Expo 2010 Shanghai was the most ambitious world exposition to date with more than 70 million visitors. It boasted an unprecedented collection of pavilions that represented the ambitions of individual nations as well a collective vision for cities in the new millennium. Together, the buildings constitute a cross section of contemporary trends in architecture, showcasing a full spectrum of cutting edge technology, building materials, and design sensibilities. This book captures this extraordinary architectural event with the eloquent and probing photography of Nic Lehoux. The thorough documentation includes detailed photographic accounts of the various architectural features and the public spaces and landscapes that bind them into a total and unique environment. The accompanying essay situates the event in a long standing tradition of world expositions while underscoring the particular geographic, cultural, and political aspects of the Chinese context that shape the Shanghai Expo and its thematic orientation.

• Text by Rodolphe el-Khoury & Andrew Payne
• Photography by Nic Lehoux
• Concept and Compilation by Oscar Riera Ojeda

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Contributors Biographies

Rodolphe el-Khoury is Dean of the Miami University School of Architecture. He was Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto, Head of Architecture at California College of the Arts, and associate professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design. El-Khoury was trained as a historian and an architect; he continues to divide his time between scholarship and practice with Khoury Levit Fong. His books on eighteenth-century European architecture include The Little House, an Architectural Seduction, and See Through Ledoux; Architecture, Theatre and the Pursuit of Transparency. Books on contemporary architecture and urbanism include Monolithic Architecture, Architecture in Fashion, and States of Architecture in the Twenty-first Century: New Directions from the Shanghai Expo.

Andrew Payne is a senior lecturer in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, where he also teaches in the Literary Studies Program. His articles on architecture, art, and contemporary culture have appeared in publications like the Harvard Design Magazine, Praxis, Public, and Parachute. He is also the author of numerous monograph and catalog essays on various contemporary artists and architects. He is currently working on two book manuscripts. The first, Thales or Some Other: The Intellectual and Cultural Legacies of Construction, examines the significance of a single term, construction, within the modernization of intellectual and cultural disciplines. He is also co-authoring a second book manuscript with Rodolphe el-Khoury, Distributions of the Sensible: Architecture, The Reorganization of Sense Experience, and the Meaning of Modernity. The book examines the successive recalibrations of the relationship between sense experience and cognition in architectural theory and practice from the seventeenth century to the present.

Nic Lehoux is a Canadian architectural photographer who works with architects that push the boundaries of design of the built environment. Nic is regularly commissioned to document significant buildings around the world with his unique eye, lighting, and sense of composition. His images are frequently published in the international architectural press. His professional work puts a particular emphasis on incorporating people within tightly-composed architectural photographs. Nic is influenced by the concept of the “decisive moment” – popularized by Henry Cartier-Bresson – which he adapts to the rigors of architectural photography. His images therefore serve as a reflection on the interaction of people with the built environment.