Expo 2025 Osaka

Covering 3,500 square meters, the pavilion offers visitors a unique architectural and exhibition experience, showcasing the country’s innovation, culture, and productive activity. Over six months, companies, regional authorities, and other institutions will use their spaces for meetings, presentations, and forums. In this way, architecture becomes a strategic tool for international visibility.

"MANY YEARS LATER, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." — G. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (translated by Gregory Rabassa).

The building is a complex of small event spaces for the Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai: a theater for ceremonies and performances, an exhibition space for traditional crafts, and a restaurant/lounge. The theme of the Expo is "Designing Future Society for Our Lives," and the architecture is designed to resemble life, where sky, wind, water, and earth intertangle with each other.

Mario Cucinella, Architect and Founder of MCA, commented: "Designing the Italian Pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka is a unique opportunity to create a true stage, not only to showcase the culture, history, and innovation of our country but also to establish a space for fostering connections: for future dialogue, for strengthening cultural, social, and economic ties. Aligned with one of the Expo's themes, 'Saving Lives', the project and its architectural and technological content, as well as the choices of material, propose a renewed balance among humanity, nature, and technology. The Italian Pavilion can become a powerful tool to promote, inspire action, and establish new synergies for the development of a more sustainable future. It represents a new vision of society and the city: a living organism where the relationships among people, art, the environment, and history can come alive." The Italian Pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka is presented as a living, regenerative ecosystem, capable of embodying the continuous dialogue among tradition and innovation, art and science, craftsmanship and technology. Designed and built by MCA – Mario Cucinella Architects, the Pavilion is conceived as a dynamic and immersive laboratory, offering a journey through Italy, told via a series of sensory and narrative experiences that actively engage the visitor.

The Canada Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka features interactive exhibits and installations that present the country's innovation, culture, and diversity. Designed under the creative direction of Robert Lepage, the pavilion offers an immersive experience aimed at introducing Canada's values and capabilities to a global audience. Additionally, it aims to showcase Canadian innovation, resources, investment, and education to the broader Indo-Pacific region. Centered around regeneration, the design is in line with the broader theme at the Expo: "Designing the Future Society for Our Lives."

The Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) General Assembly in Paris has officially approved the Registration Dossier for Expo 2030 Riyadh, formally confirming Saudi Arabia as the host of the upcoming World Expo. With this milestone, the next phase of preparations will begin, including the official invitation of participating countries through diplomatic channels. Coinciding with the approval, the initial masterplan for the Expo site designed by LAVA, the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, has been unveiled. Scheduled to take place from October 1, 2030, to March 31, 2031, the event will be held on a site in Riyadh, designed to accommodate more than 40 million visits and host over 195 participating nations.

Designed by French architecture studio Coldefy with Italian design and innovation practice CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati. The France Pavilion is envisioned as a 'theatre of life', where architecture frames moments of presence, movement, and interaction. Inspired by a mise-en-scène, or stage design and arrangement, the Pavilion is designed as a fluid sequence of spaces, guiding visitors through changing perspectives that mirror the rhythms of daily life – the beginning, transition, pause, and departure. The design draws inspiration from the Japanese legend of Akai Ito, the invisible red thread connecting destined souls. In a time defined by digital estrangement, the Pavilion reclaims physical space as a medium for dialogue. A quiet inner garden offers refuge, emphasizing that encounters with nature are just as vital as those with one another. Its shifting façade, with 17 meters high fabric veils resembling theatre curtains suspended down two sides, is in contact with the elements and responds to light and wind. The pathway through the Pavilion follows a carefully choreographed progression – ascending towards an exhibition displayed inside, alternating between enclosed and open-air spaces, and concluding with a return to the wider Expo site.

The UAE Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, titled "Earth to Ether," presents an immersive, multisensory experience that narrates the story of the United Arab Emirates, from its cultural heritage and core values to its forward-looking innovations. Inspired by the symbolic date palm, the pavilion reimagines areesh, a traditional form of Emirati vernacular architecture, by combining agricultural byproducts from date palms with refined Japanese woodworking techniques. Opened in April 2025, under the theme "Designing Future Society for Our Lives," the pavilion is located in the "Empowering Lives" zone. Designed to work under the broader theme, the UAE Pavilion offers diverse programming and interactive exhibits and serves as a collaborative platform for co-creating solutions that "drive collective progress."

The Spanish Pavilion at the Expo Osaka 2025 is designed by the architecture and design practices Néstor Montenegro (EXTUDIO), Enorme Studio, and Smart and Green Design. This comes after being selected in the public competition organized by the Spanish Cultural Action (AC / E), the institution responsible for representing the country in Universal and International Expositions. Located in the northern section of the 65-hectare Pavilion World, within the thematic area of Connecting Lives, the pavilion highlights the key concepts of Oceand and Sun, Sustainability and Circularity, and Craftsmanship Knowledge. The exhibition will be open throughout the event, until October 13, 2025.

The Serbian Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka positions itself as a striking ambassador of sustainable and culture-infused design, combining technological foresight with emotional narrative. Designed by ALEATEK Studio, the pavilion manifests the concept of a "Floating Forest", referencing Belgrade's protected Ratno Ostrvo (Great War Island), and stands as the only Expo pavilion featuring a living façade, with over 95% of its materials being recyclable and 80% reusable in future constructions.

The 2025 Osaka Expo has captured widespread attention—not only for its architectural ambition and spectacle, but also for breaking records and generating controversy. Its most iconic feature, a monumental timber ring designed by Sou Fujimoto, has already made headlines as a Guinness World Record-breaking wooden structure. Built on the reclaimed island of Yumeshima, the site has attracted praise and critique in equal measure.  Beyond its awe-inspiring 2-kilometer circumference—parts of which extend dramatically over the water—the structure has also drawn concerns, including questions about health & safety, extreme heat, and swarms of insects that may affect the visitor experience.

Expo 2025 officially opened its doors on April 13, 2025, on Yumeshima, a reclaimed island in Osaka Bay. Held under the theme "Designing Future Society for Our Lives," the event brings together over 150 countries and international organizations to address pressing global challenges through architecture, technology, and design. At the center of the Expo grounds stands the Grand Ring, a monumental circular structure designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. Spanning approximately 2 kilometers in circumference and rising to 20 meters in height, the timber structure encircles the main exhibition area and was recognised by Guinness World Records as "The largest wooden architectural structure". 

NOIZ has recently completed the architectural design of "null²," one of eight Signature Pavilions at Expo 2025 Osaka, produced by researcher/media artist Yoichi Ochiai. The Signature Pavilions have been planned as the thematic core of the current Expo, assigned to selected Japanese researchers and creators. The steel frame architecture is covered with metallic membranes that waver with the wind and reflect its surroundings, resembling a digital landscape in a futuristic physical world.

What can a pavilion’s architecture reveal about its country? At major World Expos, national pavilions are designed to answer this question, transforming into spaces laden with symbolism. Though temporary, these structures are rich in meaning, functioning as architectural expressions of political identity. Their forms and materials encapsulate national ambitions. Expo Osaka 2025, the latest chapter in this ongoing narrative, showcases how nations increasingly use built space to construct global images of themselves—sustainable, technological, culturally distinct, and geopolitically relevant.

Portugal, like Japan, is a country of the sea, with a deep connection to the ocean. During the Age of Discovery, Portuguese explorers sailed the world's oceans, bringing Western civilization to Tanegashima and opening Japan to the West.

The Luxembourg pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka is both welcoming and intriguing. It is a shady resting place amid the hustle and bustle, inviting to discover and offering an unexpected, invigorating, and stimulating journey through the many facets of Luxembourg. The Luxembourg pavilion is located in the part of the Expo 2025 Site that takes up the theme 'Connecting Lives'. It is made up of three characteristic elements corresponding to the three themes of the Expo 2025 Event: *'Designing future society', the general theme of the expo, a single project, the uniqueness of what we all have in common, we all share the same Earth, represented by a single roof covering the whole pavilion. It is the project of the Luxembourg nation that radiates and communicates beyond its borders. *'Connecting lives', the theme of this part of the Expo 2025 Site, is a diversity of volumes of different sizes and heights that represent the multicultural community of Luxembourg and form an artificial landscape. *'Connectivity' is the theme of the pavilion, which takes the land as a common good, the Luxembourg territory, and its unique traditions that bind its inhabitants together. A walk through this stylised landscape invites the visitor to discover and experience life in Luxembourg.

Uzbekistan has revealed the latest photographs of the pavilion for Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, after the recent opening. Designed by Atelier Brückner and realized by NUSSLI, the pavilion aims to showcase the country's vision for the future under the Expo's broader theme, "Designing the Future Society for Our Lives." Composed of modular, reusable wooden elements, the pavilion's architecture will later be reconstructed in Uzbekistan, serving as a studio, workshop, or school.

A pavilion made of wood and glass as an exhibit. The architecture of the Czech National Pavilion at Expo 2025 in Osaka reflects the idea of life energy and continuous development. The author of the design is Apropos Architects studio, which works with the motif of a spiral. Visitors to the pavilion walk through a 260-metre-long path that winds around the building and gradually rises through four floors to emerge on the observation roof. This dynamic movement symbolizes not only the passage of time and the development of the individual, but also personal and social growth.