Technological Failure at the 1900 Exposition Universelle

           Like many Paris fairs before it, the 1900 exhibition hoped to showcase the modernity of Paris through technological innovations installed in both the fair grounds and the city itself.  Although its immediate predecessor, the 1889 Exposition, demonstrated the ingenuity of French engineering with the construction of the largest (Galerie des Machines) and tallest (Eiffel Tower) buildings in the world, the 1900 Exposition largely aimed to demonstrate French technological improvements to the social sphere, particularly in urban infrastructure.

            Improvements to transportation logistics were a major Parisian contribution to the exhibition, particularly with the opening of the underground Metro several months into the exhibition on July 19th, 1900.  This technological advance was greeted with consumer and critical enthusiasm, and treated as the "ultimate symbol of the new means of transport" and even tied to "France's civilizing mission" as an "agent of moral and material progress." (Soppelsa 282) Hoping to preemptively alleviate the traffic congestion of the 1878 and 1889 expositions, Parisian engineers additionally constructed twenty new streetcar lines, installed a new bus system, added numerous trains to extant lines,  and opened a new train station.  (Soppelsa 280) A British guide to the exposition stresses that these advancements had been anticipated in the layout and design of the fair. The gateway, he notes, stood over 45 meters, and through its fifty-eight passages was capable of admitting almost sixty thousand guests per hour. (xxi) 3,152 electric lights illuminated the gate's facade, which was bedecked with statues symbolizing labor and electricity.  Electric lighting was also installed throughout the exposition to illuminate nighttime events, although its installation was not complete for several months into the fair.

Paris Metro Under Construction

            Of the eighteen departments at the fair, twelve were dedicated to particular national products, branches of the French military, and the general fields of "Mechanics," "Electricity," and "Civil Engineering."  Additionally,  the two categories of "Colonization" and "Social Economy" suggest a technological planning of the social sphere and indicate a status as particularly French accomplishments.  
                   Where its predecessors succeeded, however, the 1900 Exposition's displays of technological innovation experienced catastrophic failure. Although they may have demonstrated the newness of Parisian transportation infrastructure, their many failures revealed a contradictory lack of resiliency and sustainability.

            Parisian transportation infrastructure was struck with a seemingly unending barrage of minor accidents, electrocutions, and massive delays. The Metro was afflicted with an accident on its first day of operation, when an iron bar left on the tracks disabled a train and caused numerous delays. The additional passenger trains, despite the hope that they would speed transport, caused hours of congestion-related delay in the Parisian train stations. Exposition infrastructure likewise proved extremely dangerous, with thousands of workers dying in the process of construction and several guests perishing after being thrown into the Seine by two collapsing footbridges. Soppelsa argues that rather than showcase progress, these tiny, persistent disasters were imagined as a constant "culture of risk" that now plagued modernized Paris.

Foreign Pavilion Under Construction

            Despite these setbacks, exposition organizers were able to prevent their greatest fear- an urban fire- by installing water cisterns underneath the exhibition buildings. Any fires that caught, caused either by guests or the flawed electrical lighting systems, were swiftly extinguished. However, the demands of the cooling systems for the transportation machinery, electrical plants, cisterns, and exhibition displays, combined with a heat wave that summer, exhausted the municipal water system. Constantly safeguarding against the risk of fire, officials decided to augment the water supply with water straight from the Seine. This resulted in a highly visible and olfactory disaster: the draining of the Seine to create a "slow-moving  'blackened sludge'" that turned over decaying substances from the bottom in an infectious, roiling mass. Methods of sewage disposal were likewise overwhelmed, and the waste floated down the Seine to contaminate the water supply of downstream towns. Tragically, Parisians still consumed this water, which caused a typhoid epidemic that killed thousands of Parisian citizens.

The Seine, before the sewage overflow.

            Despite the efforts of the Exposition organizers, rushed construction and unexpected contingencies led to constant accidents, occasionally with fatalities. The environmental pressures of the Exposition overwhelmed Parisian infrastructure and caused highly visible and pathological failures. These twin dilemmas contradicted the exposition ideal of improvement to social technology, and were touted by political opponents of the current administration and thus immortalized as indictments of the extant regime. Thus, the 1900 Exposition paradoxically became known for technological failure.

                        

Map of the 1900 Exposition

What are the ideals for the architecture of a World’s Fair, where the hosting country has an opportunity to announce its technological ability and national character to the world? Hitchcock's 1936 review Exposition Architecture offers some categories for success: he advocates deceptively simple criteria such as a "well-ordered overall plan," application of construction programs on a large scale previously "incapable of being realized," and, taking "full advantage of architectural possibilities inherent in metal, glass and plaster." The previous Expositions Universelles held in Paris attract his attention, and he looks with favor on the "cold but well-proportioned Neo-Grec style" of the Paris 1855 exposition building, the "festive and appropriate treatment" Eiffel gave to the long metal gallery of Paris in 1878, built in relation to the "magnificent city-planning schemes of the eighteenth century," and other fairs that, on a scale small or large, achieve an excellent harmony in decoration and layout. Notably, however, the 1925 exposition fails in his eyes, as its decorative program overwhelms its few quality contributions in small scale architecture.  

          This short demonstration of priorities illustrates the challenge of adequately measuring the success of a fair’s total architectural environment in cases where, though it may lack a central feature, improvements to a city are judged to be a representative of social and technological advancement. This in particular was the strength of the 1900 Paris Exhibition, whose architectural contributions were restricted to the construction of two beaux-arts pavilions and the Alexander bridge. (43 Campbell)

The 1900 Paris Exposition spanned a massive area of land compared to earlier exhibitions. Pushing well past the Champ de Mars landscape still featuring the 1889 Eiffel Tower, the 1900 Exposition pushed down the Seine into the Esplanade des Invalides, installed a new bridge to cross the Seine and erect a plaza of fine arts, and finally bedecked this main artery with national pavilions and a reconstruction of old France. Finally, the Trocadero plaza, formerly preserved a park and rest area, was built up into a series of individual national displays of the colonies of European nations that hoped to demonstrate the social success of the colonial enterprise by providing unique stereotyped cultural experiences. This construction project was largely unified by an overhaul to the extant architecture by means of installing Neo-classical facades on the numerous exhibition halls on each plaza.

Palace of Various Industries

 In the Galerie des Machines, an entirely new decorative rotunda was built in the center of its massive space, blocking the view of arches and connections in the iron structure and demonstrating a complete disregard for materially determined decoration in Paris at the time. Likewise, the1900 Paris exposition is known for the introduction of the art nouveau style in fashion, architecture, and consumer goods, and was a predominant style unifying purchasable goods among French and other European exhibitions throughout the fair. This most notably occurred in the Pavilion of Art Nouveau by Siegfried Bing, which displayed interior furniture, interior décor, and external architecture in a coherent presentation of the art nouveau style. Photographs from the 1900 exposition give, on the whole, a strong impression of a unity of imposing external design.

These total decorative environment encompassing the exposition was mixed with the fair’s contemporary focus on social technology, such as the colonial projects mentioned above and the new electric and transportation systems discussed in the next entry. The fair’s most iconic buildings integrate an experience of decorative forms saturated with electric power, as in the case of the Porte Monumental and the Palace of Illusions. The Porte Monumental, adoring the North Eastern entrance to the fair ground, is loosely considered an art nouveau structure; its sweeping, arched interior was adorned with minarets of uncertain origin (“Hindu, Meican, even Siamese art” writes a confused Campbell p 44), decorated in turn with a “kind of classic rose,” at the heart of which was an electric light. Thousands of these organic forms marked the cresting structure. 

The Palace of Illusions was a popular attraction lined with glass panels and building on the use of mirrors to enlarge space throughout the city of Paris. It too is representative of 1900's numerous efforts to merge technological innovations in glass, decorative materials, and new social technologies with architectural and urban paradigms.   

The Palace of Illusions was sponsored by the company Saint-Gobain, responsible for 90% of the world's mirrors at that time, to demonstrate their new capacity for making clear mirrors in broad sheets that could be assembled to span the length of walls. Eugene Herard's architectural program the six walls of the hexagonal structure to give the "illusion of hundreds of halls extending endlessly in all directions." The walls were separated by six Corinthian columns and supported by six arches lit with three thousand electric bulbs, thus combining classical reference with explicit overtures to modern luxury and convenience. It was found on the first campus of the exposition, in close proximity to the Palace of Diverse Industries (also bedecked with a thousand clusters of electric lights Campbell 44) and to the entrance to the fair.

            While the 1900 Exposition Universelle lacked the ostentatious architectural displays of previous exhibitions: it pushes no limits in the size or capacity of architecture, or in the possibilities of architectural materials. However, through the use of decorative programs and electric lighting, it did convert the exhibition grounds into a unified image of technological and social advancement.