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.