SOCIAL MEDIA ZEITGEIST

World Expositions have long been occasions where nations present visions of progress, innovation, and culture through architecture. They are at once spectacular and ephemeral, built to dazzle for a short season, yet often leaving behind remnants that endure for decades. Visiting Osaka’s Expo 2025, I found myself reflecting on those traces of past fairs, and on the architecture of impermanence and permanence that defines these extraordinary events.

The Afterlives of Past Expositions

Although I had not experienced a World Expo before, I had visited many former exposition sites over the years, where traces of something remarkable often endured.

I used to walk past a small, fading remnant of the Franco-British Exhibition near Shepherd’s Bush Green. It was a surviving piece of the once-spectacular White City, which had occupied the vast site beyond and hosted the 1908 Exhibition, the Olympic Games, and many other grand events. The White City, with its striking blend of classical and oriental architecture – palaces, canals, domes, and arches – has long since been demolished. Only its name endures, echoing its past glory. London’s Crystal Palace tells a similar story. Once the shining centrepiece of the 1851 Great Exhibition, it too was lost, destroyed by fire, though its name still marks the area in which it was later located. Interestingly, many other World Expositions have left behind more lasting physical legacies.

Buckyball, Buckminster Fuller

The Barcelona Pavilion began its life as a temporary German exhibition building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. Though it was dismantled following the event, it was thankfully reconstructed 56 years later and now serves as a place of pilgrimage for architects and designers.

The Montreal World Expo in 1967 gave us the Buckyball – Buckminster Fuller’s ingenious design for the US Pavilion still stands, now flying the Canadian flag and provided with a global audience once a year during the F1 Grand Prix which now takes place on the old Expo site

Of course, the Eiffel Tower is the best-known surviving building of this type. Built for the 1889 World’s Fair, it will probably outlast everything else by means of repairs and replacement of parts. The story of the tower’s creation and survival is as fascinating as the building itself.

Sou Fujimoto’s Grand Ring,

Highlights of Osaka 2025

The Osaka Expo of 2025 continues this dialogue between the temporary and the lasting. Many of Japan’s leading architects have contributed, together shaping a remarkable landscape of ideas, experiences, and structures.

Encircling the Osaka Expo grounds is Sou Fujimoto’s Grand Ring, the colossal 2-kilometre-long timber structure is more than a pavilion, it is a landscape: shelter from rain and sun, a vantage point over the site, and a space of exploration that dissolves boundaries between environment and architecture. Fujimoto previously explored similar methods in his 2013 Serpentine Pavilion, a light lattice of white steel. In Osaka, the concept has grown immense, heavy, and elemental. The Ring feels timeless, as if it had always been there, a wooden Stonehenge that could encircle the Great Pyramid of Giza. While most of the Ring will be dismantled and the timber reused, plans are being discussed to retain a portion. I wish it could all remain; big can indeed be beautiful.

SANAA’s Better Co-Being Pavilion

Nearby, SANAA’s Better Co-Being Pavilion offers a contrasting delicacy. Designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa – recent recipients of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal – the pavilion hovers like a weightless cloud above the landscape. Wandering beneath its shimmering canopy, I found myself interacting playfully with glowing, vibrating stones distributed to visitors. Even without fully grasping the intended narrative, the experience was joyful and uplifting, embodying the Expo’s theme of architecture as experience.

Toyo Ito’s auditorium is another highlight. Its gold overhanging roof recalls Philippe Starck’s Asahi Beer Hall in Tokyo, but Ito’s design feels as if it is emerging through a glimmering portal in the sky – a bold, radiant gesture that commands attention.

And then there is the Japanese Pavilion, designed by Nikken Sekkei and Oki Sato. This circular building offers the most comprehensive exploration of future technologies at the Expo. Moving through its interconnected rooms, I learned about concepts regarding waste to resource conversion, accompanied by Hello Kitties made of algae . Quirky and ambitious, the pavilion blends playful spectacle with deep engagement, drawing queues throughout the day.

Japanese Pavilion by Nikken Sekkei and Oki Sato

Why Visit the Expo?

World Expositions are more than theme parks of technology and culture. They are laboratories of architecture – testing ideas about material, scale, form, and experience in ways that can inspire long after the pavilions are dismantled. Architects can learn much: how temporary structures can still achieve permanence in memory, how national identity can be embodied in built form, and how architecture can become participatory, experiential, and joyful.

Visiting Osaka 2025, I felt both the thrill of discovery and the echo of past Expos. Whether or not the Grand Ring endures, the lessons will remain – architecture as experience, as symbol, and as possibility.

Jan Kuzminski is Director of London based Openeight Architects, which he co-founded in 2010. Photography is his own.