Oriental Crown

By staff reporter JIAO FENG

A people's national pavilion at the World Expo is expected to put their best foot forward in terms of aspirations, innovation and world view. That of the host country is always under particular pressure to be the most eye-catching and mind-blowing.

Giving a Global Gala an Eastern Face

 

Workers testing the lighting system for the “Oriental Footprint” exhibition in the National Hall. Photos by China Foto Press

"Our objective was that people could see this was the Chinese Pavilion at first glance, even from afar, said He Jingtang, chief of the pavilion's design team. He is president of the architectural school of South China University of Technology and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Chinese-ness is core to the design.

The Chinese Pavilion sits at the intersection of the east-west and north-south axes of the Expo site. It consists of three sections; the 69-meter-tall National Hall perches in the center, overlooking the 13-meter-tall building for provinces and autonomous regions, and the section shared by Taiwan, Macao and Hong Kong on its circumference.

Perched on four massive pillar-like structures on a nine-meter-high base, the square National Hall resembles a huge, multiple-layer roof with overhanging eaves giving it the shape of an inverted pyramid. This is an exaggerated rendition of the post and beam construction of an old-time mansion and an amplification of the interlocking dougong – a bracket system characteristic of traditional Chinese architecture. Dougong are the parts that join pillars to the roof, and provide increased support for the weight of the horizontal beams that span the vertical pillars. An assembly of dougong enables the structure, predominantly made of wood in old China, to be flexible enough to withstand earthquakes while sustaining little damage.