Osaka Expo 2025 – Better Co-being SANAA
Expo 2025 is a World Expo organised and sanctioned by the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), which is being held in Osaka, Japan. It is taking place for six months from 13 April to 13 October 2025. This is the second time that Osaka has hosted a World Expo, having previously hosted Expo 1970. The Expo takes place on the artificial island of Yumeshima in Osaka Bay. The projected visitor count is approximately 28 million.
Within the Forest of Tranquility at Expo 2025 Osaka, SANAA’s Better Co-being Pavilion appears as a delicate field of white columns and overlapping roof plates that hover just above the landscape. Designed by the Japanese Pritzker Prize–winning duo Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the pavilion is composed of slender steel supports topped by a constellation of thin, translucent canopies, some circular, others irregular, recalling clouds or tree branches.
The columns are positioned in a seemingly organic arrangement, creating soft porous pathways, gathering points, and transitional moments within the wooded clearing. This unenclosed architecture, defined by natural rhythms, porosity, and light, echoes its organic context. New photographs by William Mulvihill document its early stages of assembly, capturing how SANAA’s architectural language of lightness and ambiguity is resolved through precise material detailing and structural calibration.
Curated by art critic and curator Yuko Hasegawa, and produced by Hiroaki Miyata, a professor and lead researcher for the thematic project Resonance of Lives, the pavilion is one of several projects at Expo 2025 Osaka exploring how architecture can facilitate new forms of coexistence. Miyata’s framework centers around the idea that we are entering a global turning point, spanning economics, health, education, human rights, and environmental practice. SANAA conceives this to act like a social interface in this context, a place where people can gather, interact, and imagine alternative models for living together.
