Osaka World Expo 2025 Part I

This would be my third time participating in a World Expo. I've attended the Shanghai one in 2010, and the Milan one in 2015. The first one occured during my pre-architecture life, I got to experience it as a tourist with no expectations. I was blown away by the sheer scales of all the superstructures. For a high school student, it was like going to another kind of amusement park. The second one happened during my senior year while studying abroad in Spain. This one I had too much expectations, I was at the full peak of design curiosity so didn't properly calibrate my enthusiasm. I was frustrated throughout that visit whenever I could not get into the starchitects' pavilions due to the wait time of the lines. By the time I visited this third one, I've worked in the industry for 6 years, I gained some better understanding of masterplanning, architecture design, structure, details, landscape, interior design, and coordinations so there was a lot more to pay attention to this round, and not just merely chasing after all the famous pavilions. 

I learned a lot about the expo masterplan after visiting Sou Fujimoto's exhibition, I could see his thought process and ambition all manifested. The Grand Ring was truly magnificent as the largest timber structure by humans, the modularity and the scale really accentuated the momumentality. It was an absolute beauty in any weather/lighting conditions. It is a shame that they are dismantling it after the expo and don't have a proper plan to reuse all the pieces - it could easily become one of the new wonders of the world. This just shows the constant political challenges the architects are facing daily, and how limited the architects have a say in today's settings.

Image from the Expo 2025 Mater Plan document. The final layout might be different.

Instead of rushing to lines for the pavilions, I took a different approach this round, focusing on the master plan, overall layout, and the logistics first. I wanted to understand what it takes to plan out a whole expo and learn the entire surrounding.

I noticed how they nicely grouped the pavilions into different zones, and have back of house/service space all behind the pavilions with restricted access (see diagram below). Service cars could drive freely underneath the Grand Ring, especially the southern portion where it overlaps with the water since no pedestrian access. For the rest of the Grand Ring, they would do a temporary close off whenever service cars need to pass through, similar to when a train passes on ground.

Back of house and service diagram.

There are 5 escalators to take people up to the top of the Grand Ring (see diagram below), aside from that there are egress stairs and elevators nested within the Grand Ring. Whenever there's an escalator, they did reserve a plaza space to accommodate the discharge and the foot traffic.

Escalators.

The wayfinding through these infrastructures/layout quickly became familiar to me, I was able to recognize and locate landmarks without the use of map after few hours. The forest of tranquility was the center anchor of the master plan. Several circulation spines were established from that park and then all tie into the escalators (see diagram below).

Circulation diagram.