08/12: Osaka
Expo 2025, Grand Ring
Sou Fujimoto’s Grand Ring is the architectural anchor of Expo 2025—the largest wooden structure ever built, spanning 61,035.55 m². Designed between 2023 and 2025, it uses a fusion of modern engineering and traditional Japanese nuki joinery, with about 70% of its timber sourced from Japanese cryptomeria and cypress, the remainder from foreign pine. The ring functions both as a roof and as circulation: elevated walkways, sheltered corridors, and viewing platforms that guide visitors around the site.
Despite its scale, the structure doesn’t land as brute monumentality. On the lower level, its grid recalls Sol LeWitt’s grid structures. Above, the flow of people transforms it. Watching the crowd move in waves across the elevated loop gave the view of Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains transposed into everyday circulation.
In person, the Grand Ring became less an object and more a lens: it framed the choreography of visitors as the actual spectacle. The architecture staged its own life through the movements of others. Having first encountered the model in Fujimoto’s retrospective at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, it was striking to experience the built work as both monumental infrastructure and a stage for collective play.