The planned World Expo 2025 in Osaka faces a series of controversial challenges. On one hand, it is haunted by its own history: it must overcome the monumental shadow cast by its predecessor, the enormously influential World Expo 1970 designed by the heroes of Japanese modernism Kenzo Tange and Uzo Nishiyama. On the other hand, and more importantly, while the topic of this new Osaka World Expo 2025 edition, “Designing a Future Society for our Lives” is timely and relevant, the architecture of the exhibition itself raises many critical questions regarding sustainability, the very topic the world expo espouses to address: featuring a gigantic ring-shaped wooden roof of 2 kilometer circumference, the architects of the World Expo 2025, Sou Foujimoto Architects, situated on an artificial island far away from the mainland and only reachable by long drives.
Does a centralized world expo still make sense in a time when the planet is facing an ecological emergency? In light of the climate crisis, how can a world expo justify the massive embodied and operational carbon footprint produced by the millions of visitors and exhibitors traveling from around the globe?
In this studio, conceived as an independent sequel to the “Circular Kyoto'' studio offered in the fall semester, we embrace these questions and develop counter proposals for Osaka 2050. We imagined our alt-expo as a global, trans scalar architecture, intertwining a planetary network of circular, physical/virtual hybrid nodes,distributed in tactical locations in participating cities around the world. We developed utopian and visionary projects at multiple scales: from the planetary to the urban, to the architectural, to the furniture, to the detail. Projects are grafting onto existing social infrastructures, giving new life to obsolete typologies, urban parks, and abandoned buildings.
Additionally, each proposal actively designed “a future society” by critically examining the role of the digital in design. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digitalization of our society, offering the opportunity to access services from home and participate in classes, meetings and political debates virtually. Governments, businesses and institutes, are now leveraging this confinement-induced trend, and rethinking their real estate strategies. Other companies are completely moving online.
In this studio, we see virtualization as an opportunity and danger for architecture: We will actively question the role of the virtual and the changing need for physicality in the proposed counter proposals for the world expo: How can we leverage digital spaces, including augmented, virtual, extended realities (AR/VR/XR) to minimize extractive practices and CO2 emission while providing meaningful experiences?
Each studio member, individually or in a group of two, focused on the analysis of a global problem that could be exhibited in an alternative world exposure. With the help of AI, information on the topic could be gathered in a very short time. The affected areas that are important for the exhibition were then globally represented by the students. Following this, an individual exhibition concept was developed which, with the help of physical and digital tools, enables a globally networked, decentralised exhibition.