Future Life Village Landscape by eiko tomura landscape architects

The beginning: Yumeshima’s wetlands
The site of the 2025 World Exposition is the artificial island of Yumeshima, located on Osaka Bay. Its construction started in the late 70s as a waste landfill. The island was primarily being used as a logistics center, but had remained largely unused. It quickly started being occupied by nature: a rich wetland environment appeared, becoming home to a wide variety of organisms, including rare endangered algae, and a habitat for many plants and animals.
Now, as the water levels around the world continue to rise, the environment is changing on many scales. Wetlands are one of the environments whose boundaries became more and more blurred, but that are also recognized as having the potential to serve multiple important functions.

The landscape we designed was born from the need to seek new ways of coexisting with various living things and new ways of relating humans to the environment.
The theme of the Future Life Village pavilion is about showing experiences of future lifestyles.
The landscape design takes into account
– the complex mutual interactions between people and nature
– the recycling of water resources
– the reuse of what is considered waste
and it ties them into a proposal for a diverse and healthier future lifestyle.

Coexistence of man and nature
The natural environment of Yumeshima, originally born as a consequence of the landfill, and almost completely wiped out by the Expo construction, is inherited as a memory in the landscape. In addition, as the Expo is an event full of diversity, visited by people from all over the world, diversity was added to nature as well, by introducing environment categories: pond, wet, moist, mesic, dry, rain garden.
In the courtyard of the pavilion, on an concrete paving, a myriad of holes were opened, varying in size from 6 cm to a few meters, and each one assigned to a category. The openings are filled with soils, with water, with plants, with gravel, with moss, and planted with different plant species according to the category each one belongs to. In this way, many different small natures, originally from different environments, are able to coexist next to each other, and they loosely define spaces, routes, sceneries, building mutual relationship with man.
A diversity of shapes, of sizes, of spaces, of sceneries, of people, of discoveries, of interactions, give life to a rich experience of coexistence. As the Expo goes on from April through October, plant seedlings will show us the process of putting their energy into “life”, and an ever changing landscape throughout the event. Microorganisms and animals that live there will gather and gravitate towards their favourite small nature. In the same way, we created a landscape where humans can walk, stop, observe the small natures, sit, and enjoy many small discoveries. Plants, animals, micro organisms, people: they all coexist on an equal footing here.

Water cycle
Water resources are carefully used in a circulation system for a variety of uses, including the formation of micro climates. Rainwater is collected on the roofs of the pavilion units, and flows towards the courtyard garden, where it is catched by a number of rain gardens. Water then moves through sloped slits on the edge of the garden, and through the soil, flooding the various holes and irrigating their plants, eventually ending in the large central pond. The water of the ponds is part of a circulation system: water is collected and sent to radiating units cooling the semi-open exhibition spaces, then it goes up above the gabion walls and sprinkles down, irrigating the gabion plants and cooling the stones and the surrounding environment. Finally, it returns to the garden and the pond. The sustainable use of water resources for many purposes is a very important element of a future lifestyle, and it was precisely designed in this pavilion.

Reuse of waste
The site of the Expo, the island of Yumeshima, was born as a waste landfill. Taking over the story of Yumeshima’s creation and its developments, the Future Life Village makes large use of artificial stones called ‘Yōyūkangenseki’. Even though they are indistinguishable from true stones, they are made by using waste matter from the furnace. Ashes resulting from melting processes are slowly cooled until they crystallize, forming artificial stones, as hard as natural ones. Boundaries and distinctions between artificial and natural are blurred, and the reuse of waste lowers the impact of human activities on the environment.
The ‘Yōyūkangenseki’ stones were used to fill the gabions of the pavilion architecture. Many different plants, such as ferns, ivies and grasses, are placed between the stones, their roots wrapped in small gunny bags filled with soil, and irrigated with water sprinkling from the top of the gabion wall.
The paving of the courtyard garden, including the steeping stones, is a terrazzo floor, which had chips of the artificial stones used as aggregates, making them visible.

• Project typology: pavilion

• All architecture offices involved in the design: KOMPAS

• Other credits:
Photos: Yohei Sasakura (where indicated)
All other pictures: ©eiko tomura landscape architects

• Location of the project:
Expo 2025 Future Life Village
Yumeshima Island, Konohana-ku
Osaka, Japan