Finding nonsense in Happy Street

On May the third I tweeted an opinion about the Dutch Pavilion on the Shanghai 2010 Expo. The opinion was that it looks like a cheap tourist village somewhere in the Mediterranean. Kitsch. And embarrassing. It’s easy to express an uninformed opinion, 140 characters is more than enough. I’ll try to explain why I was mistaken, why I should never have tweeted that tweet.

One of the reasons I didn’t like the Dutch Pavilion was the name: Happy Street. A colorful street, painted in bright colors white, green and red with a shiny yellow crown on top. I think I saw this structure right after some depressing news item about Dutch intolerance, the contrast between this Happy Street and the news seemed enormous at that time. Happy Street turned into a facade, an empty cynical marketing campaign, a billboard for something that doesn’t exist.

Another reason I didn’t like it is because of how it looks. No, that’s not true, I didn’t like it because of how I thought it looks. I thought that some cynical marketeers collected all sorts of corny buildings like the old wooden ones you may find in Zaanstad. What I saw was a reflection of a conservative utopia, an epoch somewhere in the nineteen fifties, after World War II but before the Sixties and Seventies. An era where everybody worked hard, never complained and lived together, in the streets, the happy streets. And and era where everybody obeyed authority, thus the Crown of our undisputed Royal Family.

I was wrong.

Yes, it is a utopian structure. The artist has a clear vision of what a happy street should be like. But it’s not the nineteen fifties in the Netherlands, it’s the street life he found in Hong Kong in the nineteen eighties where industry, housing and shops could be found in one and the same street, where work and living were not separated, that’s what his Happy Street is like. That’s not cynical. It might be a bit naïve but it’s definitely no evil marketing campaign for the conservatives in the Netherlands. It might be abused by these marketeers though.

But is it nonsensical, does it belong on this site? The structure makes sense. It shows the visitors many major export qualities of the Netherlands: architecture, high tech, water management, design. Every detail seems to have a meaning in this building. That’s the opposite of nonsense.
And the fact that it will be demolished in October, 6 months after it was finished is in itself bizarre. But that doesn’t make this pavilion unique, all pavilions await the same fate, it’s the nature of the World Expo in itself that is absurd.
But still, after seeing this Dutch documentary and after being encouraged by dxtr I decided this building and especially it’s architect deserved a spot on Love Nonsense. Unfortunately both the tweet and the documentary are in Dutch, both are well worth your time though, even if you don’t understand every word they say.

If you don’t agree with me and believe this is a sensible structure in every way please forgive me. In order to make it up to you I give you some other works by John Körmeling, the artist we’re talking about. The Rotating house on a roundabout, the drive-in ferris wheel and the parking carpet. And as a bonus I give you the website of Happy Street which loads the images in reversed order: it starts with the last ones so it takes much more time than needed to load which makes it a perfect example of anti-efficiency.