EXPO 2010 day THREE

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...like we decided, our last day of the expo we visited the rest of the Best Urban Practices area, again being very comfortable to visit compared to the crowds on the other side of the river and again, giving us a lot of good stuff! I was amazed by all the different info I got served here literally "in the face": 80 projects from around the world that demonstrate innovative solutions to urban issues, such as water treatment, energy conservation, transport, social interaction, and bring residents into closer contact with nature.


To say again, both zone D and zone E are mostly set inside the area that has four factories that once belonged to Jiangnan Shipyard and Nanshi Power Plant. They have been renovated and converted into pavilions for the Expo. Afterwards, they will be converted to other use. Symbols of China's earliest industries in the 1920s are turned here into a kind of an innovation park. It's a bunch of good examples how to do it and make it look amazing.


We ate in a Rhone-Alpes Case Pavillion that had a French School restaurant at the top. "Le Restaurant Ecole Institut Paul Bocuse"...and my mum was melting! Even though I didn't really expect to pay so much for food in China, where the food is great and you can get it cheap and that I expected to eat a lot more of the chinese dishes, I must confess I definately had one of the best looking and tasty shrimp dish I will probably ever have.


When it comes to the cases, half of them were full of information I could maybe chew on a bit more easily if having twice as much time just for this area. The things that I will present I found unique in the idea and in manifestation of this idea with the design of the pavillion.

The Sao Paulo case

Stood out of all the other cases because of it's specifics, that was a sustainable development of a city in a bit other way: it was about THE CLEAN CITY LAW, which was approved in September and went into effect on January of 2007. Since then, ALL of the giant outdoor advertising was banished and ALL of the store signs in the city of Sao Paulo were regulated in shape and size. The city got rid of the visually polluting layer of advertisement we all are getting familliar with, or at least, they gave the advertisers rules of behaviour. The pavillion is set up of noumerous panels with a before and after double reflection imprints on them.
here's some more info about it

The German-Chinese House

I was very aware of this beautiful small pavillion before coming to Shanghai, kind of like about the Norway pavillion, just that about this one I was 100%!s(MISSING)ure that it's amazing, 'cause for the latter one, I was just questioning myself. So on the second day of our visit, I just had to check it out, finding it closed, for no good reason (at least when talking to a chinese security guy at it's door). Soon he pointed one of the german organisers inside as a relevant source of information, so I decided to bother one of them, who was currently fixing something under the ceiling, standing on a ladder. So he told me there was a visit of a german president the next day an they had to get everything ready and checked for this high visit (it was a Germany Pavillion's day on 19th of May) and that he wasn't sure when it would open in the evening, but that we're very welcome to call him any other day and he'd give us a tour. Cool!

So we called him on this last day of our Expo visits and got all the info there is to get about the structure. Just in short: this is only one of the many pavillions that are a part of a three year event series called "Germany and China- Moving Ahead Together" that is underthe patronage of German president Horst Köhler and Chinese president Hu Jintao. The mind behind this sturcture and also some others in this on going project before is a german architect Markus Heinsdorff .

The structure of the pavillion is 100%!c(MISSING)hinese bamboo, so a traditional building element, put together by a modern connecting technology. The long bamboo canes originating from my beloved South East Chinese province of Yunnan - where everything grows big! The bamboo for the first time made laminates originates from Shanghai's surrounding provinces. It's an experimental project and we've been told that such a structure has never been made so far. Hm, I guess we'll se more of it to come. I'd have one right away! The house has a contract for two months on the Expo area. If it will remain for the remaining 4 months, it hasn't been decided yet, but I have a positive feeling about it. How would they allow one of the architectural highlights of this expo to leave early? ...I suggest setting up a tea house in it! =)






Before seeing the German-Chinese House we passed the Switzerland Pavillion, that was having trouble with their fancy weird chairlift. It was being repaired, but the queue for it was still full of determined Chinese to take their turn in going for a ride. Ha, ha, I wonder how many days of repairing it they will have in a 6month season. I'll just wait for my turn of skiing in Switzerland instead! This pavillion is a somewhat crazy structure, that has an interactive, intelligent facade enveloping it. It's a curtain of woven aluminium elements under which visitors pass to access the urban area on the ground floor of the building. This curtain is sprinkled with special red dots, wich actually are LED lights comprised of an energy source, a storage unit and a consuming unit. The energy produced is made visible in the form of flashes that are triggered by the pavilion surroundings, so when you take a photo of it, a part of the pavillion actually winks right back at you! At night, the facade can be active, thanks to the energy stored in these red cells.

We also passed the good looking Poland Pavillion with almost no queue, but since we played it as a team all of the way, I didn't insist in entering it, cause other two team mates were almost done for the day. Passing from outside...the polish had some kind of a show going on under one of the pavillion's openings...













Here's just some more links to the cooler Cases of Best Urban Practices Area:

Hong Kong: "Smart Card_Smart City_Smart Life"
Rhone-Alpes Case Pavillion
Rhone-Alpes TV
The Hamburg House - “Home of Hidden Energies”
"Tent City of Mina"
Madrid Case
London Case — Green House Effective
bedZED
Basel Geneva Zürich - “Better Water, Best Urban Life”
Freiburg Case

...if you feel you're into it...just go and visit it youself! I'm considering another visit there maybe... 😉

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Photos

Madrid Case
covered in bamboo to filter sunshine, heat and sound

Madrid Case
an artificial tree that can control climate

London Case bar
a cieling id made of thousands bottles of beer =)

London Case bar
...the furniture is all put together of different appliances and vehicles parts

Shanghai Case Eco Housing
Shanghai's green building demonstration project

Shanghai Case Eco Housing
the tubes are filled with algae, somehow producing energy...OK, I guess this is more just a conceptual addition, cause it probbably doesn't go that easy =)

Shanghai Case
Eco Housing aims to achieve zero energy consumption inside the structure

Comments

[Jennie]

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