Building the future

AUSTRIA Pavilion
The Austria Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka is a truly international collaboration, designed by Vienna’s BWM and assembled by Tokyo-based Shinohara Shoten. Appropriately for the country of Mozart, Schubert and Strauss, music provides the framework for the structure. Riffing on the expo theme of “designing future society for our lives”, Austria’s contribution will focus on the idea of “composing the future”.

In practice, this means that the exhibition hall will be divided into three thematic areas: relationships, people and ideas. Each section will see innovative technologies bring to life the country’s achievements across sectors as varied as life sciences, AI, mobility and the creative industries. The staging will build to a crescendo in the final section. The audio and visuals are impacted by the responses to interactive questionnaires that allow visitors to share their values and priorities, shaping the room in a reflection of the collective will. The musical programme, courtesy of Mozarteum University Salzburg, will provide a sweet soundtrack to Austria’s vision of the future – one that is built on a respect for tradition coupled with a bright optimism for harmony between man, nature and technology.

An early rendering of the Austria Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka BWM founder and partner Johann Moser and project lead Hubert Meyer The pavilion’s looping structure is designed to resemble musical notation

BWM Designers & Architects
Ahead of the curve in Vienna

“A cliché is a very productive thing to use,” says Johann Moser, the M in the name of celebrated Vienna architecture studio BWM. This idea was front and centre when the firm set about designing the Austria Pavilion. The structure’s defining feature will be a sweeping wooden spiral, designed to resemble a line of musical notes: the opening bars of “Ode to Joy” by Ludwig van Beethoven. The curve of the spiral – made from Austrian spruce and meticulously assembled on-site in Japan – is intended to mimic the movement of a conductor’s baton as an orchestra is led to a crescendo.

Cultural ties between the two nations stretch back to the 19th century. After being largely shielded from outside influences, Japan was beginning to open to the world, driven by a wave of political and cultural modernisation. At the Vienna World’s Fair in 1873, Japanese emissaries presented their nation’s arts and crafts, along with – in another first – soya beans. These caught the eye of an Austrian botanist, Friedrich Haberlandt, who would go on to play a key role in popularising soya-based foods in Europe. But that was not the only connection. Four years before the Vienna World’s Fair, as a gesture of goodwill, Austrian emperor Franz Josef gifted a piano – a Bösendorfer, no less – to Japan’s emperor Meiji.

Sadly, that piano no longer exists but another Bösendorfer will be displayed in one of the pavilion’s three rooms (Bösendorfer has been owned by Japan’s Yamaha since 2008, yet its pianos are exclusively manufactured in Austria). While the other two rooms celebrate Austria’s achievements – including scientific breakthroughs and the social welfare system – the emphasis in this third room is cultural exchange, the essence of Expo 2025 Osaka. “World expos started as competitions between nations, but that’s no longer the case,” says Moser. “These days, every invention, especially in technology, is globalised.”

So, while showcasing the best of Austria, as any national pavilion should, BWM’s design also portrays the country as an equal partner in a fruitful and longstanding cultural dialogue with Japan. Perhaps more crucially, it also reveals Austria as a key player in a broader, interconnected world – one collectively seeking solutions to an uncertain future.

An early maquette of BWM’s design for the Austria Pavilion A rendering of the pavilion’s music-themed exhibits Scan the QR code to find out more about the Austria Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka

Women’s Pavilion
Yuko Nagayama Architecture with (re)purpose
The fact that expo pavilions are, by their nature, ephemeral makes their sustainable credentials even more important than more permanent constructions. Circularity – both in form and function – will be at the heart of the Women’s Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka. Its geometric, wooden kumiko façade is assembled without the use of nails. The materials will be repurposed from the Japan Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai — and the future possibilities for reuse continue.

The Women’s Pavilion will be a courtyard-like space with a long external corridor, typical of the machiya style. Tokyo-based architect Yuko Nagayama was inspired by the narrow Expo 2025 Osaka site. She wanted the structure to convey the planet and its regenerative processes. The steel beams will also be repurposed, as the foundations will employ a low-carbon alternative to concrete developed in Japan that reduces emissions during construction by about half. “The Women’s Pavilion is a testament to the possibilities of reuse,” says Nagayama. “The plants here were collected from the mountains near Osaka and they will be returned there after the Expo.”

And much like the pioneering “Women’s Work” exhibition at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair, this new pavilion aims to create a legacy that can be shared with future generations. Its true success will not be felt when Expo 2025 Osaka closes in October, but decades from now when the impact of these ideas has reverberated around the world.

The Women’s Pavilion is made from wood salvaged from a previous expo The 1873 Vienna World’s Fair pavilion that housed the “Women’s Work” exhibition Architect Yuko Nagayama in her Shinjuku offices

Japan Pavillion
NIKKEN SEKKEI
Designing the circle of life

At any world expo, the host country’s pavilion is guaranteed to be a spectacle. For Expo 2025 Osaka, the Japan Pavilion goes one step further: it’s alive. Inside the grand wooden ring that encircles the site on the artificial island of Yumeshima, any waste created in the pavilion will be given over to a waiting army of microorganisms, which will decompose the garbage and turn it into a biogas that will power the pavilion. It’s a circle of life, found within the round walls.

The Japan Pavilion, designed by Nikken Sekkei, will be a physical manifestation of a holistic philosophy. The question at the heart of the design is a simple one: “What lies in the place between lives?” The basic structure is circular, consisting of hundreds of upright wooden planks. Visitors will see between and around the cross-laminated timbers, which are spaced far apart enough to allow clear lines of sight. The gaps symbolise the spaces between lives. Three entrances and exits will add to the theme of circularity, of constant flow, of a lack of a beginning and end. It’s an invitation to contemplate the liminal, the in-between.When you step inside, the design elements will continue to speak to these themes of connection and circularity, right down to the uniforms worn by the attendants. Designed by Yuya Nakata, the unisex designs will pay homage to the traditional Japanese kimono while encouraging flexibility and individuality. The obi belt can be tied in different ways, allowing each wearer to make it their own.

Nikken Sekkei’s design speaks to Expo 2025 Osaka’s themes of connection and circularity The structure is designed to be easily disassembled for reuse in buildings across Japan after the Expo is over

SHINOHARA SHOTEN
Assembling the spiral in Osaka

Founded in 1974, Shinohara Shoten started out as a seller of lumber and building materials. As one of the five businesses that now comprise the Tokyo-based Shinohara Group, it specialises in wooden architecture and provides structural planning and design, material procurement, pre-cut building manufacture and construction services. Succeeding his father and company founder in 2012, second-generation president Yuichi Shinohara sought to roll out the company’s residential expertise in other sectors.

“Around that time, non-residential wooden architecture was gradually increasing around the world through the use of ‘glulam’ [glued, laminated timber], mass timber and so on, but in Japan it was limited to residential projects,” says Shinohara. A decade later, the company has completed a range of office, school and stadium projects, most notably working on a timber roof for the Japan National Stadium, designed by Kengo Kuma for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. “The successful completion of these projects has proved valuable but, while there is an abundance of wood, we also have the technology required to work it, which can be harder to find,” he adds.

As a member of the Austria Pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka, Shinohara Shoten will lead the on-site installation of the structure’s wooden ribbon, while also sharing its wide-ranging expertise with the project team. The requirement for the design to meet both European and Japanese building standards saw designers working closely with lead structural engineers, Vienna-based Werkraum Ingenieure, to ensure compliance. The design was refined through numerous iterations over almost 12 months.

Upon completion of the design, the 12-metre-high ribbon structure – a spiralling lattice made from Austrian spruce – was manufactured by Graf-Holztechnik in Horn, Lower Austria, before being disassembled and transported to Japan. By the time it arrived in Kobe in December, Shinohara Shoten’s plans for the installation at Yumeshima were firmly in place. In an ideal world, the structure would be constructed in the order of pylons, wooden elements then stainless-steel mesh. However, the combination of a short timeline and a site area that was just 8 metres wide required the structure to be built literally from the ground up. Even the six pylons, each measuring up to 16 metres in length, were transported in segments for assembly on-site. Their arrangement within the spiralling form, fixed to the ribbon at multiple points, left little margin for error and required specialists to position the tips with millimetre-perfect precision.

Having worked closely alongside teams in Austria and Japan, Shinohara believes the realisation of the project’s architectural vision will truly be a sight to behold. “Once the pavilion is complete, I want people to stand back and take in the whole scene: a work of art standing among the bustling crowds,” he says. “Seeing the design for the first time, we thought that it’d be impossible. Creating something like this is incredibly challenging, especially with wood, so when you take it all in, it will be truly magnificent.”

Shinohara Shoten president Yuichi Shinohara and project lead Yoshinori Yajima