At the centre of the original Expo grounds stood Tarō Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun, a 70-metre-high totem embodying his belief in primitivism, play, and the vitality of life. Its three faces symbolise past, present, and future: the Black Sun on the back, the central Face of the Sun (an image resembling Brancusi’s Kiss—yet sparing intimacy in favour of monumental ego), and the gilded mask at the top. Inside, the Tree of Life installation once traced the evolutionary story of species, rising through the tower’s core. With the Festival Plaza dismantled and the tower’s interior no longer accessible, the structure today survives only as monument, detached from the everyday architecture of use. Standing before it, the temporal metaphors resonate uneasily: the golden face still gazes forward, the present face confronts us directly, but the Black Sun of the past is harder to place—vanished, or perhaps deliberately skipped over. Revisiting the site is like stepping into a layered time capsule: returning to the past to see their future, only to confront our present, still caught between utopian promises and unresolved contradictions.
Among the archival models of the Expo grounds, we also spotted Arthur Erickson’s Canadian Pavilion—a reminder of another nation’s vision of the future, now frozen in the past.