Qualla: Expo 2000

Expo 2000: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RalfR, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kraftwerk was paid US$190,000 for five seconds of music. The jingle - a vocoded voice saying the name of the fair - became the signature sound of Expo 2000, and when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was asked about the fee he said he "wouldn't have spent so much money." As a line item it was trivial against a world exposition that ended roughly US$600 million in the red. As a story it stuck, because it confirmed what a lot of Germans already suspected about the whole enterprise: expensive, clever, and impossible to explain. The fair ran in Hanover from 1 June to 31 October 2000, the only world exposition Germany has staged since the war. Twenty-five million people came. Forty million had been expected.

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Image: RalfR | CC BY-SA 3.0

Expo 2000: Won by One Vote

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AS&P – Albert Speer & Partner GmbH, CC BY-SA 2.0 de. The Bureau International des Expositions awarded the fair to Hanover on 14 June 1990, beating Toronto by twenty-one votes to twenty. A single delegate decided it. Two years later the city council published a survey of local opinion and found that 51.5 per cent of area residents s...

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Image: AS&P – Albert Speer & Partner GmbH | CC BY-SA 2.0 de

Expo 2000: Nobody Could Say What It Was

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BKP, CC BY-SA 3.0. Earlier expos had shown off what the present could do. Expo 2000 proposed instead to present solutions for the future, which is a considerably harder thing to put on a poster. The advertising was described at the time as cerebral, and it did not help. The Berlin marketing firm Sc...

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Image: BKP | CC BY-SA 3.0

Expo 2000: The Buildings Made the Case

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jens Bludau, CC BY-SA 3.0. The architecture, meanwhile, argued for the fair far better than the campaign did. Shigeru Ban built the Japanese pavilion as a gridshell of recycled paper tubes; German building control refused to certify a structure held together at the joints with tape, so a secondary wooden f...

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Image: Jens Bludau | CC BY-SA 3.0

Expo 2000: The Empty Plot

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jens Bludau, CC BY-SA 3.0. A hundred and fifty-five nations took part. The United States, having agreed to attend, reversed the decision late, and the ground reserved for the American pavilion sat undeveloped for the whole five months - a rectangle of nothing in the middle of a fair about the future. Final...

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Image: Jens Bludau | CC BY-SA 3.0

Expo 2000: Scattered Across Two Continents

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Snoop at German Wikipedia (log of original upload: [1]), CC BY-SA 3.0. Most of the national pavilions were demolished, or dismantled and shipped home, and the fair's afterlife scattered widely. The Christ Pavilion was rebuilt at Volkenroda monastery in 2001. Mexico's went to the art college in Braunschweig, the Nepal Himalaya Pavilion to Wiesent nea...

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Image: Snoop at German Wikipedia (log of original upload: [1]) | CC BY-SA 3.0