Architect Atsushi Kitagawara’s Japan Pavilion earned Gold Prize winner for best exhibition design at Expo Milano 2015 for its computer-graphic images and washoku—traditional Japanese cuisine.
The interactive digital installation Harmony, created by teamLab, had visitors walking a six-minute loop through screens of rice, installed at various heights. The projected images change depending on the visitors’ movements.
“This interactive art installation creates a space where visitors look as if they are wading their way through the rice fields,” teamLab explains on their website. “As they wander around, people can experience a passing of nature that is characteristic of Japan across the period of a whole year.”
Entitled “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life,” the entire exhibition followed the theme of harmonious diversity, including the pavilion itself. Constructed with traditional Japanese wooden structure techniques, a compressive strain method showed joints made entirely from wood.
