Ode to Osaka

The temporary Ode to Osaka pavilion is an inflatable structure, an organism that breathes with its visitors and acts as the intricate and complex narrative of a game of Chinese nested boxes.

The surrounding architecture is that of the precious Rationalist concrete, wood and glass construction annexed by Sverre Fehn in 2008 to the National Museum in Oslo. A pavilion within a pavilion, this exponential reference to his final and constructed designs makes it more than the temporary reconstruction of an unbuilt project. It is a design-environment that can be completely dismantled and transported, constituting more than the redefinition of a proposal and homage to its architect who died in 2009.

It works magically with the evocative force of ectoplasm, a medium that materialises around it, a clinical object with a powerful design aura. Sverre Fehn’s career is dotted with pavilions – remember that of the Venice Biennale – and splendid museums, exercises in style that earned him the reputation of Master of regionalist Modernism.

The exhibition focuses on a rejected proposal but includes a critical redefinition of his work by retrieving long forgotten plans and documents. Originally designed by the Norwegian architect for the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, it was intended to blend with Danish architect Bent Severin’s Scandinavian Pavilion.

The exhibition had the futuristic title “Progress and Harmony for Mankind” and featured a gigantic and almost immaterial vaulted US Pavilion, a feat of engineering by Davis-Brody. It sought to imagine the near future in terms of never-ending development with highly technical trajectories. With 64 million visitors in its six-month duration, it was Asia’s first great World’s Fair, developed to a plan by Kenzo Tange and with a number of architectural creations built as accolades to the infinite potential of development. The most striking thing about the documentation on that Fair displayed in this exhibition is the way it contrasts with this minimal analogical and functioning reconstruction of Sverre Fehn’s work.

Manthey Kula Architects have executed a perfect job on the pavilion, its white colour and poverist choice of materials drawing out the dark soul of development. It is the room in a temple that divulges a critical conscience and the spasms of progress, heralding the possibility of environmental disaster, pollution and an end of resources. The concept of this space seems, indeed, to have created a decompression chamber and a meditation space.

The 1970 Scandinavian Pavilion was designed with great intelligence, going against the tide of the futuristic rhetoric of the times. Eleven friezes on the facade with a + sign and a – sign constituted a simple gesture weighing up the pros and cons or the two sides of development ahead of the times. The title of the exhibition in the pavilion, “Environmental protection in an industrialised society” was actually a countermelody to the apotheosis and emphasis of progress intended as never-ending growth. The 72,000 images and projections on environmental catastrophes, desertification and other themes that might be drawn from today’s eco-sustainable agenda were supposed to raise the awareness of the millions of visitors to the problem of our planet’s non-infinite resources. Just a year after the euphoria of the Moon landing, Sverre Fehn probably wanted to plunge everyone into a timeless place with an artificial atmosphere.

Free from all forms of aesthetic pollution, the grammar and colours reduced to a warm and enveloping monochrome, it is only slightly structured by an unexpected design giving it the appearance of a traditional Japanese house. The experience is one of an internal space containing all the philosophy of poetic modernism. In the words of the architect, “Our future depends on the conditions in which our decidedly unfashionable sky finds itself”.