Design: No Knocks for Knoxville

A World's Fair that exudes an air of friendly intimacy

Some great international expositions will always be remembered affectionately for their cultural flair and technical innovations. Others, particularly some recent, much ballyhooed U.S. fairs, have left only debts and deserted weed fields. Chances are good, however, that no one will knock the Knoxville fair, which opens this week and closes in October.

This hope is based on the ground's advantageous valley location in the heart of the city, and the decision of smart planners to design the fair as a fair rather than a permanent mausoleum of grandiose ambitions. About half of its buildings are temporary and can be dismantled and their parts sold when the fair closes. Even the trees are planted in wire baskets for possible later transplanting. Yet none of this impermanence detracts from the fun, let alone the ingenious beautification of a site that was a messy, abandoned railroad yard when groundbreaking started a little more than two years ago.

The Knoxville International Energy Exposition is not a great and important fair like the great and important World's Fairs. The first of these was held in 1851 in London, where 14,000 exhibitors displayed the wonders of a new industrial age. The greatest wonder of all was the Crystal Palace. Designed by Joseph Paxton, the palace introduced a new prefabricated architecture of glass, iron and wood.

The Paris World's Fair of 1889 produced another herald of modern architectural engineering, Gustave Eiffel's 1,010-ft. tower. Except for the first Ferris wheel, the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 did not really advance structural engineering. But it was a dream of what the American city might be. Designed under the direction of Architect Daniel Burnham and Landscape Architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who also created New York's Central Park, it helped inspire the monumental heart of Washington, D.C., as well as public buildings from coast to coast.

Later World's Fairs—St. Louis (1904), San Francisco (1915), Chicago (1933-34), New York (1939-40 and 1964-65), Brussels (1958), Montreal (1967) and Osaka, Japan (1970)—never achieved the cultural and architectural importance of those early ones. Both New York fairs were gaudy happenings that turned architecture into a tool of advertising. The 1964-65 New York fair has left bizarre ghosts of its architectural arrogance, such as the Unisphere and the New York State Pavilion. Montreal's Expo 67, in contrast, leaves a pleasant memory of some fine buildings and a colorful environment inspired by the most beautiful fair in this century—the Swiss National Exposition at Lausanne in 1964. Lausanne, a national fair, was an exemplary work of art, excitingly varied and yet harmonious.

Knoxville's energy fair does not pretend to be in the same big league with the so-called universal expositions, which are classified by the Bureau of International Expositions, established in Paris in 1928. Smaller fairs, such as Knoxville's or the proposed 1984 fair in New Orleans, are categorized as "specialized" expositions and are devoted to one major theme. Exhibitors usually share large halls.