Savour International

From theme parks to reality: Centre Pompidou in Paris is currently featuring a superb exhibition that shows how the extravagant architecture of world fairs and theme parks have influenced urban architecture, and have engendered artificial cities such as Dubai and Shanghai.

 

Paris’s Centre Pompidou is currently the site of a whimsical exhibition on urban spaces that is a mix of virtual reality, artistic reflection, and underscored reality, and features the luminous kitsch of Las Vegas, the air conditioned gigantomania of Dubai, and the animated visions of Shanghai – plus photographs, collages and installations on the concept of the city itself.

 

The historic core of the show, which features 350 exhibits (scale models, documents, films and videos) comprises the world fairs of the past 100 years – these geographical and pedagogical marketplaces which originally centred around scientific and technical achievements, before becoming, starting with the 1898 Paris World Fair, a mass phenomenon thanks to the multifarious wonders on view at that event. The Paris World Fair featured, on both sides of the Seine, an Italian palace, a Khmer temple, and a Swiss chalet, as well as cows and shepherds. The event’s success soon inspired commercial imitations that took the form of theme parks.

 

The Centre Pompidou show’s title, Dreamlands, takes its cue from Coney Island’s Dreamland amusement park (1904), which in lieu of cheap thrills offered visitors a breathtaking around-the-world tour featuring the canals of Venice, ringed by painted palace facades. Visitors could marvel at Alpine peaks made of cardboard and canvas and were captivated by Chinese temples – this at a time when such distant places were accessible neither online nor via budget flights.

01 | The Dreamlands show at Centre Pompidou blurs the boundaries between art and commerce. Here you see Untitled (Skyline) by the installation artist, video artist and photographer Kader Attia (2007).

02 | The performance piece La vie en pink (2004) from the Mister Pink series. The main theme of the Centre Pompidou show is that elements that were once the province of world fairs and theme parks have influenced the work of architects and artists.

03 | Palace for Joan Lit. This inspired design by architect Cedric Price, who died in 2003, is part of the 1960 Laboratory of Pleasure concept, which included movie theatres and restaurants.

Dream architecture

So what do the visions of a theme park have to do with urban planning? And what do the attractions of a world fair have to do with modern design? A great deal, says co-curator Quentin Bajac, who dreamed up Dreamlands in collaboration with Didier Ottinger: “In the late 19th century, the motifs and formulas of this architecture of spectacle and entertainment were still confined to the enclosed spaces of the theme parks at world fairs. But over the course of the 20th century, these motifs and formulas came to be applied to the schemata of urban development.” According to the curators, Dreamland was the beginning of an “architecture of sensationalism, dissipation, and dreams.”

 

The Centre Pompidou show bears out this tight correlation, for we see here how the illusions created by exhibits fuelled fantasies and utopias, and how they inspired artists and influenced urban planners, resulting in a new architectural language embodied by world fair pavilions in new urban centres. The exhibition shows – via 16 photographs of constructions ranging from Pavillon de Vénus, a meandering pavilion designed by Salvador Dali for the 1939 New York world fair, to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas – how this relationship entailing bilateral inspiration has continued to evolve up until the present day. US-based Venturi and Scott take their architectural cues for the casinos and hotels they design from the garish iconography of advertising posters, in lieu of the functional uniformity of glass and steel.