Picture a walled garden.  Trees brimming with pomegranates and figs. Fragrant flowers. Decorative tiles. Earthen pathways. The soothing sound of water. 

For more than 2,500 years, gardens have flourished in Uzbekistan. Often enclosed in lush courtyards in the hidden heart of buildings, Uzbek gardens are timeless sanctuaries of beauty and rest, innovation and ideas, intellectual exchange and social connection.

These gardens are spaces where the connective thread between nature and humans is cast in the spotlight as well as human-to-human hospitality – all culminating in a richly connective universal knowledge.

This fragrant world of gardens – and the knowledge that springs forth from them – is the seed of the Uzbekistan Pavilion, as reimagined for modern times through the contemporary vision of ATELIER BRÜCKNER.

One key source of inspiration for the pavilion is Khiva, the ancient UNESCO-listed city renowned as a centre of learning. Here, generations of scholars, artisans, families, merchants have long gathered to share and exchange knowledge in its madrasas and courtyard gardens.

The Uzbekistan Pavilion mirrors the life cycle of such a garden – and in the process, also highlights numerous shared values that the country’s culture timelessly shares with Japan.

An appreciation of the meticulously handcrafted, a natural material palette and an awareness of the beauty of nature are qualities that both Uzbekistan and Japan are known to underpin the cultural DNA of both Uzbekistan as well a Japan. Another shared quality is hospitality – something that can always be experienced through a rich and warm tea ceremony culture in both countries.

Finally, both countries are deeply attuned to the beauty of gardens – in Japan, as a metaphor for the impermanent beauty of human existence and in Uzbekistan as symbol of paradise, abundance and spiritual harmony.

And it is here, where these two cultures overlap, that the Pavilion sits, in a space rooted in craft, human connection, beauty – and ultimately, a timeless sense of knowledge.