After its official opening on 10 June, the Soviet Pavilion immediately attracted increased attention from both the creative elite and the general public. Both the exterior and interior of the building were widely regarded as contrasting with the pretentious style of most of the other pavilions – later called Art Deco – and impressed with the originality and novelty of the technical and artistic solutions involved. They were praised in particular by such renowned European artists as Fernand Léger and Le Corbusier. The latter, who himself designed one of the exhibition's largest pavilions, the New Spirit, declared that the Soviet Pavilion was the only one worth seeing. Léger, Pablo Picasso and Theo van Doesburg were also notoriously eager to meet the designer of the Soviet Pavilion, but Rodchenko abstained from meeting with his prominent foreign peers – according to the members of the Soviet delegation, the reasons were his reserve and shyness, as well as his lack of knowledge of foreign languages.
