The Milan Trade Fair new complex will offer complementary services that will help it to blend with the surrounding area: the area will provide an extensive parking system, vast landscaped areas and a wide range of compatible services, such as hotels, stores, cafés, bars and restaurants, and recreational facilities. It is the place of meeting, of ideological exchange, of relationships, of opportunities. The building is a great architectural project for the country. Its dimension renders it one of the major complex nowadays on building in Europe.

Constructed in response to the city’s need to expand its over-charged convention and exhibition activities at the Milano Fiera City, where many of the fashion shows held, the new space will compete with other large venues around the world. Despite the cultural importance of the conventions and exhibitions that it hosted in its fairgrounds, including the yearly furniture show, the city was being rapidly outpaced by others like Chicago and Frankfurt in the global competition for international scale trade shows. At the same time, the European Union was looking to invest in a brownfields cleanup project in the industrial and postindustrial suburban megalopolis that extends 193 kilometers from Milan to Turin. The E.U. agreed to clean up a former AGIP gas refinery near a primary highway intersection connecting eastern and western Italy to the northern reaches of Europe if the city would build a $700 million trade-show complex on the space.

The cleanup took just over a year and involved substantial removal and chemical cleaning of the soil, before Fuksas was commissioned for the design. The abandoned areas and suburbs call for important interventions also the starting point. The architect thought about a unitary complex, of simple geometry. “When you build one million square meters, you really don’t know if what you envisioned will be good or bad,” says Massimiliano Fuksas, who based his office in Rome.

The Milan Trade Fair defies any notion that what is functional must be boring. Rather than imitating the hangar-like style of most convention centers, the building creates a sense of a protected playground under the open glass canopy. Fuksas adds to the futuristic fantasy with four steel-clad pods that serve as conference rooms. These stand on insect-like legs over shallow black reflecting pools. The play of reflections continues on the pods’ shiny steel walls mirroring the orange fronts of buildings across from them. It is designed to be efficient and functional for the people who must work there, be they exhibitors or visitors.

The structure has been designed to allow several shows to be staged at the same time, even events that are not related to trade fairs, and to streamline the enormous flows of people and goods. The Fiera covers 1 million square meter and by almost every measure stakes a legitimate claim to being called a mega structure. Compatible services will occupy an overall area of 60,000 square meters: 37,500 occupied by 3-4 star hotels in the southern area, 9,000 for hotel-related services (bars, cafés and restaurants, fitness centers and multifunctional spaces), and 13,500 for a shopping arcade with 150/200 stores selling typical and top quality products from Lombardy. Numerous parking spaces are also incorporated, a lot with 10,000 parking spaces adjacent to the exhibition grounds, and an additional 10,000 in an estimated area. 1.5 kilometers away that is also the property of Fondazione Fiera. “The new Fiera is not a building,” says Fuksas. “It’s too big. Some 50,000 people could live inside of it.” Fuksas considers it, “a city in itself, but it’s not a city.”

The Milan Trade Fair design is characterized by the great central axis: the great transparent coverage modifies spaces and represents the continuity of the vision. The service center, the offices, the convention area, are the core of the entire system: transition from entrance to central axis. On the sides, the pavilions, with big facades made of reflecting metal (of more than 200 meters for the two-level pavilions), bring back the life and the images of the pathway. The entrances are signal and event.

According to Giuseppe Blengini, an on-site project architect, the design of the Fiera followed the same process that all of the firm’s projects undergo. It began as a rough, conceptual sketch by Massimiliano Fuksas himself. In this case, the inspiration came from the local landscape, a random composition of natural elements and some unnatural ones, including a “mountain of steel,” emblematic of northern Italy’s industrial landscape. This sketch was worked into a model, which was then computerized using Rhino 3D modeling software, a program favored by industrial designers and conducive to sculptural work. Blengini says that the back-and-forth between sketch, model, and computer was repeated dozens of times, under the surveillance from the architect himself.

The free-form glass and steel structure, which looks light and airy, didn’t come easily. The steel grid structure is made of geometric modules connected together with nodes or circular joints at the intersections of the steel rods or struts; named sail by Fuksas. The entire project was completed in 27 months, lightningfast in Italian terms. “It took three months to do the first 100 meters of the sail structure, and then it took only eight months to complete the rest.,” says Fuksas. “The hard part was the vision. The scale is so immense that we never fully comprehended the project until it was done. When they first started constructing the sail, they said it couldn’t be done. It was the first time in history that they used the nodes in this way. Each of the more than 26,000 nodes were unique in that they had to be customized to adapt to the particular form at each connecting point to create the apparent undulations of the sail.”

The building is designed to harness Milan’s solid waste, treated at a “heat-valuator plant” a short distance away, as fuel to produce its heat and some electricity. Walls treated with a special photo catalytic titanium-based paint oxidize or decompose pollutants present in the atmosphere. The paint covers more than 100,000 square meters of surface area, and its manufacturer claims it can neutralize the pollution produced by 30,000 vehicles, the average number arriving daily for exhibitions.

Fuksas, who prefers to be an impediment to penetrate the U.S. segment, says, “we architects are part of the artists’ world. We need to evoke emotion.” His design does just that, thrilling visitors with the unpredictable rises and dramatic descents of the structure that resembles lacework. In addition to garnering attention for its innovative design, the convention center also won the Urban Land Institute’s 2006 Award for Excellence for its ecology and land reclamation. Built on an Agip oil refinery site at the end of the Rho-Pero metro line and lodged between downtown and the Airport, the site reduces traffic congestion related to the Milano Fiera City convention center.

In this project, Fuksas depicts architecture as “a ‘contaminated’ art: it lives of other universes, it observes modifications and changes, and it attempts to synthetically represent what happens. Architecture is not only inspired by architecture, but it tends to comprehend and to talk to everyone. In a moment of very few ‘visions’ looking to the future, and the mere running of quotidian life and of existence, this project seems to be part of the European more dynamic scenery. It exists a demand and a desire of architecture, of emotions. This project is ambitious. It is addressed to future visitors, and, firstly, it tries to pay much attention to people who will work and spend their days inside the New Milan Trade Fair. Our country resumes a route which has been interrupted for more than 30 years, thus putting under construction one of the most important international trade fair complex.”

[Show as slideshow]