08/12: Osaka
Expo 2025, Better
Co-Being Pavilion
The Better Co-Being Pavilion, designed by SANAA and produced by Hiroaki Miyata, appeared at first to be the quietest of the four. Slender columns, translucent planes, and drifting overlaps with the landscape suggested openness rather than enclosure.
Walking through, however, it became clear that the experience was more directed than it seemed. Movements were subtly programmed, and the so-called “artworks” often felt like props—gestures that risked slipping into pseudo-art. Yet these very tensions underscored the pavilion’s proposition: that coexistence is not effortless, but structured, staged, sometimes awkward.
Here, SANAA’s touch still mattered—the spatial lightness, the sense of being inside a container for relations rather than for objects. But what lingered was not a smooth harmony; it was the friction between design intention and lived experience. In that gap, play emerged—not spectacular, but ambient, provisional, and a little uneasy.
click here to see our stories ^