br An history of curiosity br The expositions found its

An history of curiosity
The expositions found its origin in two meaningful moments in world history. On the one hand was the exposition des beaux arts (the first regular exposition was the Salon des Artistes Français of 1673 in Paris), which sprang from the habit of showing paintings and other works of art at fairs. On the other hand, during the Enlightenment the most advanced nations began to exhibit recent products of industries (in 1756 and 1761 the London Society of Arts exhibited machines and industrial products to the public). Those sorts of exhibitions were still associated with a city, a group of artists or local manufacturers. As the industrial revolution grew and progressively involved an ever larger number of nations and people, the structure and the spirit of the exhibitions drastically changed, until they became Universal Expositions. The Expo\'s tradition starts, in fact, precisely in the middle of the nineteenth century, during which d-cycloserine nations like France, Belgium and Great-Britain were in the fullness of their Industrial Revolution phase. The world exhibitions were primarily the product of the age of industrialization. The aim of the first World Expo was to show all sorts of produce, from all nations on the planet. That purpose is the reason “the director-general of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, Raymond Le Play, openly talked of the ‘encyclopédie\', a complete record of human knowledge, through all lands and all times, as being his model. These visionaries attempt to accomplish this by erecting a vast building, and inviting all nations, with their colonial possessions, to fill it with objects. Perhaps this offers us the clearest definition of what an exposition is: it is an attempt to depict the world through a vast display of produce” (Greenhalgh, 1993 p. 29). As Paul Greenhalgh pointed out in his account, the demand at the rise of the expos for cultural information must be related to the scarcity of museums throughout Europe. The “grand museums we now casually accept as being part of our institutional life, given a small number of exceptions, were not yet in place. And along with the absence of museums, went the absence of classification systems we now treat as natural, the absence of hoards of museum workers we now identify as an entire profession, the absence of a public who understood how to view objects in an institutionalized environment, and, most significantly, an absence of an understanding of what was not possible.”
History of Expos
On May 3rd, 1851, with these words the young British queen Victoria described to her uncle, the King of Belgium, the opening day of the “Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations,” held at Hyde Park in London. The Great Exhibition was the first such dramatic event of its kind up to that time. With the passage of time such events went under several titles, including “Exposition Universelles,” “International Exhibition,” World\'s Fair, or Trade Fair, depending on the host country. However, the 1851 London\'s Great Exhibition is without doubt considered the first world Expo. After the example and the success of the first Expo, other nations quickly followed the British example and this new typology of event was subsequently hosted for the first time in cities like Dublin (1853), Paris (1855), New York (1853/4), Moscow (1872), Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876) and so on, spreading from Europe to the United States and from Australia to Asia. Another remarkable occurrence followed the first Expos. As the exhibitors were growing in number and in the volume of objects Membranes presented to public, the strategy of having a single building in which the entire event was organized appeared to be increasingly insufficient. After initial attempts to annex smaller buildings to the main hall, the creation of several (and different) buildings sponsored by private and governmental entities seemed to offer the most feasible solution. As Paul Greenhalgh explains, the first “fully-fledged pavilion-style exposition was the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, followed in 1878 by Paris”.