B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

It would be wrong to portray the Great Exhibition as an un-nuanced celebration of modernity. But the structure built to accommodate it, the Crystal Palace, was, to a remarkable extent, exactly that, and it was perhaps the greatest of all the Great Exhibition’s achievements. It was the palace, rather than its contents, that was to haunt the imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Crystal Palace was like nothing that had previously existed. At the start of the Gothic Revival that represented the most flamboyant peak of High Victorian architecture, which attempted to recreate the thirteenth century in the midst of railways, canals and factories, the Crystal Palace was like a time-travelling spaceship returned from the future.

Ever since ambitious cities struggling with each other to make their mark. A few have come close. The Eiffel Tower was the product of the 1889 Expo. Montreal almost bankrupted itself in 1967. In 1992, Seville persuaded the Spanish government to build a high-speed railway line, bringing visitors from Madrid to their city, and construct a new terminal for the San Pablo International Airport. But Seville’s dreams of using the Expo to turn itself into a high-tech gateway between America and Europe drowned in the mud of the site.

The Crystal Palace was designed by Joseph Paxton, a polymath who had begun his career as the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener, and whose first architectural experience was the creation of a series of greenhouses for his employer. The palace was the embodiment of the new industrial system. It was built in just eight months, using an unprecedented degree of préfabrication, a cast-iron structure and so much glass that it accounted for fully one-third of Britain’s annual production of the material. The glazing was installed using special trolleys that allowed 108 panes to be fixed in a single day. The palace was huge, big enough to accommodate full-grown trees, and over 500 metres long. Building it took 2,000 men and cost £79,800; they needed 4,500 tons of iron and 293,000 panes of glass.

The Crystal Palace was a condensation of many different kinds of urban space - promenade, piazza and forum - into a single gigantic object. And it represented a new approach to injecting design into every aspect of life. Despite the ruthless utilitarianism of Paxton’s structure, the interior encompassed a much broader range of styles. Among the group that worked on the interior were Owen Jones, whose book The Grammar of Ornament was perhaps the first visual encyclopaedia of decorative design, and Augustus Welby Pugin, responsible for the design of the Medieval Court.

Henry Cole used the profit made from ticket sales to the palace to help fund the creation of the Royal College of Art, to train designers and also to start the construction of what would eventually be called the Victoria and Albert Museum, the world’s first design museum. The V&A was intended as an instructive demonstration to students and manufacturers of what design could achieve, but it very quickly turned away from Cole’s vision and took on a much more diffuse role as a historical collection of the decorative arts in all forms.

If William Morris despised the Great Exhibition and refused to set foot inside the Crystal Palace, Christopher Dresser, born in 1834 (the same year as Morris), can be seen as the designer who most productively understood its significance. At seventeen years old, Dresser was already a graduate of the Government School of Design. He went inside the Crystal Palace and emerged impressed by what he had seen, at least by the inventiveness of pattern and decoration from the non-European exhibits. Morris rejected the industrial system, while Dresser was prolific in his work for it, acting as a consultant for many different companies, creating hundreds of machine-made products, from textiles to wall coverings, ceramics, glassware and metalware.

At a time when the fast-expanding middle classes were looking to furnish their homes in ways that reflected well on them, Dresser designed all the objects needed for their tables: claret jugs, tea services, serving dishes, toast racks, candlesticks and cruet sets. Dresser’s designs were radical in the context of a period when many designs combined a giddy mix of cultures and periods with the highly decorative Rococo Revival style dominating silverware. His sharp, geometric forms look startlingly contemporary even now. But it is Morris’s name that lives on as a pioneer of design, while Dresser’s is known only to the specialists.

The Crystal Palace was dismantled and relocated to the south London suburb that still bears its name. The structure was used for a variety of events over the years, before finally being destroyed by fire in 1936.

The first Exposition publique des produits de l’industrie française was held in the year VII of the revolutionary calendar of the French Republic, or 1798, on the Champs de Mars, close to where the Eiffel Tower now stands. There were just 110 exhibitors, and apart from a tethered hot-air balloon hovering overhead, the displays of cotton yarn, watches, paper and cloth were worthy if hardly spectacular evidence of the first tremors of the coming Industrial Revolution.

France had recently occupied Geneva, and tried to land troops in Ireland in an abortive attempt to support a rebellion against the British. Napoleon had yet to return from Egypt and declare himself first consul of the republic, let alone the first emperor of the French.

As developed by the French, the exhibition hall quickly became an essential part of the modern city, as a form that was put to work in a range of different contexts, from the convention centre to the department store. The expo itself evolved into a curious mixture of high-flown but empty rhetoric about international goodwill and utopian futures, with bombastic nationalism and fairground entertainment. The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, celebrating the centenary of the French Revolution, was an even larger and more flamboyant event than the Great Exhibition. Attracting all of twenty-eight million visitors, its swaggeringly ostentatious national pavilions set a precedent for future fairs. Alongside the engineering tour de force of Eiffel’s famously controversial tower (the ‘useless monstrosity’ so angrily denounced by its contemporaries) and the vast, clear spans of the Halle des Machines, a crop of bizarre new structures made their startling if temporary presence felt on the Paris skyline. Ignored as kitsch by the more squeamish of architectural historians, it was the fantastical aspects of the exposition, the replicas of the pagodas of Angkor Wat, Senegalese villages and Indochinese palaces incongruously silhouetted against the dome of Les Invalides, that were to have as much of an impact as Eiffel’s engineering brilliance.

Once inside the turnstiles, paying customers could wander along a replica of a twisting street in old Cairo, past a reasonably faithful reconstruction of the Bastille, stormed in re-enactment every hour, and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, in which they could pause for refreshment at an open-air café. It was Disneyland before the animated cartoon, let alone Mickey Mouse, had been thought of.

At the Paris Exposition of 1937, the Nazi and Soviet governments attempted to outdo each other with bigger and more imposing national pavilions. Speer’s obelisk was confronted by hammer-and-sickle-wielding Russian peasants. It was the same expo that saw a much more resonant political statement: the Spanish pavilion - designed by José Luis Sert - housed Picasso’s Guernica.

Germany did not go to New York in 1939, but Stalin’s architect Boris Iofan built a remarkable celebration of the Soviet Union in Queens. Robert Moses, the J Edgar Hoover of twentieth-century urbanism, who controlled New York’s infrastructure for forty years with implacably fixed views, organized two expos, the first in 1939 and another in 1964. The difference between the two reflects the way in which the expo has declined into commercial banality. In 1939, Wallace Harrison’s Trylon and Perisphere provided a soaring landmark, reflecting a world still lost in adolescent wonder at nylon, chrome, motorcars and air conditioning. Norman Bel Geddes designed Futurama, the enormous General Motors display, which proudly claimed to be the city of tomorrow - its 500,000 scale model buildings, its one million trees and 50,000 cars, 10,000 of which actually moved, defining the idea of the modern world in the popular imagination. The models were wonderful, but they reduced the individual to the scale of an ant, paving the way for Moses to start driving expressways through the Bronx, and demolishing swathes of Manhattan for the building of the Lincoln Center during the 1940s and 1950s.

By the time of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, once more dominated by Robert Moses, by now already under attack as the dark genius of urban renewal, the very idea of the city of tomorrow had gone senile. Moses distrusted modern art even more than he distrusted modern architecture, and his one attempt at involving the younger generation of artists ended in embarrassment. Warhol painted 13 Most Wanted Men, a mural that caused a brief scandal before being obliterated on orders from Moses.

The 1964 fair marked the convergence of the expo tradition with that of Disney. Walt Disney had set up his first theme park in California ten years earlier and, in the run-up to the Expo, he offered his services to several of the big commercial exhibitors. He designed a troupe of animated dinosaurs for the Ford pavilion, and a chorus of walking talking dolls for Pepsi, who sang the joys of cola in a dozen languages.

From the first Paris exposition to the starry-eyed futurism of New York in 1939, from the welfare state optimism of the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the tawdry corporate vision of New York in 1964, each of the fairs sloganized a particular view of urbanism. The most extreme embrace of drip-dry modernity was the Montreal Expo of 1967, with its concrete housing ziggurat designed by Moshe Safdie, its Buckminster Fuller dome for the United States pavilion, and its monorails.

The expo, despite all the dross and the expense, is still refusing to lie down and die. The Shanghai Expo of 2010 was the most well attended of all time, the product of the burgeoning mobility of the Chinese labouring class and the determination from governments around the world to make the best possible showing in front of this potentially enormous new market. But in the world of the jaded consumer in Europe and America, the idea of the expo has lost the cultural significance it once had.

London’s Millennium Dome - strictly speaking the structure was neither a dome nor were the contents that of an expo - demonstrated all too clearly just how pallid the species has become. It was too polite to follow in the full-blooded vulgarity of the great expos, and its exhibits were too bland to have the redeeming architectural brilliance of the Crystal Palace. It was left to deliver morally improving but empty rhetoric about sustainability and new technology that Prince Albert might have recognized, but not much in the way of innovation.

The more superficially sophisticated that the world appears to become, the more its public rituals signal that its underlying preoccupations remain as intoxicatedly atavistic as they have ever been. Like the Olympic Games and the Grand Prix circuit, the expo movement comes wrapped in the appearance of a glossy sense of modernity. For all the alibis of urban renewal, the real significance of the expo is closer to the motivations of the Easter Island head builders, or the ritual festivals of the Mayans. They are massively profligate undertakings that involve pouring huge resources into events that in the case of the Grand Prix races last less than two hours. The calculations of everyday reality do not apply. These are events that are to be understood as reflecting national prestige, or the imposition of cohesion, or else the rampant pursuit of sheer spectacle for the sake of spectacle.