As the entire world is getting ready for the Expo Osaka 2025, the most anticipated architecture event of the year, with its heroic theme ‘Designing Future Society for Our Lives,’ it is time to look at its special and glorious legacy.
Expo Osaka 1970, opened 55 years ago, was a benchmark and memorable event, with some extravagant and avant-garde pavilions which had left their mark on the history of architecture. Not only was it the first World’s Fair held in Asia and one of the best attended expositions in history, but it featured some of the most futuristic and visionary architecture expressions of its time. Under the theme ‘Progress and Harmony of Mankind,’ Expo Osaka came to promote the power of architecture to evoke the ideologies of the Zeitgeist.
It was an event of the Space-Age and the participating architects sought to express innovations and to showcase advanced technologies and their power to affect the quality of life. Seventy-seven countries, one colony (Hong Kong), three US States, and one German City participated, and its masterplan was designed by Japanese hero architect Kenzō Tange. It was where Japanese Metabolism, the unique biomimetic architecture movement based on the notion of megastructures and organic biological growth had its most substantial expression. The Toshiba Pavilion, by Kosho Kurokawa, for example was one of them as well as the Tower composed of detachable modules, by Kiyonori Kikutake, both leading figures of Metabolism.
One of the most memorable pavilion was the domed Pepsi Pavilion by architect John Peace and artist Fujiko Nakaya, representing the non-profit organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). It was the world’s first natural fog sculpture, which was develped together with cloud physicist Thomas Mee, testing various methods in creating a mass of fog from water droplets.
With this spectaular legacy, we cannot wait to visiting Expo Osaka 2025.
