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The French Exposition Universelle of 1867

By Xinyi Ding, Ke Li, Tahel Singer

Context of 1867 Exposition

Paris in the 1860s was a marvel

Context & History:

French

  • The 1862 London World Expo did not turn a profit like the inaugural World Expo in London in 1851, nor could it replace the status of the Crystal Palace Exhibition in people's minds.

  • Seven years after the first World Expo in France, Napoleon decided that the French people could and should prove that Britain is not the only country capable of showcasing its industrial and artistic talent resources, and they could and should surpass their ancient rivals once again.
  • The combination of imperial will and geometric spirit reshaped Paris, demolishing old slums and creating broad streets and extensive parks.

  • The 1860s saw the advent of modern infrastructure in Paris with new gas, water, and sewerage systems.

  • New businesses thrived in the renovated city; Les Halles food market and several department stores, like Le Printemps and La Samaritaine, were established.

  • New train stations and railway lines connected Paris with the expanding network, marking the beginnings of modern transportation.

  • The rise of banks such as Credit Lyonnais and Société Générale indicated the economic growth of France.

  • Paris in the 1860s was a hub of art and knowledge, with French painters gaining worldwide respect and recognition.

The Exposition Universelle in 1867

Exhibition

General Intro

  • This World Expo was the "Festival of Paris" and achieved the pinnacle of glory for the Second French Empire (1852-1870).

  • A total of 41 countries participated with 5026 exhibits; from April 1st to January 3rd, during the six-month period, it attracted over one million people who purchased tickets to visit.

  • The elliptical pavilion built for this World Expo is a massive reinforced concrete structure, measuring 490 meters in length and 380 meters in width. It covers an area of 17 hectares and took two years to construct with the efforts of 2600 workers.

The Universal Ellipse: Palais du Champ de Mars

The Universal Ellipse

In order to better organize the exhibits and participating countries, the organizers carefully designed the layout of the pavilion, organically combining the participating countries (regions) and exhibit categories (themes) together.

The first is formed by concentric zones, which will house similar products of all nations; the second, of radiating sections, each one given over to a particular nation.

In this way, visitors can tour exhibits of a specific country along the vertical direction, and compare similar exhibits from different countries around the same circular loop.

Floor Plan of the Palace

The Palace design represents a thoughtful effort to categorize a wide range of ingenious products.

Layout of the Palace

  • Since the first World Expo held in London in 1851, the guiding principle has been to showcase products based on countries/regions. Within their allocated space, countries are free to display whatever they wish.

  • However, in the 1867 Palais du Champ de Mars, a first attempt integrated nations and products into a unified system, symbolizing a philosophy in architecture that reflects human achievements.

Galerie des Machines

THE OUTER CIRCLE: POWER AND IRON

The outer circle of the Palais du Champ de Mars represented the reality of 19th-century Europe, hosting impressive machines and inventions.

A noteworthy example was the US, which stood out with exhibits such as the telegraph supervised by Samuel FB Morse.

Categorized Exhibits

THE INNER CIRCLE

The classification system recognized ten fundamental divisions of human endeavor and further divided into classes, or subgroups, such as works of art, ndustrial products, and raw

The two-part classification system prevented chaos and facilitated exhibit organization. France, being the host, received the most space, followed by Britain, Prussia and north Germany, Austria, Belgium, the US, and Russia, reflecting their status in French governmental esteem.

Euvres d'Art

THE ARTS OF THE FIRST CIRCLE

Although the 1867 Expo was supposed to focus on industrial arts, fine arts were still held in the highest regard. Even the most amazing machines seemed to have a layer of grime compared to the elegance of fine arts. Beside the carefully polished canvas of painters, metal monsters like the Krupp cannon seemed like bullies strutting around a iron factory.

Musée de L'Historie du Travail

LABOR UNITES ALL

In the innermost oval, surrounding the open-air garden and the central pavilion, visitors saw a novel display: the Gallery of Labor History. This was another attempt by the Second Empire to win the hearts of the working people by giving dignity to labor. The Labor History Gallery provided archaeological proof for the upliftment of 'ordinary people'."

Jardin Central avec Poids, Mesures et Monnaies

The exhibition, presenting various global currency and measurement systems, aimed to inspire the creation of international standards and spark thoughts among visitors on the connecting ideas and systems behind diverse global items.

THE TRUE INTERNATIONALISM

Prototype design

Take a walk in Paris Exhibition 1867!

PrototypeDesign

Panoramic Display

Panoramic Display

  • Panaroma projection

  • High-resolution steoro-images

  • Surround sound system

Interactive Device

Light from the pointer

Select and interact with the interactive elements.

Press button

Press to discover details.

Design elements

  • What we have
  • Stereo-images taken from the Universal Exhibition.
  • Meta-data including country, category, ect.
  • Some really interesting knowledge which will surely attract the visitors.

  • What we want to create
  • An emmersive experience which can lead the visitors back to 1867, allowing free exploration of the amazing exhibition.

Design elements

Create a sense of 1867!

We want to attract the attention and evoke the atmosphere of 1867 from the first glance by:

  • Palace Overview
  • Interactive Figures
  • Background Music
  • La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein

Create a sense of 1867!

How should we arrange the elements?

  • "Most visitors apparently wandered among the wonders of the park without too much thought for deeper meanings. One could amble contentedly from a rustic American one-room schoolhouse — representative of the ideal of free education for everybody — to the replica of the Tunisian "Bardo of the Bey" (king's palace),7 pass through the underground grottoes of the aquarium, then relax beneath an ornate kiosk with its novel zinc roofing, iron railings, and curiously carved wood."

How should we arrange the element?

  • "In the Palais du Champ de Mars in 1867, however, the first effort was made to integrate these two organizing principals — nations and products — into one coherent system. As such as system, it represents more than a convenient arrangement of products. It is a philosophy, realized in architectural space, concerning the nature and purpose of human achievement."

Metadata - Region

The original data is labelled with regions, representing the displaying place in the exhibition.

We have 1023 objects in total, and 290 of them has ‘Country/Section’ label.

Excluding those without specific geo location (for example, the central garden), we get the regional distribution of each area and plot the world map based on the regional distributions. (For those labelled with two locations, we count them in both regions.)

Data

Metadata - Category

Most frequent categories: Sculpture (85), Architecture (68), Machine (23) .

In total we have 19 distinct categories, we also have 22 occurrences of multiple categories

There are 716 objects with no labeled category

We used some further processing to extract similar categories that could be combined:

[('Animal ?', 'Animal'), ('Machine', 'Machine (Boats)'), ('Architecture (Interior)', 'Architecture')]

Let's add something interesting!

Let's add something interesting!

Simply viewing pictures without purpose can quickly lead to boredom. It is the knowledge behind them that sustains viewers' interest and allows them to truly immerse themselves in the exhibition.

-> Add some intersting facts and narratives.

The overall experience?

The overall experience will be like a true journey, starting from the outer layers of the exhibition, exploring the weighty steam engines and cannons, then progressing into increasingly intricate exhibition areas. Eventually, you will transition into more metaphysical realms, such as art and labor history. Finally, you will reach the focal point of the journey, reflecting on the entire experience and concluding the journey with the historical perspectives and evaluations of others on the exhibition.

Victor Hugo

Down with war! Let there be alliance! Concord! Unity!..

O France, adieu! Thou art too great to remain merely a fatherland. To become a goddess, thou must be separated from motherhood. Soon thou shalt vanish in a transfiguration.

Thou shalt no longer be France: thou shalt be Humanity! No longer a nation, thou shalt be Ubiquity. Thou art destined to dissolve utterly, radiating outward, transcending thy frontiers. Resign thyself to thy immensity. Adieu, O people! Hail, Humankind! Submit to thy sublime and fateful enlargement, O my country; and as Athens became Greece, as Rome became Christianity, thou, France, become the world!

The overall experience?

User flow

Demo

Let's see the demo!

Discussion and Future Work

  • For speech generation, we currently use voice presets provided by suno-ai/bark and haven't finely tuned it, so more adjustments needed for better sounds
  • Surrounding the main building was a massive park divided into four sections.
  • This area was initially designed as an extension of the internal exhibition space: countries could build large pavilions or exhibits here that were not convenient to place inside.
  • In our current design, we ingored THE PARK outside the Palace.

  • The given dataset includes around 1000 photos, however, it's not the entire 1867 exhibition.
  • During the research, we found more photos of 1867 exhibitions.
  • Thereofe, one future work is to continue to build our dataset and research on description. Then, we have chance to Recreate the 1867 World Expo and have a comprehensive immersive experience.
  • Besides, we need more serious research

Discussion

Reference

Aymar-Bression, P. Histoire générale de l’exposition universelle de 1867.... France et puissances étrangères (Paris, 1868)

Chevalier, Michel. Exposition Universelle de 1867 à Paris. Rapports du jury internationale publiés sous la direction de m. Michel Chevalier (Paris, 1868, 13 volumes)

Ducuing, François. L'Exposition Universelle de 1867 Illustrée (Paris, 1867).

Exposition Universelle de 1867 à Paris. Catalogue général publié par l Commission impériale (Paris, 1867)

Fournel, Victor. "Voyage à travers l'Exposition," in Le Correspondent, April-July, 1867.

Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past-Volume C: From 1750 to the Present (Jerry H. Bentley , Herbert F. Ziegler)

An Underground Education: The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields (Richard Zacks)

François Ducuing, Edititeur scientifique, L'Exposition universelle de 1867 illustrée (2 vol), Paris, 1867

Exposition universelle de 1867 á Paris, Rapports du Jury international, publiés sous la direction de Michel Chevalier, Paries: Imprimerie administrative de Paul Dupont, 1868

M.p. Duchesne de Bellecour, Exposition chinoise et japonaise au Champ de Mars, in Revue des deux Mondes, 1867

suno-ai/bark: https://github.com/suno-ai/bark

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