Twice Mice

I love revisiting the site of old World Fairs, and Brussels hosted two great ones in 1935 and 1958. They built the Palais de Expositions for the 1935 expo, but covered the whole building with cloth for the 1958 event held on the same site because they felt that its art deco appearance was not futuristic enough.

The first World’s Fair after World War II occurred 13 years after the war, and was in Belgium in 1958. The theme was “technology for the progress of humankind”. The centerpiece of the expo was Atomium (atom plus aluminium). An iron crystal with nine atoms, magnified 165 billion times, and towering 105 metres above the ground, it is an imposing and spectacular structure. It took two years of a team of construction-acrobats to assemble, working day and night, rain and snow, with no helmets or harnesses. There were no deaths during its construction, only one broken leg.

Each atom is joined by a powered escalator, that at 39 metres were the longest in Europe in 1958, and the trip to the top atom is via what was the fastest lift in the world, designed by Schindler to travel 5 metres per second. One of the spheres is reserved for children between the ages of 6-12 years who can hire it overnight, and fall asleep inside the oxygen of water molecules that descend from the ceiling like rain. They still sell the same treats today at the Polka Dot Cafe that existed fifty years ago – the Cha Cha biscuit and Dessert 58.

The 186 days of the expo were not a success, they were a triumph. Over 41 million people visited the Worlds Fair, and at night they could look up and see the lights twinkling around each sphere of the Atomium, like electrons orbiting their nuclei. Walt Disney was in Brussels working on Peter Pan, and he was saddened that the expo was to disappear at the end of September. This inspired him to built the EPCOT center and theme parks that would never be torn down.

Like the Eiffel tower, the Atomium was intended to be a temporary structure. As such, its outer spheres were coated with aluminium sheets that were only 1.2 mm thick, which was showing its age by 2004. For its fiftieth birthday, the Atomium was given a complete makeover. It was completely stripped down to its skeleton, and then the aluminium and fiberglass spheres replaced with galvanized and stainless steel. Today, this structure should correctly be called Atosteel, as no trace of aluminium remains today.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 6:42 am and is filed under Belgium, Choosing our new home.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.