World Expos are like Olympics for architecture. Dozens of countries pit their top designers against each other, brandishing national aesthetics, engineering might, and shock-and-awe wizardry to out-spectacle political rivals and woo host country citizens. And for years, the U.S. was the best. Under the leadership of Jack Masey in the '60s and '70s, the now-defunct US Information Agency fought on the Cold War's cultural front with a supersquad of home-grown talent: Buckminster Fuller, Chermayeff & Geismar, Edward Durell Stone. Their pavilions popped up in Expos from Afghanistan to Osaka, often super inexpensive, and always stunning.

That was the golden age. Then the government stopped funding U.S. pavilions, and the American philosophy on its pavilions shifted away from showcasing great architecture and focused instead on digital entertainment. That leaves us today with Canadian architect Clive Grout's pavilion for the Shanghai Expo in May: a giant movie theater, with architecture totally secondary to the so-called "4-D multimedia" display inside. It might not be the most embarrassing entry this year, but it's damn close. How did we fall so far? Take the tour of expos past.

In 1958, Edward Durell Stone had been working for years, but this was the project that landed him on the cover of Time. The fame arguably ruined his career, leading to high-profile disasters like New York's GM building, but it was well-deserved. The expo's theme was atomic energy, and it was centered on a 335-foot-tall reflective iron crystal molecule. Stone's circular pavilion brought things down to earth--it's big (340 feet wide), but a light-filled interior, thanks to a translucent roof and Stone's trademark quirky, filigreed facade, gave the space-age fair a much-needed humanist touch.

Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome--and the infamous model kitchen inside--drew 2.7 million visitors over the 6 weeks the American National Exhibition ran. Masey had commissioned Fuller to build a 110-foot-diameter dome for the '56 Agricultural Expo in Kabul, so this wasn't his first time in the global spotlight, and it wouldn't be his last. The pavilion's highlight, though was the $14,000 canary-yellow GE kitchen: the site of a Nixon-Khrushchev face-off over which nation's kitchens (i.e. politics) were better for the working class. Each accused the other of being "afraid of ideas."

By 1967, Fuller was the Shaun White of the Expo circuit, rocking the geodesic dome and blowing millions of minds. The '67 Expo was supposed to be held in Moscow, but the Soviets backed out at the last minute--trying to save face, they went all out in Montreal in celebration of their 50th birthday. The U.S.S.R. pavilion featured a massive Cosmos Hall, showing off their space-race technology, and (as a post-Kitchen-Debate dig at the U.S.?) the largest restaurant at the Expo. Stuff that in your GE oven!

This was maybe the best Expo for architecture: Moshe Safdie's modularHabitat 67 housing block also went up that year and Fuller built his biggest dome yet. The U.S. pavilion's theme was Creative America--it contained artifacts like Elvis's guitar and some of our own space gadgets. Fuller's dome--designed with Shoji Sadao--was huge: 200 feet high, 250 feet wide, with a monorail running through it. It was covered in 1,900 acrylic panels, but in a Terminator-like twist, the skin caught on fire in 1976 and melted off.

Inspired by Apollo 11 and built with NASA-developed tech like mylar and fiberglass fabric, the U.S. pavilion this year was a 125,000-square-foot inflatable dome. The real innovation, though, was how cheaply it was built. The government cut the pavilion's funding in half to only $450,000, and it was still built without a hitch. In contrast...

...The 1992 pavilion in Seville saw its original $45 million budget slashed to less than half, and the building still cost $14 million--twice as much as its projected cost. This Expo was a flat-out disaster. While Tadao Ando designed a kick-ass wooden palace for Japan (the world's largest wooden building at the time), the U.S. plunked down a pair of pre-used geodesic domes, in a nod to the glory days of Bucky Fuller. One dome held a standing-only theater showing a GM film called "WorldSong" about how we're all, like, one, man. They were wrapped in a mural of Columbus sailing to America and in between them stood... a batting cage. Today, most of the other pavilions are still there. The U.S.'s is long gone.

After the Seville debacle, the U.S. government stopped funding pavilions, requiring them to find private sponsors. Seville was such a blow that the U.S. skipped the next few expos (Taejon '93, Budapest '96, Hanover '00) while other countries' pavilions kept getting better--check out MVRDV's epic Hanover showing or FOA's for Spain in 2005. Finally, we got back in the game in Aichi (thanks to a NASCAR-driver's worth of corporate sponsors). It wasn't much of a debut: The official government site doesn't even show pictures of the exterior, or cite the architect, just "production director" Bernard Taresco. That's because the pavilion, thanks to its focus on sponsorship, was a glorified corporate VIP lounge (the "Franklin Room") looking out on a movie theater showing a Benjamin Franklin documentary.

So here we are, with Clive Grout's $61 million megaplex. Inside, a "4-D show" of a Chinese-American woman's life in 2030 plays on seven screens, designed by BRC, the folks behind the Aichi film. Grout touts a couple greenwashing touches like an "urban courtyard," a "rainwater-fed pool," and recyclable aluminum siding, and makes a dubious claim that the building is supposed to look like eagle wings, but all in all he says, "We have not felt the need to do an architectural handstand to get attention." So sad, so true.

Check out some of the other pavilions--some stunning, some not so much--here and here, and mourn the passing of American architectural might.