We spent quite a long time studying the competition projects for the Russian pavilion at EXPO in Osaka – the projects submitted for the competition, the results of which were never announced due to our country’s withdrawal from the 2025 World Expo – and discovered that there was not just one competition, but two in fact. The main one, all six projects of which we managed to collect, took place in the middle of 2022, and the first one – at the end of 2021. We also managed to obtain one of the projects from the first competition for publication.

While the pavilion in the second competition was supposed to be dedicated to Time, the theme of the pavilion in the first competition was different – it was planned to be dedicated to the digital twin technology, i.e., a digital model that completely replicates the parameters of a real object and allows tracking and modeling its processes.

Sergey Nebotov explains that there was very little time to work on the project, literally 2 or 3 days; the competition was akin to a short-term student project, the elaboration was minimal, and there were only a few images. At that early moment, the location of the pavilion was also not defined; the architects were offered to choose from several similar, long, pencil-shaped A-type pavilions, located in the eastern part of the exhibition in the “Expanding Life Opportunities” sector oriented with their ends to the plaza. Anyway, this location is very close to the one that was later considered final, and the length of the pavilion’s site is the same, about 90 meters.

The “Novoe” architects focused on the theme of the “digital twin”, naming their pavilion “Mirage”, and taking the 1900 Vrubel painting “Swan Princess” as a starting point: “The Swan Princess is a creature of dual nature, she embodies two elements – the dark, cold water and at the same time the heavenly element, soaring upward. The artist tries to capture the moment of the maiden’s transformation into a bird, a miraculous metamorphosis of forms”. The architects also specify that they sought to capture the transitional state of Russian society; it was the end of 2021.

Ultimately, the architects came up with a composition of several bands of curved mirrored facades with integrated LED lighting.