The artist and architect Melvin Charney (b. 1935) was invited in 1966 to enter the competition for the Canadian Pavilion for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan. Charney, working in collaboration with architect Harry Parnass and engineers Janos Baracs and Marcel Pageau, proposed a “self-erection exhibit system.” The system applied the recent plug-in architecture theories of the British architect Cedric Price, the Archigram group and the Japanese Metabolists and was based on ready-made, mass-produced and interchangeable components that could be shipped and constructed on site, and later dismantled and re-used. Cranes used to erect the pavilion would remain to form part of the structure and could then be used to change and reassemble the exhibition enclosures, which were made from shipping containers. As Charney explained it, the pavilion comprised both its physical equipment and the process of its construction: “the assembly of the crane modules, the swinging of the booms, the taut cables and the enclosures are ‘scaffolding’ for the participation of people in the light, sound and movement of an exhibit.”1 The project was widely published, notably by Reyner Banham in his book Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, and became well known throughout the world despite having failed to win the competition, which was awarded to Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey.