Overview

The “Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles - Wereldtentoonstelling Brussel 1958,” popularly known as Expo 58, was held on the Heysel plateau in Brussels, Belgium, from April 17 to October 19, 1958. Registered by the International Exhibitions Bureau (Bureau International des Expositions, BIE) as a general exhibition of the first category, it was organized by the Executive Committee of the Society of the Exhibition. It is commonly described as the first Expo after World War II, but that is accurate only for its category: it was the first general exhibition of the first category held after the war. The BIE lists 12 Expos between the end of the war and its opening: Expo 1947 Paris, Expo 1949 Stockholm, Expo 1949 Lyon, Expo 1949 Port-au-Prince (a general exhibition of the second category), Expo 1951 Lille, Expo 1953 Jerusalem, Expo 1953 Rome, Expo 1954 Naples, Expo 1955 Turin, Expo 1955 Helsingborg, Expo 1956 Beit Dagon and Expo 1957 Berlin. King Baudouin opened the Expo on April 17, 1958, and over its six months it recorded 41,454,412 visits.

Origins and the bid

Brussels brought long experience to the project. The city had hosted international exhibitions in 1888, 1897, 1910 and 1935, and Expo 1958 Brussels would make it a host for the fifth time. The Atomium's history of the event notes that Belgium's record as a host weighed in its favor when Brussels was chosen over proposals associated with Paris and London. The BIE registered the Expo at its 32nd General Assembly on November 5, 1953, giving the organizers four and a half years to prepare.

Theme and subthemes

The theme, "A World View: A New Humanism," presented science and technology as tools for human progress, while insisting that moral development keep pace with them. In his opening speech, King Baudouin made that point directly, arguing that technology alone does not make a civilization. Nuclear energy was a central subject: a display promoted the peaceful atom under the motto "Atom = Hope" and included a scale model of the BR-3 reactor at Mol.

The site

The Expo reused the grounds of Expo 1935 Brussels and extended into Laeken park by way of a precast concrete footbridge. The Centenary Palace received a temporary new facade, and a new hall, Palace No. 7, added 10,000 square meters of exhibition space. The city itself was reshaped for cars and air travel: urban motorways were built, Zaventem airport was developed, and a new tram line carried visitors from the city center to the site. The Cité Modèle housing project in Laeken, begun in this period, was not completed until the 1960s.

Architectural historians Gaia Caramellino, Alessandro De Magistris and Federico Deambrosis argue that the Expo transformed central Brussels even more than the Heysel plateau. Promoted with the slogan “Carrefour de l’Occident” (Crossroads of the West), it served a government strategy to make the Belgian capital a hub of the new Europe, with fast routes for private cars and a new administrative center meant to bridge the upper and lower city, a transformation one critic called a “massacre.” Many of these plans predated the Expo, but its opening date imposed a deadline, and the attention it brought, with visits by about 80 percent of Belgium’s population by the authors’ count, helped officials overcome resistance, although many works were still unfinished when the gates opened.

Pavilions and international participation

The BIE counts 39 participating countries, while the Atomium's history describes an Expo of Belgium and 44 countries. The United States, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands and France received the largest plots, each about 25,000 square meters. The American and Soviet pavilions faced each other near the Atomium, and the Cold War rivalry shaped both. The Soviet Union displayed a replica of Sputnik and Laika's cabin, projecting technological mastery. The United States pavilion, designed by Edward Durell Stone with displays by Peter G. Harnden and Bernard Rudofsky, stood under a translucent, cable-tensioned roof and included a Circarama theater showing a 360-degree Walt Disney film tour of the United States, as well as "Unfinished Work," an exhibit on the country's social and racial problems. The Czechoslovak pavilion introduced Laterna Magika, a new form of immersive theater.

The Atomium became the Expo's symbol. Designed by engineer André Waterkeyn with architects André and Jean Polak, the 102-meter structure represents the unit cell of an iron crystal enlarged 165 billion times, with nine spheres joined by tubes. It was completed on March 25, 1958, at a cost of 200 million Belgian francs, and its upper sphere held a restaurant. Nearby, the Philips Pavilion, commissioned by Philips artistic director Louis Kalff, was designed by Le Corbusier in collaboration with Iannis Xenakis and Edgar Varèse as the setting for the multisensory “Poème électronique.” The Arrow of Civil Engineering, a reinforced concrete structure about 80 meters long by Jean Van Doosselaere, André Paduart and Jacques Moeschal, carried visitors over a relief map of Belgium. Many buildings broke with symmetry in favor of angles and curves, a manner later known as the "58 style."

Not all critics were impressed. Historians Kimberly Elman Zarecor and Vladimir Kulić note that architectural purists saw a compromised modernism: many pavilions used lightweight prefabricated steel frames and panels whatever their politics, and the two superpower buildings, the Soviets’ rectangular hall with an undulating roof and the round American pavilion, shared a classicized monumentality and axial symmetry. The Belgian section’s brightly colored “space-age” ornament, known as the “Expo Style” or “Atomic Style,” was especially reviled. Besides the Philips Pavilion, praise went to Sverre Fehn’s pavilion of Norway, built of wood, stone, plastic and glass, and to the West German pavilion by Egon Eiermann and Sep Ruf, eight transparent glass cubes linked by open walkways that avoided any echo of Nazi monumentality.

Critics of the time called the Expo a “Festival of Structures,” and Caramellino, De Magistris and Deambrosis see the rivalry between the blocs played out largely through engineering. They describe the Philips Pavilion as a tent of suspended shells and undulating vaults in which Varèse’s “Poème électronique” played through 350 loudspeakers; it was dismantled after the Expo. Charles and Ray Eames made their office’s first film for a client for IBM at the Expo: “The Information Machine: Creative Man and the Data Processor,” commissioned by Eliot Noyes in 1957, with hand-drawn animation by Dolores Cannata. Disney’s Circarama film for the United States pavilion was “America the Beautiful,” which biographer Neal Gabler called the hit of the whole Expo.

Zarecor and Kulić describe Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, two small socialist states, as unexpected successes of the Expo. The Czechoslovak pavilion, by the Prague exhibition and retail specialists František Cubr, Josef Hrubý and Zdeněk Pokorný, won the Grand Prix for the best national pavilion. Behind a clear glass entrance hall flanked by experimental panels of foam glass and plastic, visitors followed a route called “One Day in Czechoslovakia” through work, leisure and culture, ending in the theater of Laterna Magika and Polyekran. Karel Zeman’s film “Vynález zkázy” won the Expo’s prize for best film. Some 6 million people visited, but travel restrictions allowed fewer than 6,000 Czechs and Slovaks to see the pavilion. Re-erected in Prague, the main building burned down in 1991.

Yugoslavia, expelled from the Soviet-led Cominform in 1948, refused a plot beside Franco’s Spain and ended up apart from the Soviet group, among Western European neighbors. Croatian architect Vjenceslav Richter, a cofounder of the EXAT 51 group, first proposed hanging the pavilion from a single mast; wind loads forced him to use 12 slender steel columns instead, and an obelisk of six tensile arches stood for the country’s six republics. Inside, split levels rose over pools from a sunken Gallery of Economy to galleries of state, art and tourism. The British journal Architectural Review counted it among six outstanding pavilions, yet fewer than 10 percent of visitors went in, and the jury criticized its weak didactic content. It was later rebuilt as St. Paulus College in Wevelgem, Belgium.

Moscow treated the socialist pavilions as a group. According to historian Lewis Siegelbaum, cited by Zarecor and Kulić, Soviet officials met their counterparts in Prague and Budapest to discuss them, and the modern Hungarian pavilion, also built of lightweight frame and panels, stood behind the two superpower buildings with its entrance hidden from most visitors. Neither the Czechoslovak nor the Yugoslav display used the hammer and sickle. The Czechoslovak restaurant was popular, though politicians in Prague complained that its food was too expensive. Laterna Magika went on to a permanent stage in Prague, and in 1989 its theater served as the headquarters of Václav Havel’s Civic Forum. At home, the pavilion became associated with a new design idiom, the “Brussels Style.”

The Yugoslav pavilion divided its audiences. Alfred H. Barr Jr. of the Museum of Modern Art and Jean Cassou of the Paris museum of contemporary art praised it, and the French L’Express ranked it among the four best pavilions, yet Zarecor and Kulić detect a stereotyped surprise that a socialist Balkan country could build so well. Many ordinary Yugoslavs who came to Brussels found it “empty” and “too modern.” Its Gold Medal, one of 35, was awarded for the building and the art exhibition alone. In the last month of the Expo, a collection of handmade dolls in folk costume shown in the Gallery of Tourism drew coverage from almost every major Belgian paper and raised attendance by at least 10 percent, undercutting the building’s image of a forward-looking country.

Belgium also used the Expo to present its colony in the Congo. Seven pavilions covered Congolese mining, arts, transport and agriculture, and in the tropical gardens organizers set up a "typical" village where Congolese people were put on display. The Brussels Times has described this section as one of the darkest aspects of the event, and the Atomium's own history calls the colonial section "somewhat controversial."

Legacy

Urban designer Patricia Simões Aelbrecht treats Expo 1958 Brussels as a model in its own right. In her reading, Expo 1889 Paris set a first model, with permanent event heritage such as the Eiffel Tower built into the city plan, while Brussels set a second in which architecture eclipsed economics: growing numbers of participants and increasingly varied national messages produced larger and more diverse pavilions, and new concrete techniques encouraged bold architectural experiments. She sees Expo 1998 Lisbon as the start of a third model, in which the urban plan itself becomes the legacy.

Most pavilions were demolished or moved after the closing. The Austrian pavilion was rebuilt as a museum in Vienna, and the main Czechoslovak building was re-erected at the Prague exhibition grounds, where it burned down in 1991, while its restaurant went to Letná Park. Parts of the United States pavilion were taken over in 1961 by the Belgian broadcaster NIR, today’s VRT, which still uses them. The Centenary Palace complex became the Brussels Exhibition Centre. The Atomium, intended to stand only for six months, was kept, renovated between 2004 and 2006, and now houses an exhibition on Expo 1958 Brussels. Expo 1958 Brussels gave Belgium its best-known modern landmark and remains a vivid record of postwar faith in science, set against the tensions of the Cold War and the end of the colonial era.