While the European architecture community recently turned its eyes to the Venice Biennale, the Asian hemisphere focused on Japan—specifically the 2025 World Expo in Kansai, Osaka. With minimal international publicity, the event seems to vanish in today’s global noise. Adding to the challenge, registration and entry lotteries bordered on the absurd. The irony seems lost on the organizers: An event meant to celebrate accessibility and global exchange feels like an airport lounge for the lucky few. It’s tempting to turn away, but that would do a great disservice to the stunning architecture on display.

Because unlike Venice where pavilions are inherited or adapted, the Expo structures are newly built: bold, experimental, and often breathtaking. Encircling the main attractions is a monumental wooden ring—possibly the largest timber structure in the world—which binds the grounds in rare architectural harmony, uniting diverse national styles into a cohesive whole.

The same could be said for the content, however, with less satisfying results: Many pavilions that tried to reflect the Expo’s overarching theme “Designing Future Society for Our Lives” did so with a disappointing sense of sameness. After the third immersive film about oceans, marine life, and our shared planetary responsibility, even the most eager visitors zone out.

At some point, you stop listening and start looking. You notice the ingenuity of the spatial staging in the Dutch or German pavilions. You marvel at experimental forms. And some truly stand out: The Portuguese pavilion, with its sculptural façade of thick gray ropes, echoes the rhythm of ocean waves. The Spanish pavilion draws the eye with its generous staircase—an architectural gesture toward sea and sun. And perhaps most quietly striking is the Swiss pavilion: Light-footed, future-oriented, and built with a minimal ecological footprint it wraps four ground-level spheres in a delicate membrane.

While I can barely recall the Milan Expo of 2015, this year’s Expo in Osaka will stay with me—overflowing with impressions carried above all by the power of architecture. In the end, it’s not the message, but the medium that defines this memorable Expo.

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