Expo 1958 opened as the first major international exhibition since the end of World War II. As a world’s fair, the exhibition in Brussels continued the century-old tradition of economic and technological competition among participating nations. Although technology and commerce were important aspects of the fair, its organizers cast the event as a cultural exchange, a celebration of the art and culture of the atomic age. To this end, the various pavilions (representing 43 nations and a variety of corporations) celebrated the broad spectrum of contemporary architecture, from the glass-and-steel modernism of Vjenceslaw Richter’s Yugoslavian Pavilion to the hyperbolic paraboloid of Guilliame Gillet’s French Pavilion. Amid the spectacular variety of architecture present at the fair loomed the specter of the Cold War (the American press referred to the event as a cultural Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 792 Cold War). The United States and the Soviet Union faced off, the Soviets di...