouflage structures to hide the unfinished pavilions for the opening. And, while being touted as a model of a cleaner, post-Berlusconi Italy, it has been damned by charges of corruption and bribery, seeing seven senior managers and former members of parliament arrested last year, and more indicted for bid rigging a few months later. So what does the city have to show for its seven-year struggle?

Traipsing the kilometre-long gauntlet of novelty structures, past Daniel Libeskind’s twisted totem poles for Siemens and Norman Foster’s €60m rippling pink concrete walls for the United Arab Emirates, it’s hard not to see the whole endeavour as a monumentally misplaced allocation of resources. The exhibition content is, in the main, as vapid as the architecture is extravagant. Visitors roam like herds of lobotomised oxen in search of nourishment, from clambering on a net over some flowerbeds inside Brazil’s giant climbing frame, to the touch-screen excitement of playing “Lithuania or not?” (a game of swiping national dishes into a digital shopping basket). Most countries’ exhibitions feel like a cross between a Waitrose advert and a travel agents’ trade fair – immersive multimedia dioramas of bountiful produce and spectacular scenery, dotted with stalls selling craft trinkets and samples of cheese.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Israel’s pavilion in Milan features tilting green ‘fields of tomorrow’. Photograph: Chamussy/Sipa/Rex Shutterstock

“We thought we had a chance to do something radically different,” says Stefano Boeri, the Milanese architect and planner originally responsible for coordinating the Expo masterplan when the city won the bid in 2008, until he was removed in 2010. “Knowing that previous Expos have been quite weak, and have failed to leave a serious legacy, we thought we could really do something that would benefit the city.”

Boeri assembled a crack team to develop the masterplan. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron were joined by the London Olympics’ chief adviser on architecture and urbanism, Ricky Burdett, American designer and “cradle to cradle” evangelist William McDonough, and Joan Busquets, the Spanish architect and planner responsible for much of the good that resulted from the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. It would have been hard to conjure a better legacy-minded think-tank on paper.

“We really wanted to get away from the usual vanity fair of competing architectural ‘innovations’,” says Jacques Herzog, speaking from his studio in Basel. “I was honestly shocked when I visited the Shanghai Expo [in 2010]. You were blinded by the amount of design, so by the time you left the show you had forgotten everything about the exhibition. We wanted to focus on the content, and use the site as a laboratory for creating something useful for Milan, which wouldn’t leave the usual wasteland of ruins.”

Their plan did away entirely with the conventional format of bombastic national pavilions, sweeping the countries under a field of tent-like canopies instead, arranged in long strips either side of a central axis. “We went back to the Roman foundation of Milan,” says Boeri, “laying out big Cardo and Decumano axes with lateral side-streets, abolishing any kind of hierarchy, so there would be no difference in size between the rich and poor countries.”

Expos entrance with the same sense of contemptuous captivation that comes from watching the Eurovision Song Contest

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A model poses next to the Swiss pavilion on the opening day of Expo 2015. Photograph: Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images

Embodying the agricultural theme, half of each plot would be given over to a cultivated garden, where the countries would grow a food of their nation and then bring their produce to a kilometre-long table running down the central boulevard – “like a global last supper”, says Herzog.

In reality, you can now admire photos of the fairtrade coffee cultures of East Timor and Rwanda, then go and have an Illy espresso at the sponsored coffee bar. Or you can learn about the cocoa industries of Cameroon and Gabon, then stuff your face with Ferrero products at the Nutella concept bar.

As for the masterplan structure, it was planned to be “shovel ready” for development after the Expo, so as not to leave Milan lumbered with the usual white elephant. “It was a very simple plan to create something that leaves behind a physical armature for a city,” says Burdett. “So when the tents came down, you would have the infrastructure there, with all the services already laid.”

As time went on, however, it became increasingly clear that this light-touch plan was too radical for the international exposition movement and its attendant entourage of sponsors to adopt. Judging by the track-record of what other Expos have left in their wake, the Bureau of International Expositions (BIE) in Paris – the intergovernmental agency responsible for co-ordinating world’s fairs since 1928 – appears even less aligned to the subtleties of city-making than the steamrolling bureaucracy of the International Olympic Committee. The BIE might talk in lofty platitudes about the “intellectual legacies” that are supposed to emerge in the form of grand declarations and charters, but in reality there seems precious little care taken to ensure the host city is left better off than it was found.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nepal’s pavilion: ‘It is still fascinating to see national ambitions embodied in a line-up of skin-deep architectural flourishes.’

Photograph: Stefano Porta/EPA

Despite brimming with positivity about the final result, Gatto is candid about the difficulties of developing the Expo masterplan. “It was not so easy to make the design advisors’ ideas a reality,” he says. “We couldn’t force the participating countries to do what we wanted – the rules of the BIE mean we have to give them freedom to design what they want. The structure of the routes and public space is still as we planned, but the sultans and sheikhs will always have their way and follow their own ideas. And that’s really what makes the beauty of the Expo, this amazing variety.”

The architectural smorgasbord is certainly varied, as you stroll from Qatar’s concrete fort, topped with a giant woven basket, past the mirrored labyrinth of Iran, to the bloated Italian pavilion, which appears to be modelled on a Chinese shopping mall. When you get to the one structure designed by Herzog & de Meuron at the end – a series of wooden barns for Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement – you sense the whole thing might actually have been a bit insipid if left in the hands of their restrained Swiss good taste. Because, ultimately, surely the only point of visiting an Expo is to marvel, drop-jawed with morbid fascination, at the bizarre architectural freak-show, and be entranced by the same sense of contemptuous captivation that comes from watching the Eurovision Song Contest. It is a spectacular mess, but it’s also fascinating to see national ambitions embodied, side by side, in a line-up of skin-deep architectural flourishes.

But then you’re rudely awaken out of your kitsch reverie by remembering quite what will be left, and at what cost it all came. Before the Expo arrived, this site was a place of overgrown, formerly agricultural land. The intention was to leave it in such a way that development could happen in a productive landscape, creating a new kind of high-density garden city once the tents were taken down. Such a bucolic idea was soon abandoned and, for ease of development, the entire site has been covered with an enormous concrete foundation slab – at a cost of €224m, mysteriously up €60m from the original tender price.

The elaborate 'canal city' idea didn’t quite turn out as planned either

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An early visualisation of Milan’s Expo by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in 2009

The elaborate “canal city” idea didn’t quite turn out as planned either. The Expo was to be a catalyst for reviving Milan’s network of waterways, opening up canals to irrigate surrounding farms. Work was begun, before it was realised that the water pressure would not be strong enough to reach the fields. The revised plan met with huge environmental opposition, so instead the network was to be buried underground. With €60m already spent on the project, the fabled “Vie d’Acqua” has yet to materialise. “It is the real scandal of the Expo,” says Boeri. “A ditch going to nowhere that will never be used.”

Nor does the future look much brighter. The Arexpo company – the joint-venture Expo legacy vehicle, co-owned by the City of Milan, the Region of Lombardy and, in smaller parts, the Fiera Foundation and City of Rho – is now in the unenviable position of trying to find a buyer for the site, a place severed on all sides by motorways and railway lines.

Having first acquired the land at a vastly inflated price from private owners (for €160 per square metre, when agricultural land in the area is worth €8-12 per square metre), the public sector is also burdened with trying to make back some of the huge outlay on remediating the site and building the Expo’s infrastructure. Recently, the site was offered up for sale at €315m – to deafening silence. What happens next is still up in the air, with vague plans ranging from building a new stadium, to a scientific campus for the State University of Milan and an innovation hub for tech startups. But don’t worry, at least there’ll be a charter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The British pavilion is ‘a metaphor for how the UK is a hive of innovation and creativity’. Photograph: Chamussy/Sipa/Rex Shutterstock

“There’s simply been far too much speculation on the land and now they’re stuck with it,” says Emanuele Braga, co-founder of Macao, a politicised arts group that has been organising campaigns against the Expo since it was first announced. “The first mistake was buying land from private developers; the second was covering it all in concrete – when the theme is about feeding the planet and reviving urban agriculture. They should have used a site they already owned that was in need of regeneration.”

I meet Braga in a former slaughterhouse now squatted as the HQ of Macao, on the other side of town from the Expo. Working groups busy themselves discussing labour conditions and workers’ rights, while a symposium led by Robin Hood Minor Asset Management takes place upstairs. (A few days later, Macao would stage an occupation of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, in protest against labour conditions in Saadiyat Island, where the Guggenheim is building its latest outpost.)

Standing on the slaughterhouse rooftop, Braga points to a landscape of derelict meat- and fish-market buildings spreading out before us that he says would have made an ideal setting for an Expo themed around food. But such a site would have necessitated the intelligence of adaptive reuse and careful planning, of a kind clearly at odds with the tabula rasa predilections of the Expo juggernaut.

Few can point to Expos that have left a lasting legacy, other than the Victorian originator and its Crystal Palace

Facebook Twitter Pinterest London’s Crystal Palace was built to house the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of the Industry of all Nations’ in 1851. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images

One hundred and sixty four years on from the first such extravaganza, London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, it seems clearer than ever that the format of the world exposition is well past its expiry date, leaving a trail of debt and destruction wherever it strikes. When pushed, even Expo boosters can point to few events that left a positive, lasting legacy for their cities other than the Victorian originator – which brought us the Crystal Palace and left a great axis of cultural institutions lined up along Exhibition Road in South Kensington, the famed Albertopolis, which the Olympic park is now trying to mimic.

Sure, Vancouver’s 1986 Expo opened up its waterfront for development, and Montreal ’67 left a nice park with a big Bucky dome and a small amount of experimental housing, but all these benefits could have been achieved without the vast expense of putting on a fair. For several billion dollars, cities could build vast quantities of real, affordable housing and acres of beautiful, truly public space.

Seville’s Expo 92 was one of the largest ever at the time, sprawling across 215 hectares dotted with geodesic domes and snaking monorails, at a cost of almost €10bn. Most of the structures were intended to be temporary, but the city had no money left to remove them following the event. They mostly still stand there, abandoned, as forlorn symbols of a future that never arrived, with the first European space rocket and a strange pyramid of national flags still looming above a post-apocalyptic landscape. The event left the city mired in debt for decades.

Shanghai’s Expo was the biggest in history, spread across an area five times the size of Milan 2015, at a cost of $50bn

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fireworks mark the opening ceremony of the 2010 Expo in Shanghai. Photograph: Feng Li/Getty Images

Hannover 2000 suffered a similar fate. Buoyed by the light-headed optimism of the Millennium year, the bubble was soon pricked when only around half of the expected number of visitors turned up, once again leaving the region saddled with debt and a landscape of overgrown ruins. The site was laid out by Albert Speer Jr, son of Hitler’s architect, who also planned the Beijing Olympics – a strangely prescient choice, given his father coined the idea of “ruin value” in his grandiose Nazi works.

Hot on the heels of the Beijing Olympics, Shanghai’s 2010 Expo was the biggest in history, spread across an area five times the size of Milan’s exposition at a cost of $50bn (£32bn) – a level of ambition that saw 18,000 families forcibly displaced, according to Amnesty International. The Chinese pavilion has since been converted into an art museum, while most others have been demolished to make way for cranes, now busy building a new swathe of mixed-use city across the site. “Better City, Better Life” was the theme – for those who can afford it.

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It is a scale of autocratic ambition only likely to be matched by the next Expo, to be hosted in the global capital of architectural hubris, Dubai; home of the tallest building in the world, the largest aquarium on the planet, and an artificial archipelago shaped like the world itself, all soon to be joined by “the world’s first indoor city”. Expo 2020 is the jewel in the crown of Dubai’s national programme of steroidal grands projets but, given the troubled trajectory of fellow Gulf state Qatar’s endeavours for the 2022 World Cup, the world is watching with trepidation.

Still, in the fantasy playground of the United Arab Emirates, where impossible dreams are daily conjured from the desert at untold human and environmental costs, perhaps the world expo movement has finally found its spiritual home. For the good of other cities around the world, may it be its final resting place.