EXPO 2025: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING

DESIGN/FABRICATION: Bickerstaff.734

FABRICATION: Bickerstaff.734

Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as a “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Yet while Russia tries to reduce Ukraine to smoke and rubble, its brutal attacks haven't made a dent in the resilient country's core values — a feat captured in the confines of its small space at Expo 2025.

Under the provocative theme “Not for Sale,” Ukraine's pavilion was designed in the guise of a store where you can buy absolutely nothing. From walls to wares, the pavilion and everything in it were enveloped entirely in the country's colors of blue and gold. The stunning space featured 18 items — such as a rose, a globe, or a model horse — that symbolized the country's values, all in deep blue and most of them manufactured of 3-D printed plastic.

Every day the staff armed thousands of visitors with a price gun, which they used to scan the QR code on objects' price tags. Instead of the cost of cosmetics or computers popping up, what appeared was a short video on the gun's screen. Click the object shaped like an M, which stood for the logo of the metro system in Kharkiv, and you witnessed a video of children studying their schoolbooks in the subway underground while the air above them shrieked with bombs. Click next on a headlamp — the type commonly used by construction workers for repairs — and you watched doctors operating with nothing more than the light of a smart phone to guide their surgeries.

Neighboring the pavilion was another smaller, equally stark space. Here were actual relics of the war: a raft; a helmet from DTEK, whose workers restore electricity for millions under relentless Russian shelling; and a bullet-smashed yet still working siren system that might be a metaphor for Ukraine itself. Thousands passed through the pavilion every day for the six months of Expo 2025, as many as 1,500 an hour, silent as if in church and reverent as if pilgrims at a shrine.