Think of it as a tiny house of produce.

Known as "Inochi no Izumi" (??????), or "Source of Life," the dome became one of the standout pieces of ingenuity on show at the Osaka Health Pavilion on Yumeshima Island. The 6.4-m-high (21-ft), 7-m-diameter (23-ft) dome, built to symbolize the Earth, sits atop a base containing four different water zones that provide the living engine of this closed-loop ecoystem.

The dome itself has a surface area of 128 sq m (1,378 sq ft), made up of transparent ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) panels for the outer skin, supported by VikingDome's T-STAR system of 245 steel structural bars, connected with 76 joins on the sphere and 10 on the base. The entire unit, with materials transported to the site in three pallets, weighs a massive 2,111 kg (4,655 lb).

The dome itself is designed to maximize sunlight and maintain a stable internal climate – but the real innovation is found inside it. A horizontally divided aquatic base supports four vertically stacked plant layers. Rather than a conventional floor-by-floor layout, the dome houses a kind of ecological cross-section, where different salinity zones and their matching crops work together in a regulated loop.

At the base are four compartments housing seawater, brackish water and two freshwater tanks. Each supports aquatic species adapted to those conditions, from marine fish and shellfish to carp-like freshwater species. These animals form the starting point of the nutrient cycle crucial for the life above. As they excrete ammonia-rich waste, specialized microbes convert it first into nitrites and then into plant-usable nitrates.