In planning for Expo ’70 officials from the Department of External Affairs advised James Maccormick, again pavilion architect, that the design should reinforce Australia’s geographic location in the Asia Pacific and ‘strike a chord of sympathy in the audience by showing that certain values of the Japanese, held to be good, are also respected and striven for in Australia’.26 This was to be primarily achieved through ‘an architecturally imaginative and aesthetically pleasing building’.27 Media reports of Expo ’67 concentrate on the innovation of the Expo sound chairs. Those for Expo ’70 focus on the pavilion design, its main body suspended from a 128-foot high cantilever arm dubbed the ‘sky-hook’, fulfilling the expectation of monumental feature architecture in Expo pavilions28 (Figure 5).
Beyond this attention-grabbing element, the pavilion and its contents were framed around a complex symbolic program that sought to create a greater respect for Australia among the Japanese. A briefing paper from External Affairs informed Maccormick, ‘it is the general Japanese attitude that, although they understand other countries, the foreigner does not understand Japan’.29 Changing this perception for Australia strongly influenced Maccormick’s design in both its iconography and at the level of abstraction.
Maccormick attempted an ‘East–West’ approach to design, aiming to reflect both Japanese reverence for nature and Australia’s technical capacity, arguing that such a balance of opposing elements was consistent with principles of ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’, which he interpreted as broadly Asian rather than specifically Taoist in derivation.30 He visited Japan in 1967 in preparation for Osaka, noting elements of Japanese architecture that he later integrated into the pavilion design to demonstrate Australian knowledge and understanding of Japanese culture. The design included an underground section accessed through a pedestrian tunnel inspired by the Japanese preference for aspects of a building to be revealed with an element of surprise.31 The floating form of the pavilion roof was a stylised lotus shape, suggesting the transcendence of gravity in sympathy with what Maccormick regarded as the Japanese emphasis on ‘control of their physical environment’.32 Outside such attempts at cross-cultural design the Australian Pavilion aimed to communicate the nation’s technical and industrial capacity, External Affairs stressing the need to ‘make the Japanese people realise that our industries are expanding and extremely important to our future even though we can provide food and raw materials’.33
In the early planning for Osaka there was strong debate over whether Australia’s primary or secondary industry should be promoted due to the greater economic importance of trade in primary products with Japan. Some called for the Osaka exhibit to be themed around Australia’s mineral resources, stressing how they had fueled Western industrial development.34 Maccormick’s design reports reveal others warning it was ‘not desirable politically to place undue emphasis on raw materials’, believing the pavilion design should defray the developing perception of Australia as the ‘quarry of Asia’.35 Frustrated by the simplicity of this discussion, Maccormick argued that diverse messages could be contained in the one design, the cantilever arm reflecting Australia’s exploitation of its minerals for inventive design and manufacturing.36 Similarly, he saw the underground section of the pavilion as suggesting mining activity while demonstrating architectural sophistication, enthusing ‘no other country at either Brussels in 1956 or Montreal in 1967 ever conceived putting its exhibition space underground’.37