PAVILIONS

SPAIN has the most satisfying pavilion of all: a well-wrought building where cool, shadowy interiors lead to bright, fountained courtyards, an art gallery where Goya and Velazquez hang cheek by jowl with Miro and Picasso. With a stageful of vibrant flamenco gypsies and a choice of fine restaurants touting "eels from the River Tagus" and "mushrooms from the caves of Segovia," Spain outclasses most other foreign and state pavilions, many of which offer nothing more remarkable than displays of consumer goods and models of jute mills.

VATICAN. The Pietaa, bathed in blue light, is a major attraction, though somewhat diminished by the cold setting and a crowd-hustling moving sidewalk. Cognoscenti who have seen Michelangelo's masterpiece glowing like old ivory in the natural light of St. Peter's might be wise to remember it that way.

JOHNSON'S WAX is polishing its image with a short, noncommercial film, To Be Alive!, which has drawn extravagant praise from cinema buffs and deserves every bit of it.

GENERAL ELECTRIC has built itself an enormous drum. The outer rim houses six theaters that revolve around a series of stages showing American home life (appliance division) at 20-year intervals from the turn of the century to the present day. Moving, talking, life-size Disney dummies inhabit the sets, which unintentionally plug nonprogress by going from a scene that recalls the cozy charms of the icebox, coal stove, gaslight era to one that spells out only the cool convenience of a modern electric home.

IBM, on the other hand, makes you glad that you live in 1964. Its wondrously wayout building is nothing more than a monstrous egg perched atop a modern steel structure. The ingenious People Wall lifts you hydraulically to the egg's underbelly, where huge bomb-bay doors open and let you in.

COCA-COLA has a walk-through exhibition that lets you wander down a street in Hong Kong, past the Taj Mahal, up into the Alps, through a Cambodian rain forest, and onto the deck of a cruise ship off Rio.

PEPSI-COLA'S UNICEF exhibit features an indoor boat ride through a wonderland of Disney dolls, representing children of every country and culture singing and dancing, winking and blinking to a mad little tune called It's a Small World. This particular ride is a must for all children, but attendance records suggest that grownups are willing to pay 95-c- to see it too.

PROTESTANT AND ORTHODOX CENTER has the controversial film Parable, which shows the crucifixion of a clown in whiteface. The controversy seems to be between those who feel the film is art and those who think it's sacrilege. Most people probably know already which side they're likely to be on. If not, there's one way to find out.

GENERAL MOTORS' Futurama suffers in comparison with its famed 1939 exhibit. The reason perhaps is that the future has come upon us so hard and so fast that the once-incredible magic of what's next now seems all too believable.

FORD re-creates the past with immense prehistoric monsters (bodies by Disney) that clash in battle and sound like dueling trailer trucks. Presumably, Ford mechanics sneak in at night to hammer out the dents on the dinosaurs. There is also a colony of cartoon-caricatured cavemen, all looking like early ancestors of the boy on the cover of Mad Magazine.

PARKER PEN has mechanized the pen-pal business. An IBM machine, stuffed with 65,000 names gathered the world over, matches ages and hobbies in minutes. Those interested can correspond with French spelunkers, Australian fur farmers or Arabian schoolboys.

ILLINOIS has built a handsome native-brick structure to house a Lincoln library and a display of Lincoln manuscripts, both excellent. The stark simplicity of the building was probably dictated less by taste than by the vast cost of its star boarder, a steel-boned, electronic-nerved mechanical Lincoln that stands up, adjusts its coattails, clears its throat and delivers six excerpts from Abe's speeches on liberty with a nasal Midwestern twang.

NEW YORK STATE'S gaudy Tent of Tomorrow, big as a football field, offers continuous amateur entertainment that makes the girders ring with the sounds of drum and bugle corps and square-dance calls.

NEW YORK CITY won't let you walk on it, but you can ride around in a simulated helicopter trip and look at a complete scale model of the five boroughs (the Empire State Building is 15 in. tall). The model will be used by city planners after the fair, meanwhile the modelmakers frantically try to keep up with the real-life builders, tearing out tiny rows of brownstones to slap in new office blocks.

THE BELGIAN VILLAGE gets an A for architecture--a delightful replica of a Flemish town--but bad marks for allowing pizza parlors and egg-roll stands to compete with colorful shops selling crepes suzette, Belgian cookies, lace and crystal.

JAPAN displays its ancient arts and modern crafts, consumer products and heavy industrial machines in an intricate maze of buildings. Its best attraction is an outdoor demonstration of samurai dueling, Kabuki players and judo experts, as well as the tea-ceremony performance, where the ancient disciplines are enacted by pretty Japanese hostesses in gorgeous, drip-dry kimonos.

Many of these pavilions have long waiting lines during the day, and an hour standing in the sun is not the best way to enjoy the fair. Try G.M., G.E., Ford, IBM, or Johnson's Wax in the evening hours; even if the lines are no shorter, at least the wait is cooler.

Meanwhile West Virginia puts on a demonstration of glass blowing: Montana has a trainload of Western collector's items, including an invitation to a hanging, Calamity Jane's thundermug and Buffalo Bill's silver-handled toothbrush. Alaska has brought in Chilkat Indians to custom-carve totem poles (at $100 a running foot). General Cigar offers a magic show, Indonesia demonstrates shadow puppets, Oregon runs a lumberjack carnival, Polynesia sells chunks of fresh sugar cane, Sinclair Oil has a forest of dinosaurs, and the Scott pavilion boasts the best rest rooms of all, with a diaper-changing room for harried mothers.

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