Osaka’s biggest architecture weekend lands this Saturday and Sunday. Ikefes Osaka – officially the Living Architecture Museum Festival, or Open House Osaka in English – opens buildings across the city for free on Oct 24 and 25, with extra pre and after programs on the days around them. The organizer’s count is 224 participating buildings and sites as of Aug 27.

The published list runs across the city and down the scale: big complexes like the Umeda Sky Building, Osaka Station City, Herbis Osaka and Breeze Tower sit alongside a capsule inn, an architecture studio’s own office and individual entries inside the Osaka Ekimae Dai-ichi Building. A map and a program search are on the official site, and a printed guidebook is sold separately.

Participation is free. Some programs – special tours, talks and small-group visits – needed advance applications. The lottery round for those closed Oct 12 and the results are out; if the notification email never arrived, logging in on the festival site shows the outcome. A first-come additional round for programs with spare capacity opened Oct 17 and closes as each program fills. The day-by-day timetable went up the same day.

Worth knowing before you plan: “open” covers a range. The list runs from offices, cafes and landmarks you can partly enter any week to spaces and tours that only exist this weekend, so what each building offers – and whether anything inside costs money – is on its own program page.

Source: the official Ikefes Osaka 2026 site and its Oct 15 and Oct 17 notices. Checked Oct 19, 2026. More like this on The Menu and the this-week hub.