Osaka - Expo 2025
Expo 2025 is taking place on Yumeshima, a man-made island in Osaka Bay, under the theme “Designing Future Society for Our Lives.” The site is organized around Sou Fujimoto’s Grand Ring, a vast circular timber structure that connects national and thematic pavilions into a single loop. Unlike Expo ’70, which produced a dense field of experimental architectures, Expo 2025 is more streamlined and carefully orchestrated, balancing themes of ecology, technology, and social coexistence.
Yet beneath the optimism linger tensions: cost overruns, unfinished pavilions at opening, and critiques that some structures swim too freely in spectacle. In this tension between ideal and outcome, our encounters with architecture at Expo 2025 hinge on how these pavilions reconcile public promise with embodied experience.
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.
08/12: Osaka
Expo 2025, Japan Pavilion
The Japan Pavilion—led by Nikken Sekkei and overseen by Oki Sato—is one of the national flagships within the Grand Ring’s core. It deploys a mix of architectural poetics and scientific ambition: its interior programming includes experimental algae research pointing toward biodegradable materials and carbon uptake strategies. Spatially, the pavilion orchestrates scale shifts, shifting thresholds, and a sequence of transition zones.
But even as it gestures at futurism, the pavilion risks overreach. In our visit, the layering of narrative (environment, identity, innovation) sometimes crowded the experience. The architecture felt both saturated with symbolism and reluctant to let forms breathe on their own—a familiar tension in expo design.
08/12: Osaka
Expo 2025, Blue Ocean Dome
Shigeru Ban’s Blue Ocean Dome, organized by ZERI JAPAN with exhibition concept by NDC, was conceived as a pavilion for marine conservation and zero-waste futures. The structure comprises three domes: Dome A, built of bamboo and open to natural light; Dome B, centered on a massive LED spherical screen; and Dome C, constructed from Ban’s signature paper tubes for workshops and events.
Inside, architecture and exhibition fused into a narrative of ecological urgency—immersive projections, kinetic installations, and structural expressiveness visualized cycles of water, marine ecosystems, and waste flows. At times, the massive spherical screen carried the scale and sensorial charge of an Anish Kapoor installation—pulling viewers into an enveloping field rather than presenting content in a straightforward way.
Beyond these theatrical moments, what lingered was the atmosphere: the way light filtered through, the softness of the materials, the sense that air, water, and structure were breathing together. The pavilion framed water not just as subject but as collaborator. In its sensitivity, it recalled the elemental clarity of Nishizawa and Naitō’s Teshima Art Museum—translated here into the scale and spectacle of an expo pavilion.
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.
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