The High Cost of Living
DESIGN/FABRICATION: Bickerstaff.734
FABRICATION: Bickerstaff.734

Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as a “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Yet while Russia tries to reduce Ukraine to smoke and rubble, its brutal attacks haven't made a dent in the resilient country's core values — a feat captured in the confines of its small space at Expo 2025.




Under the provocative theme “Not for Sale,” Ukraine's pavilion was designed in the guise of a store where you can buy absolutely nothing. From walls to wares, the pavilion and everything in it were enveloped entirely in the country's colors of blue and gold. The stunning space featured 18 items — such as a rose, a globe, or a model horse — that symbolized the country's values, all in deep blue and most of them manufactured of 3-D printed plastic.




Every day the staff armed thousands of visitors with a price gun, which they used to scan the QR code on objects' price tags. Instead of the cost of cosmetics or computers popping up, what appeared was a short video on the gun's screen. Click the object shaped like an M, which stood for the logo of the metro system in Kharkiv, and you witnessed a video of children studying their schoolbooks in the subway underground while the air above them shrieked with bombs. Click next on a headlamp — the type commonly used by construction workers for repairs — and you watched doctors operating with nothing more than the light of a smart phone to guide their surgeries.



Neighboring the pavilion was another smaller, equally stark space. Here were actual relics of the war: a raft; a helmet from DTEK, whose workers restore electricity for millions under relentless Russian shelling; and a bullet-smashed yet still working siren system that might be a metaphor for Ukraine itself. Thousands passed through the pavilion every day for the six months of Expo 2025, as many as 1,500 an hour, silent as if in church and reverent as if pilgrims at a shrine.

Fire and Ice
DESIGN/FABRICATION: TARHIV Architecture & Urbanism Ltd.

AAlmost every pavilion at every World Expo, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, had one thing in common: thermostats locked at a constant temperature. Croatia turned this standard inside out and upside down in a first-of-its-kind pavilion called “Climadiversity” that exported its weather 5,800 miles to Japan.



To call attention to the way climate has shaped human culture and the way human culture has shaped climate, the Balkan country filled its pavilion with 13 kilometers — about eight miles — of water-filled tubes that snaked through the 53-square-meter space (roughly 570 square feet) floor-to-ceiling like a rainforest of piping. More than just an avant-garde work of art, the plastic conduits and the three tons of liquid coursing through them varied in temperature depending on where you stood in any of five different areas. Guests could tell whether a section ran hotter or cooler based on the ambient feel but also by the color of the fluid. The temps in these micro-climate zones were neither random nor constant, however. The relative coldness or warmth could change every 30 minutes depending on weather data transmitted live from 45 weather stations in Croatia, bringing the country's climate to the Expo almost in real time.




A subtle gradation in the pavilion's floor took the 2,500 daily attendees — usually six at a time — upward so that they climbed from warmer locations at the bottom that represented the seaside to cooler ones at the top that represented the mountains, just as they would in Croatia itself. When guests entered any of the areas, their own body heat altered the hyper-local climate, fulfilling the designers' aim. To demonstrate this even more vividly, a series of monitors displayed the guests' thermal images, showing the temps of their body and the area around them. Reds, yellows, and oranges indicated a hotter location, while blues designated a cooler setting. To capture these glowing experiences, visitors could access and download the images, creating a kind of weather front that extended far beyond the borders of the pavilion.



What new stories about melting icebergs and rising sea levels cannot always achieve, Croatia's pavilion did in a way you could feel on your skin. It showed that the fate of the climate is our fate as well, linked as tightly as Earth and gravity, cause and effect.

Threads of Time
DESIGN: Shifa Zghoul and Ahmad Jubra
FABRICATION: Daiko Nitten

Jordan may be small, but its impact on the world is huge. It's home to several Dead Sea Scroll discoveries, and archaeologists found there the oldest-known evidence of bread-baking — about 14,000 years old, predating by far the arrival of agriculture. In the same way, the Jordan pavilion at Expo 2025 measured a modest 300 square meters but offered an experience rivaling those that were more than 10 times its size with budgets to match. Designed by architects Shifa Zghoul and Ahmad Jubra with the theme “Weaving Possibilities,” the pavilion's exterior set the tone with a kinetic aluminum facade inspired by the red-and-white Jordanian shemagh, the traditional headdress. Inside, instead of the expected array of travel posters and tchotchkes a diminutive country often outfits its pavilion with at a World Expo, visitors discovered an experience rich in history and aesthetics.




Naoki Kusumi, a Japanese artist renowned for his sublime mastery of plaster, created a red mud wall that evoked Jordan's ancient rose-red city of Petra. Using a variety of natural earth pigments and layered-plaster techniques, Kusumi created a tactile surface suggestive of Petra's streaked rock formations and the surrounding desert's ever-shifting sands. Although only a few months old, the wall could have been a contemporary of the Magi or the Ceasars. The journey through Jordan continued with an installation by textile artist Ishraq Zraikat. Called “Passage,” the weaving's horizontal light stripes on dark brown and black goat hair referred to the Bedouin tent, a “house without a door” that symbolizes Arab hospitality. Across from it was the Stone Piano (aka Desert Soundscape). Designed by architect/artist/geologist Ammar Khammash, it consisted of a series of 500-million-year-old limestone blocks that were transformed into a unique xylophone so ancient it came from a time when the day was only around 22 hours long. The limestone wasn't carved to make the correct tone. Instead, each fossil was tested in the desert to see what note it would sound. When visitors struck the blocks with a mallet, the ethereal sounds were visually translated into notes projected on “Strata,” another Zraikat weaving above.








The journey ended at the Theater of Civilizations, where visitors were asked to slip off their shoes and socks and step into the circular space where they could rest on 22 tons of red sand shipped in from the Wadi Rum. Once people sat, the lights dimmed and the stars came out over the fabled sandy wilderness on a 360-degree projection screen, and a live narrator introduced the natural magic of the UNESCO Heritage site in multiple languages. Even when the show ended, people lingered as if moving would break the spell of being in an enchanted land. “If you want to keep people in your pavilion,” joked Zghoul, who also served as the Jordan's commissioner general for the pavilion, “take their shoes.” However, stealing footwear wasn't necessary in a pavilion every bit the marvel that ancient cities and legendary deserts are.

Food for Thought
DESIGN: Kengo Kuma & Associates
FABRICATION: Orange and Partners

Before tucking into a meal in Japan, it's customary to say “itadakimasu.” The phrase, which translates into English as “I receive,” expresses a profound gratitude to those who toil or sacrifice to produce the food that sits before you. That moment of grace is expressed in a series of bravura exhibits within the Earth Mart pavilion that feels like a multi-course menu of ideas that forces visitors to confront the sometimes uncomfortable stories behind their food consumption.



The pavilion stood out against its nearby science-fiction-inspired neighbors — one mirroring a family of Borg cubes, and another echoing a manta ray — with a thatched roof made from reeds collected from five regions across Japan. No arbitrary choice on the designers' part, the biodegradable reeds honored the architecture of ancient Japan and symbolized satoyama, the philosophy that Japanese villages lived by for more than 30 centuries, one of sustainable harmony with their nearby forests and mountains.

Inside, the pavilion was as sleek and polished as a bullet train. An introductory film depicted a man sitting down to eat, offering “itadakimasu” as a kind of appetizer for the exhibits ahead. Most importantly, it asked the first of several variations of the question: How many lives do we need to consume to live?



Composing two main zones, the pavilion's first section was the “Marketplace of Life,” which visualized the total amount of food a person might consume in their lifetime, using sculpture as an infographic. For example, a centerpiece of 28,000 eggs, the estimated number an average Japanese person consumes in a single lifetime, funnels down to a massive sunny-side-up egg scaled to match the meal those thousands of eggs would produce. Another ceiling element depicted a silver cloud of 3,000 to 4,000 sardines tapering down to a solitary package of three resting in a supermarket-like frozen-foods display, the .1 percent of the fish that survive nature long enough to make it to the grocery store. Underscoring this illustration of Darwin in action, silhouettes of sharks (a major predator of sardines) are projected on the floor in front of the display case.




A series of black and white photos of a cow, pig, and a chicken by livestock photographer Akari Takimi appeared on three monitors looming over a plastic shrink-wrapped hunk of beef. Tender, even loving, the pictures pressed home the theme of the sheer number of lives that sustain our own. Another photographic series by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio called “Hungry Planet” came at the question from a different angle: portraits of families from Mongolia to Mexico, with a typical week's worth of food piled in front of them.

A series of scales set low enough for children to easily access invited visitors to lift items from a shopping basket — a carton of milk, say, or a jar of honey — and set them down on a digital scale. Instead of the item's weight popping up, an animation appeared on a screen set below the scale explaining the item's true cost to the environment or in human labor.



A towering shopping cart, made of materials similar to those used for Japanese lanterns, was big enough to contain about 10 years' worth of food that a single Japanese person ingests. The neighboring walls played off this with infographics comparing Japanese consumption to other nationalities. (Americans gulp down about 70 percent more than the Japanese.)

The second section, “Marketplace of the Future,” looked like a minimalist Apple store, but rather than the latest tech gadgets, on display were 25 typical Japanese ingredients such as rice flour, daikon radish and sweet red bean paste, as well as traditional means of preparing foods, including fermentation. While these are rooted in a gastronomic heritage stretching back centuries, the nourishments are known for their balance of nutrition and eco-friendliness, which were then reinterpreted by five chefs, including ones from Venezuela and France, who offered unusual twists on them. Another exhibit showcased “Evolving Frozen Foods,” serving up innovations like vegetables, meat, eggs and other ingredients that were frozen, pulverized into a powder, and then reshaped into rice grains. One variety was the self-explanatory “salad rice,” while another version was “family rice,” modeled after oyakodon, a bowl of rice capped with chicken and eggs.



Most intriguing was Roku-Shoku, developed by Sony Group Corp. Perhaps best described as “culinary recording,” the system meticulously chronicles everything in how a recipe is prepared, from the exact weight of ingredients and mixing methods to cooking temperatures and the precise arm motions of the cook — meaning that you might be able to preserve your grandmother's lasagna recipe and recreate it perfectly forever.

At the closing, guests circled a massive dining-room table while a rush of images were projected on large white plates at each setting showing the delight of shared food. Most meals conclude with a dessert, but his one ended on something even sweeter: itadakimasu.