Expo Doing it in style

When World Expo 2010 opens in Shanghai today, New Zealand will be showing itself to the world, but just what does it take to represent contemporary Aotearoa? Sarah Catherall finds out.

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THERE'S not a bleeting lamb or bungy jump in sight _ instead, the image of New Zealand competing with other parts of the world is of stylish, green cities, and a country that is low-key and welcoming.

Our $32 million expo pavilion opens this weekend at the World Expo 2010 Shanghai: a six month-long party when countries show themselves off to China and the world.

While the United Kingdom will be luring Chinese visitors to a wow- factor building that is shaped like an illuminated porcupine, and Pakistan has built a replica fort (better than India's effort, according to the critics), our architects have deliberately steered away from an eye-catching forum. The New Zealand Expo pavilion is a verdant wedge with a nine-metre pohutakawa tree visible on the rooftop, which is intended to resemble an arboreal Eiffel Tower.

Says Blair Johnston, the architect for Warren and Mahoney, who has spent the last two years on the project: "Everyone's trying to be different, but the risk is that everyone will be the same. Expos are typically about overload. Among all this visual and aural 'white noise' we want to provide respite, where the building and the experience become one."

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Visitors are tipped to spend six to eight minutes in the New Zealand pavilion. Expo commissioner-general Phillip Gibson says the pavilion showcases the country as a clean, green and innovative place to visit, study and do business.

China is now our second-largest export market, and Mr Gibson says it is critically important to our economic wellbeing that "we are here and we are here with style".

Our pavilion is expected to lure 40,000 visitors a day, and is built on a 2000 square metre site - the smallest site available - near the much larger Australian pavilion and near those from Malaysia, Singapore and Cambodia. With some countries spending US$60 million to US$80m, Mr Gibson says: "We stack up really well. We've already been dubbed a must-see pavilion in the Chinese press."

Visitors to our pavilion will meet a professional kapa haka group performing under a courtyard canopy intended to represent the Maori legend of Tane pushing apart the Sky Father and Earth Mother. Inside, they'll walk past a piece of 2000-tonne piece of pounamu, and up a winding ramp on an audio-visual journey, through a city like a motorway, and following the story of a fictional part-Maori girl and her Auckland-based extended family. Visitors will watch images of daily life as the girl goes to school, her parents work, skype relatives and go to a grandmother's that night. Her father, an architect, meets a group of Chinese businessmen and shows them eco- buildings he's designed. Along the way, snatches of New Zealand life will flash on the faces of buildings, photographs of real events such as cafe and beach scenes, and people going about their daily lives, which took 17 months to shoot. Tourism images of the Shotover Jet will feature, too.

Steve La Hood, a director of Story Inc, which designed the exhibition, Sexy Dresses says: "We could have had an Expo showing our lamb and butter and giant landscape . . . but we wanted to open another discussion. We had to also get across the 'we can do business with you', which is very important at an Expo".

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