Man in the Community / Man & His Health

Man in the Community

The roof of the Man in the Community pavilion was a made up of stacked wooden polygons decreasing in size to form a slender, elegant pyramid. The wood used for this spectacular trellis came from the forests of Canada's Pacific Coast.

The spaces between these wooden beams were left open so that, when it rained, the drops fell from the roof into a pond in the center of the pavilion. A garden that extended beyond the outer walls of the pavilion surrounded the pond.

The first section of the pavilion was comprised of 7 exhibition halls that depicted different aspects of city life:

The first exhibit, entitled Citerama, was a cacophony of urban images and sound. The second, The Lonely Community, showed the "cages" in which city dwellers are often trapped, seperated by sex, age, class, even illness. (The visitor was symbolically "caged" by the creative use of mirror.) The third exhibit, The Electronic Community, illustrated the dangers in the onslaught of information in the computer age. The Workday Community used puppets to illustrate man's inherent aversion to progress.

The second section of the pavilion concentrated on solutions rather than problems:

Community on the March and The Interdependant Community showed the challenges that faced underdevelopped and/or emerging nations.

Urbanissimo was a cartoon presented in the final section of the pavilion. It showed how the city seduced the farmer with it's charms, with the alienation of nature as a consequence...

Man and His Health

The Man and His Health pavilion was adjacent to Man in the Community.

The core of the pavilion was Meditheatre which combined cinema and theatre to show achievements in modern medicine. Open heart surgery and caesarian birth were among the procedures presented.

There were 5 exhibit halls that surrounded Meditheatre. The world's major health problems, the adaptation of hospital services in the age of electronics and the freezing of human organs were among some of the topics discussed.

The Man in the Community and Man and his Health pavilions were, in my opinion, some of the most striking and beautiful at Expo 67.

The concept of using fallen rain water in the former remains as modern and innovative in 2006 as it was in 1967...

images: (1-5) naid.sppsr.ucla.edu/expo67/
(2-3) FOS Productions
"Meditheatre": alamedainfo.com