“The basic ideology of an exposition is that the packaging is more important than the product, meaning that the building and the objects in it should communicate the value of a culture, the image of a civilization.”
- ‘How An Exposition Exposes Itself’, Umberto Eco.
With a sinking heart laden with grievous despair, that my fellow Malaysians is an unadulterated photo of the Malaysian Pavilion currently standing within the Shanghai Expo 2010.
Let’s see now, I really should be objective so what would be a likely interpretation of the pavilion or the circumstances behind it?
- The way to peoples’ hearts is through their stomach, so getting our pavilion to look very much like a roadside Tom Yam joint should bring in the masses?
- As a display of sustainable correctness, Malaysia told the Expo organizers not to demolish the temporary site office because with some red, yellow and brown paint, we could make it our pavilion?
- Someone mixed up the drawings and built the housing of the workers for the pavilion instead of the actual pavilion?
- We thought we might be able to boast having the highest number of hits or visitors by making our pavilion look like where the public toilets are?
- Someone misread the brief for the expo and thought that the requirement was for a pavlova instead of a pavilion, hence we ended up building a design meant for a dessert?
- Rather than go through the rigmaroles and formalities of putting up an official pavilion, we just snuck in and made a squatter pavilion?
- There was a pondok Pak Guard somewhere that was such an epitome of Malaysia that applying the digital technology of mirror-duplicate and resize to it would result in a pavilion that would be such a showcase for application of technology onto the vernacular?
- The pavilion intends to attract shopping tourists to Malaysia by giving them a precognition of the kind of buildings to look for when they want the really, really cheap and tacky stuff?
If architecture is a reflection of the peoples, in this case a nation, than what is the pavilion saying about us? No matter really, because I believe many of us already know that it wasn’t designed in Malaysia. So whatever it says of us, it is not us who said it ourselves nor want to be said of us. However, it does say that whenever Malaysia wants to have something to show the world, Malaysia gets others to do it for them. In that case, what it DOES say about us is that we are most definitely a third-world nation.
Nevertheless, even if that was the route Malaysia chose to take, couldn’t the choice have been made with a sense of aesthetic or integrity higher than that of a street peddler of cheap imitations?
Oh, and by the way, here’s a portion of it at night, enough to illustrate the creative technology of illumination from Malaysia, as would be familiar to anyone who had a budget for blinking lights from Giant or Mydin during a festive season.
Or of course, anyone who has patronised a roadside Tom Yam joint.
