At the center was the skeleton of a traditional Kazakh yurt build out of graphene rods. The architect Asif Khan used the material to create an amazing installation. As at Shanghai and Milan, Britain built its Astana pavilion around a single concept the UK’s offering focused on technology made possible by the super-material known as graphene, for which a University of Manchester team won a Nobel Prize in 2010. Austria, which had a good story to tell about the country’s use of renewable energy, decided to relegate the text to the edge and rather to focus on building an association between their country and fun by building their entire pavilion around brightly colored human-powered contraptions that variously honked, squeaked, and lit up when visitors pedaled, pulled, or pushed. Some countries broke from the pack: Austria, Britain, and Japan did best. ![]() The best journey-to-a-future-city film was in the Chinese pavilion, where a magical phoenix showed a cave-girl the future of civilization before resurrecting her frozen super model mother. Not all the slogans were credible: is Pakistan really ‘magnificent, resplendent’ to anyone but its own citizens? Similarly not all overlapping ideas were created equal: the best-looking solar concept car was in the French Pavilion, where the Peugeot pipped Germany’s BMW. The boldest idea-seen in the Kazakh and Chinese pavilions-was for a space-based solar energy collector which will zap beams of power down to earth. Many exhibits presented variations of the same idea: upgraded solar panels were ubiquitous windmills and waterwheels spun cross sections of biomass furnaces winked in every corner and ingenious, wave energy devices abounded: there was an entire gallery of competing wave energy designs in the Kazakh pavilion solar aircraft featured in the UAE, South Korea, Czech, and Slovak pavilions, while ‘infinity mirrors’ were part of Germany, Israel, and Spain. There were many takes on the idea of collaboration, which the UAE articulated as ‘the energy we create together.’ There was a ‘Land of Energy’ (Azerbaijan), a ‘Center of Energy’ (Turkey), and ‘Land of Light: Energy for All’ (Algeria). ![]() After a few hours at the expo, the tag lines seemed to merge. The show’s theme meant that the content of many pavilions overlapped.
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