All's Fair

The opening of the Brussels World's Fair was only 24 hours away, and, despite seven years of planning and 16 months of frenetic construction, the 470-acre showcase was still a littered building site. "We'll never make it," muttered a French official--and in fact the French (along with the Italians, Brazilians, the Arabs, Moroccans, Tunisians and Spaniards) were not ready on opening day. In the U.S. pavilion one entire exhibit was torn out for being unready. In most pavilions there were similar last-minute crises. But after workmen had performed a herculean overnight cleanup job, Belgium's tall, shy King Baudouin, 27, formally opened the first world's fair anywhere since New York's in 1939. Under grey skies and an umbrella of 50 Belgian air force jets, the bespectacled Baudouin proclaimed in French and Flemish: "The aim of this World's Fair is to create an atmosphere of understanding and peace."

Mixed Notices. With these hopeful words out of the way, the men of 42 nations hustled back to their pavilions and to the reality of today's world. The Brussels fair, however noble the aims and claims of its participants, has become a propaganda and prestige battleground in the cold war. The chief contestants: the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. From last week's opening until the closing next Oct. 19, an estimated 35 million visitors are expected.

Within minutes of the opening, most of the 160,000 first-day visitors tried to descend on the U.S. and Russian pavilions. (In the crush, a Belgian guard at the U.S. pavilion was pushed through a plate-glass window, hospitalized.) Both pavilions got mixed notices. There was almost universal agreement that in architectural beauty Edward Stone's circular U.S. pavilion of steel and gold aluminum (TIME, March 31) surpassed Russia's rectangle of frosted glass and steel, though the Soviet building was an improvement on Russia's usual grim monoliths. Those who think that fairs should be fun preferred the U.S. exhibit. But for all its air of sophistication and relaxation, the candor with which American life is portrayed, the humor displayed in the drawings of Cartoonist Saul Steinberg, some Europeans thought the U.S. exhibit "empty-looking" and something of a hodgepodge. Many criticized the "heavy propaganda" and the ponderous predominance of machinery in the Soviet pavilion, but felt that the Russians provided more to study.

Wolves & Mink. The big drawing cards at the outset: for Russia--models of the Sputniks. For the U.S.--a continuous parade of European fashion models, decked out in American-made bathing suits, $15 chemises or $7,500 mink coats. Almost unnoticed in the wolf-whistling stampede toward the fashion models: the U.S. atomic energy exhibit. Other American attention-getters: the "Circarama," a 15-minute movie of America the Beautiful projected on a 360DEG screen; the IBM 305 Ramac, which produces answers in ten languages in ten seconds; a set of U.S. voting machines. The pavilion's transplanted "corner drug store" and restaurant sold hot dogs, hamburgers, milk shakes at a brisk rate, chiefly to Americans.

In contrast to the heavy-handed Soviet exhibit, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Yugoslavs contributed some of the fair's most striking displays, with a high standard of workmanship and design--as if in echo of the esthetic free world to which they once belonged.

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