The centerpiece of Lisbon's Expo '98 is a new kind of aquarium, recreating whole marine habitats that give an illusion of life in the open sea

By ROD USHER /LISBON

orld expositions used to be ways to showcase national industries; today they aim to be more like the "stately pleasure-dome" Coleridge depicted in Kubla Khan. Since London's Crystal Palace began the Expo tradition back in 1851, architects, engineers and, nowadays, virtual reality specialists try to make tangible the sort of spectacle the poet fantasized under the influence of opium. In Expo '98, which opened in Lisbon last Friday, the star attraction had a definite feel of Coleridge's vision of...a miracle of rare device,/A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice. Expo '98's outstanding drawing card is the Oceans Pavilion, the biggest aquarium in Europe, and the focus of this exhibition's theme: "The Oceans, a Heritage for the Future."

Most of the Lisbon Expo pavilions are plain, hangar-like boxes that will be dismantled after an estimated 8 million people have passed through between now and the end of September. The Portuguese learned the lesson from the last Expo in Seville in 1992 that pretty buildings can be pretty useless after the crowds have departed. But the aquarium which rises from what was once a swampy lagoon on the banks of the Tagus River is already proving such a hit that organizers have asked the Portuguese not to try to visit it until the Expo closes. This is a request likely to go unheard, as was indicated last week by workmen rushing to erect shade tunnels for the long lines that began forming as soon as Expo's doors opened on Friday.

Given its striking, ship-like exterior, its more than 8,000 inhabitants from 250 species and enough water to fill five Olympic pools, the aquarium gets what at first seems a surprisingly soft sell from the man who designed it, Peter Chermayeff, a British-born architect of Russian parentage and head of the firm Cambridge Seven Associates in Cambridge, Mass. Chermayeff says, "We have gone to great lengths to suppress the architecture..." or: "The most innovative thing is how simple it is..." or: "The departure with this aquarium is to say less and let people feel more."

Behind his understatement, Chermayeff is revealing what he has learned as the world's leading designer of aquariums. After building them in the U.S., Italy, Japan and elsewhere, he has realized that people love to sense what life is like under the water covering seven-tenths of the planet, but they don't always want to feel, as he puts it, "hammered with a science lesson."

To this end, Chermayeff and his colleagues took on an ambitious project in Lisbon: to reflect slices of the world's oceans, not separately but interconnected as they are in life. The aquarium is a huge main tank 6.7 m deep and holding 4.5 million l of water, surrounded by four additional displays connected by curved transparent walls made of acrylic 36 cm thick to support the enormous pressure. Says Chermayeff: "You can be in one part of the aquarium looking at puffins in the foreground, and beyond their rocky habitat you see through the acrylic wall sharks and rays and groupers swimming right alongside. It looks like they are in the same place. You get the sense of the size and complexity of the ocean."

The four habitats around the main tank are vignettes of four oceans. The North Atlantic "biome" has steep rocky cliffs and ledges similar to the British Isles, and is filled with seabirds such as murres and razorbills. The sub-polar Antarctica region, copied from the southern tip of South America, is represented by rock shelves and grassy banks populated by Magellan penguins. The temperate section, based on the Pacific near Monterey, Calif., holds tidal pools full of sea otters and forests of kelp. The tropics are modeled on the Indian Ocean, with coral reefs and a palm-clad shoreline.

The vast main tank from which these habitats appear to grow is alive with sharks, rays, bluefish, jacks, clouds of schooling fish such as mackerel, and territorial fish like grouper and wreckfish. There are some dangerous characters such as stone fish--a creature that looks like a rock and whose dorsal spine if stepped upon injects a venom that leaves a human 15 minutes to get to hospital; otherwise it's the undertaker.

The man whose task it is to keep the inmates happy is curator Mark Smith, a marine biologist who was born 700 km from the water at Wellington, in the Australian state of New South Wales. "I was 5 when I saw the sea for the first time," says Smith, "and I fell in love with it." Now 33, he set up Barcelona's aquarium before joining the Chermayeff group, where he heads a team of specialists in birds, mammals and invertebrates, plus technicians, electrical engineers, vets and even a pathologist.

The thousands of creatures they care for are from the wild, or from other aquariums and collectors around the world. Transporting them safely to Lisbon was tricky. "With some it was quite easy," says Smith. "For example, penguins are content travelling in a thing like a cat basket with ice on the floor. Obviously it's harder with fish. In one trip in March we brought a large collection of sharks and rays from Florida on a 747--along with 30 tons of water. We created small portable habitats using circular tanks with a circular current for them to swim against, and we asked the pilot to take off at a gradual angle, about 15 degrees, to reduce distress." When animals arrive they are given a bath to remove any parasites, a harder task than it sounds when the inmate is, say, a shark or a toothy barracuda.

In aquariums, as in oceans, animals eat each other. A week before Expo opened, residents around the site, invited in for a dress rehearsal, saw a 2-m tawny-nosed shark try to lunch on a cow-faced ray. A diver was sent in to break up the struggle, and the ray was rushed to the vet, but couldn't be saved. On the other hand, inmates have already started breeding. One of the most attractive arrivals is a newborn otter which travels about on its mother's belly as she swims on her back.

Feeding, says Smith, is like running a luxury restaurant. "We have to have all sorts of shellfish, clams, octopus, cuttlefish... For the puffins, murres and razorbills we import food from Iceland and the Netherlands, and our beautiful sea dragons need live shrimp from Germany. Eventually we will grow them ourselves."

The aquarium's habitats have not been plundered from the oceans. Although it is impossible to tell, the "rocks" and "reefs" were made by artists, as were the "crustaceans" that cling to them. An idea of the scale of the aquarium comes from the numbers of these "creatures," mass-produced from molds: 11,000 limpets and shells, 16,000 barnacles and 13,000 mussels.

For Chermayeff, building aquariums has become a one-stop-shopping business run by International Design for the Environment Associates (IDEA), an arm of Cambridge Seven Associates. IDEA produces aquariums, from feasibility studies to final stocked tanks, for a fixed price. In Lisbon, that figure was $65 million, IDEA teaming up with local builder Engil.

Although he has been building them for 30 years, Chermayeff isn't sick of aquariums. With Lisbon's, he says he will be happy if it gives people "a sense that the ocean is magnificent and moving, wonderfully affecting." That would be appropriate, given the host nation's history of ocean exploration, and the fact that one of its heroes, Vasco da Gama, set off to find a route to India exactly 500 years ago.

Chermayeff also hopes his aquariums "encourage the environmental ethic. At first they were exotica, like zoos, but now there's more to it, more of a feel for the whole ecology. It's a new view of the beast itself through good presentation." If that presentation means "suppressing" his architecture, that's fine. His goal for the building is strikingly simple: "To make amphibians of its visitors."

--With Reporting by Martha De La Cal /Lisbon and Daniel S. Levy /Cambridge