"Hey, little guys," says Chermayeff to the animals. "How are you today? Come here, come here…" The tone and delivery are unexpected. Chermayeff cuts a distinguished figure in a well-cut double-breasted suit. He has cultivated the high-forehead, swept-back hair look of the elderly Frank Lloyd Wright, has a deep, rich New England voice. He wears the kind of thick-rimmed spectacles beloved of architects of a certain generation. But Chermayeff, besides being a very successful product of the American East Coast and son of the famous Russian-born modernist pioneer Serge Chermayeff, happens to be a world authority on aquariums. The theme of Expo ’98 in Lisbon is the world’s oceans. The Oceans Pavilion is thus the lynchpin of the whole event. And Chermayeff, who has built all over the world, was the obvious choice to design it.
Set in a former dock where flying boats used to moor, it appears like – what? A moated fortress? No, the imagery is of course nautical. Floating on the water like a top-heavy galleon, it rises high to a mini-forest of white suspension masts. These hold up the dramatically projecting leaves of the glazed roof, under which otters and penguins splash and frolic in the sunlight, but their rigging deliberately evokes the sailing ships that used to sail past here on their voyages of discovery. This May is the 500th anniversary of Vasco da Gama’s epochal arrival in India. Hence the celebratory Expo with its aqueous theme.
The Oceans Pavilion is to be a permanent building once the Expo is over. So is the slightly sinister metal-clad grey hulk of the "Utopia Pavilion" – a giant auditorium a little further along the waterfront that looks like an abstract sculptor’s take on a shark’s head. This, by the giant American architectural practice SOM, turns out to have an unexpected and inspiring all-timber interior like a huge ship’s hull. The Oceans Pavilion will remain as Lisbon’s Oceanarium while the Utopia Pavilion, once its multi-media Expo show is over, will become a venue for concerts and stage spectaculars. Nearby is a new theatre. Office and apartment blocks are being built. The ambitious Portuguese Pavilion, by that nation’s best architect, Alvaro Siza, incorporates a ceremonial square beneath a vast swooping U-shaped concrete canopy – hung from its edges as if it was a sheet pegged out to dry. Framing a view of the sea beyond, this will act as the gateway to this all-new part of Lisbon. The area used to be a standard run-down dockside industrial zone. Now it will become virtually a self-contained, 60-hectare new town between the old city and the airport.
That is, if they ever finish it. With two and a half months to go before the opening date, the Expo looks way behind to me – and believe me, I’m used to desperate last-minute dashes to get places finished. The roads around the site are still hopelessly chaotic, some buildings seem scarcely half-built. As soon as paving and planting is put in, it is covered instantly with a thick layer of dust, or simply dug up again. "When it rains, it’s even worse," remarks one of Chermayeff’s assistants. "With the brown mud and the stones, it’s like working in chocolate ice-cream with chopped nuts in it." There was a lot of rain earlier this year. This is one reason why things got held up.
On the other hand, a graceful new $760m bridge – one of the longest in the world - over the Tagus estuary is complete and acts as a backdrop to the whole show. It effortlessly upstages the ugly new Vasco da Gama observation tower on the waterfront – which is like an upturned truss from a railway bridge, topped with that 1960s cliché, a revolving restaurant (it is meant to look like a ship’s mast, sail, and crow’s nest, but it doesn’t). A new railway and metro line is running, serving the Expo via a spectacular new station by the Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava. Imagine a modern gothic cathedral where the arches are white steel and the vaults are glass, and you get the idea behind Calatrava’s architecture.
All this activity is throwing dust over Chermayeff’s Ocean Pavilion, and he does not like it dulling the glitter of his glass and steel roof, settling in the crevices of his riven-limestone walls, coating the high-tech external staircases. Once inside, however, the assertive architecture vanishes completely: Chermayeff’s boyish love of wildlife means he wants nothing to distract you from the main event. Everything inside seems to be painted black, so focusing your attention on the huge clear acrylic walls of the aquarium – a foot thick, though you’d never know it. "It has four different habitats represented inside it, as well as in the outside corners," he explains. "Here’s the Tropics, here’s the North Atlantic, over there the Southern Ocean or Antarctic, and over there the Pacific. The four things come together inside and make the point that the world’s oceans are really one great ocean. Even though, of course, it’s a bit of poetic licence. Because the animals are all in one temperature, in one place."
From here, you move up to the open areas in the corners under the glass roof. The pool where sea otters float lazily on their backs, for instance, goes right down to the aquarium beneath, so you can also see them swimming underwater. The cleverness of Chermayeff’s design is that the animals in each corner habitat do not in fact mingle in the middle: huge invisible underwater windows separate diving penguins from predatory sharks, for instance. The experience is cleverly syncopated as you move from one panoramic window to a little one at a different angle, and so on. "The idea of all of this is that it’s not revealing of itself all at once. You don’t see everything exposed. You keep discovering new views and changing perspectives," Chermayeff notes.
We re-emerge blinking into the sunlight, already strong here even at the start of March. Visitors to the Ocean Pavilion will be streamed in and out on a double-decker bridge connecting across the dock. As they queue in the shade, they can gaze at the world’s biggest tiled mural on the side of the landside building with its shops and restaurant. Designed by Chermayeff’s graphic-designer brother Ivan, a fellow partner in the Cambridge, Massachusetts practice Cambridge Seven Associates, the mural merges computer-aided design with the ancient Portuguese craft of hand-made blue and white tiles. Close up, it appears to be entirely abstract. Stand back, and the forms of fish – here a shark, there a seahorse - appear. Each tile represents one pixel on a computer screen. It’s the kind of quiet design in-joke that Chermayeff enjoys.
But there is one thing he enjoys more. As we shake hands, he reveals he is preparing for the treat he gives himself just before the opening of any of his great aquariums: to don a diver’s aqualung and swim quietly among the the sometimes fearsome marine animals he has gathered there. Just for a few minutes, a human will becomes a water creature on display. Only his family, however, will get to see the architect of the Oceans Pavilion testing it out on behalf of the users.
