EXPO 2025: FIRE AND ICE

DESIGN/FABRICATION: TARHIV Architecture & Urbanism Ltd.

Almost every pavilion at every World Expo, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, had one thing in common: thermostats locked at a constant temperature. Croatia turned this standard inside out and upside down in a first-of-its-kind pavilion called “Climadiversity” that exported its weather 5,800 miles to Japan.

To call attention to the way climate has shaped human culture and the way human culture has shaped climate, the Balkan country filled its pavilion with 13 kilometers — about eight miles — of water-filled tubes that snaked through the 53-square-meter space (roughly 570 square feet) floor-to-ceiling like a rainforest of piping. More than just an avant-garde work of art, the plastic conduits and the three tons of liquid coursing through them varied in temperature depending on where you stood in any of five different areas. Guests could tell whether a section ran hotter or cooler based on the ambient feel but also by the color of the fluid. The temps in these micro-climate zones were neither random nor constant, however. The relative coldness or warmth could change every 30 minutes depending on weather data transmitted live from 45 weather stations in Croatia, bringing the country's climate to the Expo almost in real time.

A subtle gradation in the pavilion's floor took the 2,500 daily attendees — usually six at a time — upward so that they climbed from warmer locations at the bottom that represented the seaside to cooler ones at the top that represented the mountains, just as they would in Croatia itself. When guests entered any of the areas, their own body heat altered the hyper-local climate, fulfilling the designers' aim. To demonstrate this even more vividly, a series of monitors displayed the guests' thermal images, showing the temps of their body and the area around them. Reds, yellows, and oranges indicated a hotter location, while blues designated a cooler setting. To capture these glowing experiences, visitors could access and download the images, creating a kind of weather front that extended far beyond the borders of the pavilion.

What new stories about melting icebergs and rising sea levels cannot always achieve, Croatia's pavilion did in a way you could feel on your skin. It showed that the fate of the climate is our fate as well, linked as tightly as Earth and gravity, cause and effect.