The Italian Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka. Interview with the architect Mario Cucinella

The expo is a glamorous and complex festive event, where you will see a something of everything. Hence I felt it would be interesting to propose as a project for the Pavilion elements that characterize our country, such as its recognizability and identity. In particular, I started from four elements: 
- a large entrance porch, to say that there is no door at the entrance but the Pavilion is open to all 
- a great theater, another historic element of the culture of our country recognized worldwide 
- a piazza, a theme of intellect, art, knowledge, and understanding
- and finally a garden, which represents our landscape culture. These are the four themes that I have embodied in the building, with the aim of making Italy recognizable and the visitor experience unique.

Of course, first of all because there are different constraints from making buildings that have to last for years. As I see it, temporariness is closely bound up with the theme of sustainability, since I have designed a building that I did not want to end up as waste. The structure is made of modular wood. Its low-impact technologies and predisposition for post-Expo reuse make it a concrete example of reversible architecture, which focuses on the interaction between people, nature and technology. 

In the end, it will be dismantled piece by piece and so become a construction material again. It seemed to me that this was the best form to give an ephemeral building. 
 

That’s a good question. I don’t know whether the cities of the future will exist. They certainly won’t exist here. We won’t be building new cities anymore, we’ve built them already. But we could talk about cities for the future, focusing on issues such as a concern for people, public space and climate change.

We have to devote our time to preparing these cities for the future.

I feel it’s very important. On the one hand, we must not remove past history. Whenever this has been done, with an extenuating work of rupture, it has produced very damaging results. The balance in Italian culture is to direct attention to the future, but always with very deep roots. 
For me it has always been a bond that I’ve seen not as a prison, a limitation, but as a travelling companion. History has to be continued by relating ourselves to the past without fear, without being too self-referential.