Charles Pappas, Expo expert, for NIN: A place for encounters, business and discovering new cultures
|People often see international exhibitions as expensive spectacles that last a few months, after which everyone is left wondering both about the cost and about what to do with the structures that remain.
However, their history shows that the legacy can be far more enduring. The Eiffel Tower was originally conceived as a temporary structure, and it is still standing 137 years later. Some exhibitions have shaped entire parts of cities, and they have showcased inventions and ideas that changed everyday life.
Expo expert Charles Pappas, who fell in love with international exhibitions as a boy, believes the key to success is ensuring that visitors do more than simply look and read. They should be able to experience, try out and discover something.
For Belgrade, the host of Expo, his message is to bring its own culture, energy and playfulness into the organisation, rather than creating a copy of some generic theme park.
When it comes to international exhibitions, people often first think of large pavilions and spectacular buildings. What can a host city really gain from such an event?
The benefits can vary greatly, but the most important thing is to think about them before the exhibition ends. The Eiffel Tower is the best-known example. It was built for the Paris exhibition of 1889 and was originally meant to be temporary, standing for around 20 years. While it was being built, many people considered it dreadful. Around 300 prominent intellectuals signed a protest letter, arguing that the tower was ugly. Today, it is one of the most recognisable symbols of France.
Paris is, to a great extent, a city shaped by exhibitions. Its broad boulevards, distinctive pale-stone buildings, parks and landmark structures are linked to the major urban changes that accompanied exhibitions from the mid-19th century onwards.
The Grand Palais, the Petit Palais and Pont Alexandre III are also part of that legacy. Even the famous chair seen in Parisian cafés was created for one of the exhibitions. It was the idea of a German inventor and later became a widely used piece of furniture.
This shows that an exhibition does not have to be merely an event confined to a specific site. It can change the way a city looks and functions, and even what people regard as part of its identity.
Can you give an example of a city that gained something from an exhibition that it still uses today?
Seattle, for example, has the Space Needle, a structure that has become a symbol of the city and a major tourist attraction. The case of Spokane is also interesting. In 1974, the city hosted an exhibition devoted to ecology. Afterwards, the riverside area was redeveloped into a large park, which became the centre of city life.
According to figures presented at the time, in the first five years after the exhibition the city generated around 700 million dollars in revenue from tourism and business activities linked to the event.
Spokane then had roughly 170,000 residents. Belgrade is much larger, so the possibilities are clearly different. But more important than comparing size is the question of what remains after the visitors leave. You cannot simply build a site and leave it to chance. You need to know what it will be used for, who will use it and how it will connect with the rest of the city.
In the past, that was not always considered carefully enough. After the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, there was even discussion of destroying the entire exhibition site with dynamite, because it was thought that this would make for a spectacular ending. Today, the approach is different. In Dubai, for example, a rule was introduced that a large share of the exhibition structures should be reused. It is a sensible principle: a plan for life after the exhibition must be part of the project from the very beginning.
In your view, what could be the most important legacy of Belgrade Expo?
Belgrade could gain new spaces for sport, events and different kinds of gatherings, and these are facilities that can generate revenue even after the exhibition ends. Transport infrastructure, including the railway station and the metro that will connect this part of the city, could make access easier and contribute to the area’s development.
Still, legacy is not simply a list of structures. If everything is done properly, an exhibition can affect the economy, tourism and urban development, but it can also change the way people perceive the city. Belgrade no longer has to be only a city people pass through or one known mainly to people in the region. It can become a destination people travel to specifically.
The crucial thing is to have a plan for how the site will be used after the event and to think about how it will fit into everyday life. That is the difference between an exhibition that leaves behind only photographs and one that leaves something future generations can use.
People often speak about an exhibition’s “legacy”, but that term can mean many things. What can legacy include?
Sometimes it is a building. London’s Crystal Palace, built for the 1851 exhibition, stood for 86 years before it burned down. There is also the Eiffel Tower, as well as the Atomium in Brussels.
But legacy can also be an invention. World exhibitions introduced or promoted numerous objects and technologies that later became part of everyday life: escalators, lifts, touchscreens, the telephone, recorded music, electrical sockets and devices for paying for fuel at petrol stations. Premature baby incubators are also among the examples.
Legacy can also be the money invested in something useful. The 1851 exhibition in London ended with a profit of 186,000 pounds, which would amount to tens of millions of dollars today. That money was used to buy land in the part of London known as South Kensington, where museums and cultural institutions were later built, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Albert Hall and the Natural History Museum. Scholarships were also funded from that endowment, and they continued to be awarded many decades later.
Among the scholarship recipients were 13 people who later won the Nobel Prize, including Ernest Rutherford, known for discovering the atomic nucleus.
So a single exhibition can contribute to our understanding of the universe. That is quite an impressive legacy.
You mention play as an important part of the exhibition experience. Why is it so significant?
Because people do not come only to receive information. They also come to discover something. At the 1889 exhibition, the same one for which the Eiffel Tower was built, the botanist Joseph Latour-Marliac presented water lilies he had bred by crossing French white water lilies with North American species. The flowers had much more vivid colours. Among the visitors who saw them was Claude Monet. He was so captivated that he painted water lilies for the rest of his life.
Monet did not come to the exhibition in search of a subject for his entire body of work. He was simply walking around and came across something that absorbed him. That is precisely the kind of thing exhibitions can make possible. Everything should not be rigidly organised, as in a theme park where the visitor moves from one attraction to another on a pre-set schedule. There needs to be space where people can wander, pause, spend 10 minutes in one place and an hour in another.
Along the way, they may come across an idea, a person or an object that changes their life.
That cannot always be planned, but it is possible to create an environment in which such encounters can happen.
The world we live in often seems rather bleak. Can the play and entertainment that Expo 2027 promotes as its main theme also have a more serious role?
I think we need play more than ever. Reality is serious enough and often difficult. So why should we make a space that brings people together equally gloomy? An exhibition can be a respite, a pause between bad news stories, a place where people relax, meet one another and learn something without feeling as though they are attending a lecture.
Play does not mean abandoning serious subjects. On the contrary, through play, complex things can be explained in an accessible way. People are active, they make decisions, solve problems and cooperate. That is entirely different from passively reading information on a wall or watching a presentation.
That is exactly why I find it interesting that the theme of Belgrade Expo is connected with play. It can give energy to the entire event and make it distinctive.
Your connection with international exhibitions began when you were only nine years old. What do you remember from that first visit?
I was born in the American Midwest, and I fell in love with world exhibitions when my father took me to the exhibition in New York in 1965.
I was nine years old, and for a child that age it was like entering a vast playground. I remember many things, but what stayed with me most was the IBM pavilion. It was circular in shape, inspired by an electric typewriter that was considered highly advanced at the time. It had a round element with letters on it, and a large pavilion was built to resemble it. Visitors queued beneath tall, tree-like structures, then entered in groups and were lifted high into the air. In a space filled with screens and projectors, synchronised to display content together, they were shown how computers work.
The ideas were presented through everyday examples. Computers were explained through housewives’ recipes or football coaches’ tactics, in a way that even a child could understand.
After the presentation, you could enter your date of birth and receive the headlines from The New York Times published on that day. At the time, that seemed incredible to us.
There was also a puppet show in which Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson solved a case using binary logic.
When I came out of the pavilion, one clear connection remained in my mind: IBM means computers, and computers mean IBM. That was the company’s aim, but the way it achieved it was marvellous. At the time, automation was causing concern, so through the pavilion IBM was both explaining technology and improving its own image.
For me, however, the most important thing was the sense of wonder. Even now, I can remember that feeling as if it happened yesterday.
Can exhibitions still leave that kind of impression on children today, in a world where almost all information is instantly available to them on a screen?
They can. The internet and screens have changed the world, but nothing can fully replace a face-to-face encounter. When you are online, you are usually looking for something you already know interests you. You may also come across something unexpected, but you are still seeing it on a small screen. At an exhibition, you are in a real space, among other people, and you do not know what awaits you around the next corner.
Imagine a child entering a pavilion and unexpectedly meeting their favourite basketball player there. A moment like that cannot be compared with watching a recording. Or imagine looking at a figure of a scientist, pressing a button and hearing information about their work, only to discover that the scientist is actually there and can come up and speak to you.
At the United Arab Emirates pavilion in Osaka, they organised an experience based on a similar surprise: visitors could meet the people whose work they had previously discovered through the exhibition display.
That is the power of an exhibition when it is well designed. It does not simply show you something interesting; it gives you the chance to experience it personally and unexpectedly. A child who visits Belgrade Expo today may still remember one moment from that place 50 years from now.
What advice would you give to countries and companies preparing their pavilions? How can they design a presentation that people remember?
First, they need to answer a simple question: what do I want people to learn about me? Not just what do I want to sell, but what image do I want visitors to take away of my country or company? Only once you know that can you design an experience that conveys the message.
Take the Netherlands as an example. Much of the country lies below sea level, and water management is one of the fields in which it has extensive knowledge and experience. Rather than simply showing visitors texts and charts, you can divide them into groups and give them the task of using play to find the most efficient way of protecting the country from floods. They will learn something about the Netherlands, cooperate, compete and enjoy themselves. In the end, they will associate that country with problem-solving and ingenuity.
A company that makes, say, a mobility aid can also create a course where visitors try out different possibilities and see how practical the product is. It can be a digital game or a real obstacle course to overcome. What matters is that people are not just an audience, but participants.
Of course, that approach also carries a risk: if something does not work, visitors will see it. But if it works well, the experience is more persuasive than any advertisement. When you try something yourself, you are much more likely to remember what you discovered.
And what would you say specifically to Belgrade, as the host city whose identity should be present throughout the exhibition?
My advice to cities and countries hosting an exhibition is always to bring their local culture into it.
They often think they need to create a theme park, but that is not the right path. Theme parks can be very similar to one another. Disneyland in Shanghai and the one in California have a great deal in common. Belgrade, however, should not resemble another city. It should show what makes it Belgrade.
That includes its coffee-drinking culture, nightlife, spontaneity, and its inclination towards socialising and play. Why should play remain only within the exhibition grounds? People play in the streets too, in schools, passageways and squares. If possible, the spirit of the exhibition should spread to the city as well, so that visitors do not experience Expo only when they enter a specific site. Belgrade itself can become part of the event.
