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A pavilion that becomes a landscape. Spain Pavilion for Expo 2025 in Osaka

The Spanish Pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka, [Osaka] Japan 13.04 > 13.10.2025 or as its designers have described it, “the construction of a landscape,” is a landscape that dialogues with the setting sun, a symbol shared by Spain and Japan. The project was carried out by the team of architectural firms Enorme Studio, Smart and Green Design, and Néstor Montenegro Mateos, grouped under Kuroshio Osaka 2025.

The pavilion, designed by Enorme Studio, Smart and Green Design, and Néstor Montenegro Mateos, breaks with the image of a “monumental building,” eludes the idea of ​​colossal architecture, and proposes a pavilion that reconstructs a landscape. It generates a welcoming space, a public plaza, a meeting space reminiscent of the Spanish Steps in Rome.

Spanish Pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka by Kuroshio Osaka 2025. Photograph by Arch-Exist.

The façade demonstrates the integration of technology and crafts such as ceramics. The effort to capture the depth of the ocean through a gradient of colors and the brilliance of sunlight, as well as the light reflections achieved through the textured surface of the ceramics, is evident.

The pavilion is built with a wooden portico structure that is repeated up to 40 times at different heights, shaping the building’s various interior volumes. This repetition of porticos creates one of the pavilion’s most distinctive architectural elements: the atrium in the waiting room. This space is designed to protect itself from rain and sunlight while maintaining a constant connection with the outside environment.

The building was constructed with natural and sustainable materials with low environmental impact, including those derived from reuse and recycling processes.

Spanish Pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka by Kuroshio Osaka 2025. Photograph by Arch-Exist.

The issue chosen, to programmatically organise the pavilion’s contents, is “The Kuroshio Current

Inspired by the ocean current that allowed the Basque navigator and missionary Andrés de Urdaneta to chart the strategic return route from Asia to the Americas. For nearly three centuries, this route served as a cultural channel and commercial exchange, fostering prosperity between the two continents.

Familiar to the Japanese during their voyages and first used by the Spanish navigator Andrés de Urdaneta (Guipúzcoa) in 1565 to navigate the route from the Philippines to New Spain, it long served as the key to completing the circumnavigation of the globe to the East and creating one of the most prolific routes for cultural exchange and fusion. The Kuroshio Current (Black Current) is the most powerful current in the Pacific; it originates off Taiwan, washes the coasts of Japan, and reaches as far as the Americas.

Spanish Pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka by Kuroshio Osaka 2025. Photograph by Arch-Exist.

The Kuroshio current uses the ocean and the sun as images to inspire the architecture of the Spanish Pavilion, because they are the most important resources of our planet and symbolize the universal, and also because they allude to a collective identity that has been forged by our geography as a peninsula celebrating a way of life, the Spanish one, intimately linked to our environment and strongly linked to the sea and the sun, a country open to its visitors.

The visitor experience

The Kuroshio current uses the ocean and the sun as images to inspire the architecture of the Spanish Pavilion, because they are the most important resources of our planet and symbolize the universal, and also because they allude to a collective identity that has been forged by our geography as a peninsula celebrating a way of life, the Spanish one, intimately linked to our environment and strongly linked to the sea and the sun, a country open to its visitors.

This is an extract from the METALOCUS article by Sara Gent

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