Expo '70 - Attractions

Attractions

A popular highlight of the fair was a large moon rock on display in the United States' pavilion. It had been brought back from the moon by Apollo 12 astronauts in 1969.

Expo '70 also saw the premiere of the first-ever IMAX film: the Canadian-produced Tiger Child for the Fuji Group pavilion.

The Canadian Pavilion, designed by architect Arthur Erickson, featured two National Film Board of Canada productions: The Land, a look at Canada from coast to coast, filmed for the most part from a low-flying aircraft, as well as the animated short The City, directed by Kaj Pindal. Montreal artist and architect Melvin Charney had submitted a radically different design for the Canadian pavilion, fashioned from construction cranes and scaffolding, which was rejected.

The West German pavilion, designed by Fritz Bornemann, featured the world's first spherical concert hall, based on artistic concepts by Karlheinz Stockhausen. The pavilion theme was "gardens of music", in keeping with which Bornemann "planted" the exhibition halls beneath a broad lawn, with the connected auditorium "sprouting" above ground. Inside, the audience was surrounded by 50 loudspeaker groups in seven rings at different "latitudes" around the interior walls of the sphere. Sound was sent around the space in three dimensions using either a spherical controller designed by Fritz Winckel of the Electronic Music Studio at the Technical University of Berlin, or a ten-channel "rotation mill" constructed to Stockhausen's design. Works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and Boris Blacher were played from multi-track tape. As the main feature, however, Stockhausen was invited to present five-and-a-half-hour live programs of his music every day over a period of 183 days to a total audience of about a million listeners. In the course of the exhibition, 19 performers in Stockhausen’s ensemble gave concerts for over a million visitors. "Many visitors felt the spherical auditorium to be an oasis of calm amidst the general hubbub, and after a while it became one of the main attractions of Expo 1970".

The Expo also featured demonstrations of early mobile phones, local area networking and maglev train technology.