© Raffaele Pernice
Glimpse of the Future in a Changing Nation.
Japan and the Osaka International Expos 1970 and 2025.
Dr. Raffaele Pernice (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)
Japan has traditionally been regarded by architects and planners as a living laboratory, a country that has often anticipated, and refined, futuristic visions of cities and an unstoppable urban change. For decades, technology, alongside a persistent discourse on the value of local traditional cultural and social structures, has catalysed the country’s design creativity, fostering the imagination of Japanese architects, designers, engineers, and planners to pursue innovative concepts and propose bold urban projects. Paradigm shifts in architectural practice and urban design theory are especially visible in the experimental projects and urban visions presented at the Osaka World Expositions of 1970 and 2025, which together reflect the radical transformations in the built environment, design aspirations, technological development, and pressing social and environmental concerns that emerged across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Japan and globally.
This presentation will outline the key drivers of the evolution of the built environment, urban ideas, architectural forms, and planning strategies in Japan since the postwar period, and how they have progressively responded to external economic, social, and cultural forces, and in the context of increasingly urgent environmental concerns.
Raffaele Pernice is an Italian architect and Senior Lecturer in the School of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) in Australia. He holds a PhD in Architecture from Waseda University in Tokyo, and a Master of Architecture degree from IUAV University of Venice, in Italy. From 2007 to 2009 he was a JSPS post-doc research fellow at Graduate School of Engineering and Design of Hosei University in Tokyo, where he further expanded his studies on modern Japanese architectural history and urban planning and design theories.
Dr. Pernice research interests and activities range from practice to theory and history of architecture and city planning and urban design, with particular attention to the transformation and urban development of the cities of Japan and the urbanism of the Asian Pacific region. His research has been supported with scholarships and grants from academic and international institutions, such as the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT), the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE), the Japan Foundation, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), among others.
He is editor of Waterfront Regeneration in a Time of Climate Change: Recent Japanese and International Experiences (Routledge 2025) and The Urbanism of Metabolism. Visions, Scenarios and Models for the Mutant City of Tomorrow (Routledge 2022).
The lecture will be held in person at the Japan Center, LMU Munich.
Venue: Japan Center, LMU Munich, Seminar Building at the English Garden, Oettingenstraße 67, 80538 Munich, Room 151
No prior registration is required.