From Utopia to Ubiquity                     Moving Walkways at Expo ‘70       

Date Spring 2025
Location Yale Architecture Gallery, New Haven
Co-curator Zicheng (Roy) Zhang


One of the allures of world expositions historically is that it is a space-time exception where architectures of past and future collide in the present. Their architectural innovations propose and incubate new ways of living in cities, and many of the seemingly radical innovations presented end up acclimating into everyday life. A notable example is the moving walkways at the 1970 Osaka Expo (Expo ’70). Its designers synthesized a theoretical discourse around techno-utopian urbanism and the flourishing manufacturing industries of Japan in proposing a solution to manage the rapid densification of cities. Their present ubiquity belies their novelty just forty years ago – as a social apparatus, an aestheticization of technology, and transportation infrastructure.

The 1970 Osaka Expo is remembered as the apotheosis of the Metabolism movement in Japanese architecture. Although we now live in a very different future from the one dreamt up fifty years ago, parts of that imaginary persist in today’s urban fabric. Emblematic of this ecology of architectural objects that made its way from utopia to ubiquity is the moving walkway. Although unassumingly ever-present today, the idea that cities could be interconnected through a continuous network was a novel subject of design and theorization in the 1960s. To show this, we selected a range of objects and materials from the Kenzo Tange archive in Harvard’s Loeb Special Collections as well as the Japanese National Diet Library; these ranged from plans, sections, photographs, drafts, and archival documents.