The sun-shading design for the Swiss Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan, developed through a collaborative workshop between KYOTO Design Lab and architect Manuel Herz, has received the Nakagawa Chemical Award in the General Category of the 24th CS Design Award.

The CS Design Award, organized by Nakagawa Chemical Co., Ltd., recognizes realized, installed works that use cutting sheets and related decorative sheet materials. In the General Category of the 24th edition, 12 works were selected from 99 entries, with 3 of these receiving the Nakagawa Chemical Award.

This project was conceived as an architectural update — responding to the intense sunlight that became a challenge in the “Heidi Café” on the Swiss Pavilion’s top floor after the Expo opened, while layering new meaning onto the existing structure. To reduce solar heat gain, a heat-reflective cutting sheet was cut into small sticker-like shapes and applied to the inside of the pavilion’s transparent membrane. The shapes take as their motifs Scherenschnitt — a traditional Swiss paper-cutting craft also connected to the pavilion’s exhibition content — and wisteria blossoms, which had originally been planned to surround the building but were never realized. Through the students’ own hands, the landscape envisioned at the planning stage was raised up onto the membrane surface — an attempt to achieve, at once, both functional environmental adjustment and a renewal of the spatial narrative.

The jury’s review noted not only the thermal comfort improvement achieved through the heat-shielding film, but also its design quality, and praised how the sticker format made application easy — creating an opportunity for students to be involved in both fabrication and installation.

Photo © KYOTO Design Lab, Kyoto Institute of Technology