Expo 2025

By Editorial Staff - 16 June 2025

Open for six months beginning April 13, Expo 2025 Osaka brings nearly 50 countries together in a great circle designed by architect and master planner Sou Fujimoto. With gestures that offer more sympathy and co-existence than the grandiloquent ones of past World’s Fairs, the new pavilions evoke clouds and the wooden seafaring boats of the past. The 700-m wooden ring imagined by Fujimoto brings diversity and varied esthetic concepts together in a warm and respectful way.

Japan’s first World Exposition, Expo 1970 Osaka or Expo ’70, was held in Suita, in the north of Osaka Prefecture, between March 15 and September 13, 1970. Its theme was “Progress and Harmony for Mankind”. Architecture and significantly Japan’s Metabolist movement were well represented in that event. The masterplan and the main pavilion (Festival Plaza) were designed by Kenzo Tange, the Expo Tower by Kiyonori Kikutake, and two pavilions were the work of Kishō Kurokawa. He and Fumihiko Maki created experimental capsules on the roof above the Plaza, and Arata Isozaki imagined two giant robots. Needless to say, expectations were high when Japan again opened a World Exposition in Osaka, 55 years later. The Expo 2025 site, which opened to the public on April 13, has an area of 1.55 sq. km on the artificial island of Yumeshima on the Osaka waterfront.

Sou Fujimoto was responsible for the masterplan of Expo 2025 Osaka (see interview on THE PLAN 156). Clearly indicating that times have moved on from the expansive goals set out in 1970, the entire 2025 effort was created in keeping with the so-called Sustainable Development Goals ¹ which were agreed to by the United Nations in 2015. As Fujimoto explained before the event, “We aim to design the venue so that visitors will be able to experience unity in diversity and one world shared by innumerable, diverse beings. We will use ‘one sky’ as a...