Foster + Partners is designing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s pavilion for Expo 2025 Osaka, Japan. Located on the Yumeshima waterfront, the pavilion creates a spatial experience that echoes the exploration of Saudi Arabian towns and cities, provides a setting for immersive audio-visual engagement, and connects visitors with the undiscovered wonders of Saudi Arabia.

Expo 2025 is an upcoming World Expo organized and sanctioned by the Bureau International des Expositions, which will be held in Osaka, Japan. It will take place for six months during 2025, opening on 13 April 2025 and closing on 13 October 2025.
Foster + Partners designed the pavilion’s mass recalling the organic shapes of traditional Saudi villages and has been carefully designed using computational fluid dynamics simulations, to allow cool winds from the west into the streets during the height of summer. In the cooler months of April and October, the landscaped forecourt acts as a barrier to protect the pavilion from harsher northerly winds.

The pavilion’s massing recalls the organic shapes of traditional Saudi villages and has been carefully designed using computational fluid dynamics simulations, to allow cool winds from the west into the streets during the height of summer. In the cooler months of April and October, the landscaped forecourt acts as a barrier to protect the pavilion from harsher northerly winds.

Visitors enter the pavilion through a verdant forecourt, planted with Saudi Arabian flora, and walk through narrow streets that lead to the Saudi Courtyard, which is the beating heart of the scheme. The courtyard allows for moments of quiet reflection during the day and transforms into a venue for performances and events at night. From here, visitors are invited to explore a ‘village’ of meandering streets, with windows and doorways into a series of immersive spaces, designed in close collaboration with 59 Productions and Squint/Opera.

The pavilion is made from low-carbon materials, includes energy-saving luminaires, adopts rainwater recycling, and incorporates photovoltaic technologies that generate electricity. The project aims to achieve the Japanese green building rating system’s highest level and is on track to achieve the Net Zero Operational Carbon target. In addition, a series of WELL design principles have been implemented to enhance the health and well-being of occupants.
 
“Creating a legacy for the pavilion, once the Expo comes to an end, has been central to the design process. The structure’s cladding is made from lightweight Saudi stone and designed to be efficiently deconstructed and reassembled, or completely reconfigured, to meet different requirements in a future location.”
Tony Miki, Partner, Foster + Partners

This inherent flexibility will significantly extend the lifespan of the pavilion and enhance its sustainable credentials.

Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

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