Better city, better life

Spain pavilion, picture from the magazine Arkitekten

Today the 68th day of the huge exibition in Shanghai, Expo 2010 which runs until october this year. The theme "Better City- Better Life", has five central theme pavilions exploring different aspects of urban development; Urban Footprints, Urban Planet, Urban Dwellers, Urban Beings, and Urban Dreams. One of the most popular house to visit is the Spain pavilion with over 2 million visitors until now. The house is made from hand-weaved wicker basket structure supported by the steel framework inside. The basket structure cover the whole building like a fur for an animal, in black and brown. Shape is organic, like a small hill with curves. Spain pavilion contains three exhibition halls which will take visitors through the time and space of the development of the cities in Spain with the theme of "From the City of Our Parents to the City of Our Children". Here is also the much argued big baby doll.

To open up the 5.28 square km exibithion area in the middle of Shanghai, they had to move 18,000 families and 270 factories, including the Jiang Nan Shipyard, which employs 10,000 workers. Instead; 6 new subway lines, 4.000 new taxi, 1,8 million volonteers, expected visitor number 70-100 million.

Another building, another place; The Monte Rosa's new hut in the Swiss alpine area. This house with 90% self-suficient energy supply and most water need taken by melt water in the spring is a so called ecological building. The process to build Monte Rosa can be seen in the movie above and by clicking at the link, you can see how they built the new hut with help from helicopters. Result is a icon bulding for alpine people, with panorama view over the mountains in altitude of 2,883 metres and you have to walk to visit.

The Fårösunds Fortress, at the large island Gotland in the Baltic sea, was a fortress for the army in the Crimean War (1853-1856) and has been rebuild to an exclusive hotel (Fårösunds Fästning). What you can see from the front side is shown in the picture, taken by me when we were there last week, and is just a grasshill with the old fence along its side still there. On the other side (I went there to take a look), was the ocean, sheeps and some people eating at a balcony. From the weebsite you can see that the old bunkers and rooms have been hotelrooms, very nice ones. Food here is local produce and very fine.

Three examples of how buildings can look like. Three different examples of how we affect when we build new buildings (or exibitions for buildings). Three different examples of how the life there would look like.