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“You’ll never pull it off!” was the standard answer to the news that, from the date of the commissioning, there were only sixteen months until the Austrian Expo project for Aichi 2005 in Japan needed to be finished. The opening of the World’s Fair was set for March 25, 2005 and it wasn’t going to wait for us. The Expo project would become one of Austria’s fastest growing undertakings – from one single employee in December 2003 to over one hundred project participants in December 2004.

In January 2004, we were able to set out the budget and time schedule, which would, for the most part, be adhered to until the end of the project. At the same time, the themes were decided upon at a workshop; music, wood and healthy living were incorporated into a complex bid document. The creative team was sought in an EU-wide competition to design Austria’s presence at Expo 2005 based upon the agreed value canon of “culturally rich, creative and enjoyable.” Owing to the time constraints, we were forced to announce a bid process based only on the statutorily-required minimum timeframes. Despite the high complexity of that bid process, the many formal requirements which have to be adhered to by law in the awarding of public contracts, and the minimum available time for preparations, over forty creative teams had submitted theme-related project recommendations by the end of April 2004.

The bid had to define not only the specific contents and values which would set the Austrian Expo project apart, but also had to indicate, among other things, how Austria’s overall positive image in Japan could be played around with. To avoid competition, the dominant use of multimedia was not desirable, as Japan is very strong in that area. The submitting team should also be multidisciplinary in its composition, in order to guarantee efficient implementation – from the architectural design to the engineering and exhibition design. The creative freedom of the submitting team had to be steered along very precise tracks in order to generate a project that could be implemented within the significant time constraints.

Of course, during that phase, doubts frequently arose: Have we chosen the right themes? Can the creative teams transform the three completely different theme areas into a precise design recommendation? Are the time frames long enough to receive a project worthy of implementation? Can we withstand the external pressure of various lobbying groups – from politics to wood-construction companies and architects? Can we keep the bid process on track? Can the whole project be developed transparently and professionally?

At the beginning of June 2004, the selection committee, composed of representatives of the principal and external expert judges, was able to select the winner from five project recommendations in the second stage of the bid procedure. The winners were Hermann Dorn and Klaus Baumgartner from the recently founded architectural firm Trecolore Architects, with The Slope – Austrian Sensations. With a strong idea, consisting of a toboggan ride down an abstract mountain made of wood, they beat renowned and long-established creative teams at the finish line, so to speak. The decision of the selection committee was very clear; it was chosen because of the strict program and its minimalist space, which would enliven all the visitors’ senses one after the other, and thus communicate a positive and innovative image of Austria across intercultural and language-related borders.

To hear, smell, feel and taste Austria, or "auf Österreich abfahren" which means to be crazy about Austria by going downhill. A simple concept from the architects Baumgartner and Dorn, only thirty-one and thirty-four years old respectively, stood out in the long list of outstanding Austrian World’s Fair planners, from Hoffmann to Schwanzer and Gienke. It was a wise decision not to weigh past reference projects too strongly, so as to allow young teams to also have a fair chance of winning. To ensure the decision was both believable and transparent, external expert judges were invited to be on the selection committee and all project recommendations were to be presented through a course of exhibitions in the Architekturzentrum Wien as well as at the architectural centres in Graz and Klagenfurt.

Finally, we had an extraordinary project which needed to be implemented… nine months to go! During weeks of day and night shifts, the crude architectural concept was transformed by detailed planning, in line with the operational requirements, which had to take into consideration everything from safety to steering the visitor flow. Instead of commissioning one single general contractor, for quality and cost reasons it was decided to split the construction work into three areas: the complex laminated timber construction, the interior and thirdly on-site building coordination including the installations.

The bid procedures for the negotiation processes in Austria and Japan came next. The most money could have been lost in construction. Significant budgetary and time pressures were placed upon the bidding companies, but regularly fell back upon the project team. In Japan, the first bids were three times our original budget. Even in Austria, the first bids provided by most prominent wood construction specialists were not particularly favourable. However, this was not a surprise as the financial risks resulting from both the geographic distances involved and the minimal implementation time could only be very crudely estimated. After weeks of marathon negotiations, cost-saving adjustments had been made to the building plans and all the financial reserves allocated to the construction project area had been exhausted, the corresponding agreements could finally be signed, always accompanied with a “little prayer” that the project could still be successfully completed, both logistically and on time.

Even at that stage of the project development, there were regular pulse-quickening surprises: The Japanese Expo Association did not accept the modular and cost-effective container system that we had recommended in the “backstage” area because of a concern regarding untested earthquake safety, although on the Expo site itself, multi-story container “fortresses” had already been installed. At the same time, it urgently “recommended” incorporating pre-selected local building companies into the bidding process. The Japanese building police again demanded a reworking of the ventilation systems and in the end did not approve the foundation plans presented by the Expo Association, meaning that the structural framework for the massive wood construction of the “Slope” had to be altered.

Originally, we had thought that all looming problems could be discussed in Japan using simple English. That was an assumption that we very quickly had to revise. When we didn’t have the use of an interpreter for weeks, nothing at all was accomplished. Even an evening of sake together didn’t establish reciprocal trust and intercultural understanding. Often enough, our Expo team and the team of the Expo Association were literally “lost in translation.”

Parallel to the construction work the personnel selection for the pavilion’s operation, the corresponding training, and the team building was going on at a high speed. We had selected a project that would place very high operational demands upon the employees of the pavilion. We sought a total of fifty committed people, twenty of them from Austria and thirty from Japan. It was to be their job to guide the masses of visitors as ambassadors for Austria in a country known for its extremely efficient service culture, to ensure the safety and cleanliness of the pavilion and to handle all events that took place there. In addition, there were around twenty-five specialized positions, including dancers in the music area, live musicians to be constantly playing, and vendors in the shop area of the Snow Bar, as well as employees for the Café Wien.

The latter two were provided by the Japanese licensee and then integrated into the pavilion team. The negotiations regarding the exact content of the licensing agreement, up to and including even the menu, broke all time records. Our first contractual draft had already been presented in Tokyo in April 2004, and the contracts were concluded three days before the opening of the Expo on March 22, 2005. With this agreement, we could pass on a significant portion of the financial risk. In the end, the café operated so successfully that a Wiener Café was located upon the site of the pavilion in Nagoya after the end of the World’s Fair. Even the sales in the shop exceeded all expectations with average daily sales of one million yen and, as a result, the Austrian products that experienced the highest sales continued to be listed in the Japanese café chain.

The Austrian Expo mosaic took form slowly. The aim was to intensify the personal appeal of the pavilion employees to the Japanese and international audience through special events. In the pavilion itself, the masses of visitors, who had only an average attention span and stayed only fifteen minutes, were supposed to receive a concise and highly positive image of Austria. At the same time we hoped to appeal to important leaders of opinion in the areas of business, tourism, culture and science in a focused manner, to further bilateral relations. In this respect, the pavilion served as an important anchor for the Austrian Expo project, at which important events would take place specifically for potential clients and partner companies, for example from Tokyo or Osaka. The comprehensive program spectrum, which was developed with numerous Japanese and Austrian institutions and in close co-operation with the Austrian Embassy, the AUSTRIAN TRADE Office of the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber and the Austrian National Tourist Office in Tokyo, extended from seminars on the themes of environmental technology and traffic technology to art exhibits, and from the differentiated concept of nature between Austria and the host country to architectural symposia on sustained construction across Japan. An important principle in planning and implementation was the strengthening of the World’s Fair’s own core standards, based on the main theme of “Wisdom of Nature.” That was the only way to prevent Austria’s participation in the World’s Fair becoming undefined or imprecise. On this basis, more than ninety events were carried out over only six months.

The intensive event program supported the comprehensive media work in Austria and Japan. Regular positive reporting opportunities in the mass media, but also through specialized information channels such as business magazines and tourism journals in both countries and beyond could be created with very minimal funds. Thus, Austria’s presence at Expo was introduced to the local audience during over five hundred television minutes on all the main Japanese TV channels. And not to forget, many of the guerilla marketing events, such as the chicken-suit campaign by Edgar Honetschläger, could even be seen by an audience of millions on Good Morning America. The advertising value created in this way, and the overall winning image, by far exceeded the invested Expo budget. At the same time, specialized audiences which would otherwise have been very difficult to reach could instead be very efficiently reached through Austria’s numerous core competences: from environmental technology, to the future-oriented wood construction, and from architectural services to the attractiveness of the target country for Japanese direct investments and tourists.

From the very beginning, the Austrian Expo project for the World’s Fair in Aichi, Japan was a balancing act between time pressures and budgetary limits, but especially between the properly planned improvement of the existing - quite positive - image or even cliché of Austria, and the playful utilization of that image, or cliché. It is a fine tightrope walk: that the “lass upon the toboggan” does not hurtle into a reactionary valley of tears of a rather abstract mountain made of wood, but instead that the entire presentation produces an innovative image of Austria, or indeed in many ways a new and surprising one. The selected strategy and precise program selection helped to far exceed the goals that had originally been set. According to initial planning estimates, approximately five hundred thousand guests were supposed to visit the pavilion. In the end over 1.7 million visitors stormed the Austrian “stage” in only six months. Initially, we had hoped to make at least thousand qualified business contacts in the course of Expo. This number was almost doubled in the course of the numerous business events and, in addition, business deals of several million euro were finalized during the ongoing Expo.

We will leave it to others to judge whether Austria’s participation in the World’s Fair in Japan will enter into history as the alpine republic’s greatest ever PR campaign in the Asian region, and the most-frequented pavilion. However, one thing appears clear: as an identity-producing platform for the depiction of national top-level accomplishments to an international audience in the areas of business, tourism, culture and science, a World’s Fair is still ideal if it is strategically planned and implemented. The good-natured comparison with the other nations provides an incentive and can offer, in the age of Internet and e-mail, a framework for personal contact and intercultural exchanges of ideas over the six months of Expo, which are effective and lasting.

At the same time, the Bureau for International Expositions, the organization which sponsors the World’s Fairs, and all the participating countries will have to consider whether in a current, ever-stronger globally-networked environment, the former visionary utilization of an Expo was not increasingly falling by the wayside and was losing its focus, becoming a temporary and oversized amusement park. Surely a future mission statement should once again, and more strongly, define the role of a World’s Fair as the world’s largest laboratory and experimentation field? Citing an analysis of Rem Koolhaas, it seemed the macro-economic environment for this was probably also lacking in Aichi. According to his studies, the most pioneering World’s Fairs were held during transitional economic periods, such as at the time of the Industrial Revolution (World’s Fair in London, 1851) or the high business dynamic resulting from the Second World War (World’s Fair in Brussels, 1958). If that is so, the next World’s Fair planned for Shanghai in 2010 should ensure many visionary surprises.

links:
Expo 2005