This report focuses on the "Festival Plaza (Omatsuri-Hiroba)" designed by Atsushi Ueda (1920-) for the 1970 Osaka Expo and the "forms" that were created in the process of its conception. By carefully examining these matters, I will present a possible methodology about Expo studies. Ueda was in charge of new town development as a technical bureaucrat, and it was his reflection on that experience that led him to the idea of Omatsuri-Hiroba. The model for this idea was the stone pier of a shrine situated in a small island, and after 1970, Ueda's idea was carried over into his proposal for the revival of Osaka as water city, and into the design of a university campus. These achievements configured a ‘sequence’, according to George Kubler's art theory examined in the brilliant book, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1960). If so, the Expo is not a peak but merely a "passing point" in history, and this perspective further enriches our research about the Expo history.
