Is There Life After Expo 2015?

The travelling world fair that is the Expo opened in Milan on 1 May. Despite its sustainability theme, ‘Feeding the Planet’, there is no (master)plan for the sprawling, 1.1-square-kilometre site located northwest of the city centre after the exhibition ends. Many of the structures look permanent, but, at the end of October, all of it, apart from the monumental Italian pavilion, will be dismantled and the site left empty for the foreseeable future.

A number of the pavilions have been given some thought regarding their post-Expo life, however. One of these is the UK offering, which represents the journey of a honeybee, from a pastoral orchard and wildflower meadow to a beautifully engineered, sculptural hive at its heart. Though the landscape looks idyllic, it is actually made of a ‘series of scaffolding-style staging platforms, which we draped membrane over and then topsoil and turf,’ explains Adam Wildi of UK manufacturing company Stage One. ‘It is very modular and very, very reusable.’ The hive itself – made up of 169,300 individual aluminium components – will be reinstated post-Expo in the UK as a unique artwork.

Another of the Expo’s genuinely temporary contributions is the Slow Food pavilion by architects Herzog & de Meuron. Three simple wooden farmhouse structures placed in a triangle so as to create an internal square or ‘marketplace’ filled with plant beds, the pavilion is devoted to exploring the theme of biodiversity. After the Expo, it will be disassembled and turned into sheds for environmental and food education in Italian schools.

The Swiss pavilion, on the other hand, manages to be both sustainably minded and intriguingly conceptual. It consists of a low-slung exhibition element and four industrial-style towers filled with food – or resources – that visitors are allowed to take as much of (or leave) as their conscience allows. ‘Enough for everyone?’ runs the slogan on the building’s exterior. Three quarters of the pavilion’s materials are reusable and the towers are due to be transformed into urban greenhouses in Swiss cities.

Less immediately obvious are the sustainability credentials of the first-ever pavilion by a Chinese company at an expo. The Vanke pavilion was designed by New York-based architect Daniel Libeskind for China’s largest real-estate company. Though its constantly mutating and tactile red landscape looks deeply permanent and even opulent, its steel will in fact be entirely upcycled, say the architects. Bodino, its Italian contractor, will re-use or sell as many of the materials and components as possible, from bathroom fixtures to technical equipment, such as wiring, the elevator and lighting. Meanwhile, other components, like the screens, chandelier and furniture, were rented so will simply be returned.

More interesting, however, is the legacy dreamed up for the 4,000-plus metalised tiles that make up the pavilion’s cladding. They will be transformed into a bespoke art piece. ‘This will be sold at a charity auction and we will donate the profits towards the preservation of the wooden Foguang temple in Shanxi Province,’ says Qian Yuan, Director of Urban Research at Vanke, ‘the second oldest building in China.’