Rika Devos

Een interieur van popcultuur als propaganda en kritiek: Bernard Rudofsky en het Amerikaanse paviljoen op Expo 58

The Viennese- american architect (1905-1988) designed some of the most prominent exhibition installations in the American pavilion at Expo 58: Islands of Living, Townscape, Cityscape, Shopping Street and The Face of America. To this end, he collaborated with Peter G. Harnden, supervisor-architect of the interior of the pavilion. Bernard Rudofsky’s installations are in line with his contemporary exhibitions designs and theories dealing with modern visual mass communication, but they also demonstrate his fascination with American pop culture at the end of the fifties. The combination results in an installation that is at once light headed and free, frivolous almost, but that is even so surprising, shocking and uncanny. This essay highlights the critical nature of Rufosky’s interior installations, as well as the special, politically charged and layered rhetoric that underpinned the presentation of these installations to the mass of fairgoers.The American pavilion at Expo 58 had a central plot, in the heart of the Foreign Section, right next the USSR pavilion. The organizers of Expo 58 had opted to make the cultural oppositions of the Cold War explicit by visualizing them in a straightforward juxtaposition. In these representations, architecture and technique were associated with political ideals. Both superpowers had appointed teams with experience in the large-scale representation of their nations. The American government had invited Edward D. Stone (1902-1978), designer of the New Delhi embassy (1954-’58), as the architect of the pavilion. A commission composed of members with MIT connections was in charge of the content and the general concepts of the exhibition. However, they opted to follow the advise of Rudofsky and Gardner: ‘another repetition of production statistics could be counted on to arouse boredom, perhaps irritation, certainly envy.’Irrespective of the detailed and strict control of the commissioner on the approach and content, as well as on the resulting political-public debate, Rudofsky managed to represent popular America in an unusual, somewhat uncanny manner. Although the diverse layers of meaning have not always reached the public of large, the pavilion still illustrate the multiplicity of post-war American representation in Europe. Rudofsky’s designs and the reactions to it by the public, as well as by American politicians and commissioners also expose a peculiar model of communication and illustrate the success and failure of the use of interiors, environments and architecture as mass media in post-war political propaganda.