METAL
Commerce meets Beauty: Milan's New trade fair sets stage for an Architectural Surprise!
Some of the most circulated facts about Milan's new trade fair complex are the claims it occupies a total land area of two million square meters, that it is one of the largest infrastructure projects under construction in Europe, that seven times the amount of steel employed to build the Eiffel Tower was used here...
But what must be seen to be fully appreciated is that something this big can also be beautiful.
Floating above the central axis is an improbably long glass ribbon, which lightly twists and sways as though stirred by a sudden gust of wind.
But this sail, stretching 1,300 meters, or 4,300 feet - the centerpiece to Massimiliano Fuksas's project for Milano Fiera - can only be swayed so far. Composed of 100,000 pieces of glass, each one different and flat to avoid using any curved elements, the sail has a surface area of 47,000 square meters, or 506,000 square feet, and weighs in at 9,000 tons... (continues on page two...)
Fuksas has described the sail as "an explosion" whose very dynamism creates its own architectural landscape. "What I try to do is arrive at an emotion trying to create an experience," he said in a telephone interview. "Architecture should surprise."
That he has. Fuksas has taken essentially simple forms and toyed with them on a grand scale. But it's not the sheer size - or not only - that wows, it's the details.
Conic skylights mimic the Alps in the background and bring light into the pavilions, which alternate steel and orange façades, creating a fluid dialogue between the various structures.
"It's like music," Fuksas said. "Sometimes you repeat a theme, other times there are variations to the themes, at times it's a jam session, a choral ensemble done with simple instruments."
Moving the exhibition grounds from the heart of Milan to the site of an abandoned oil refinery northwest of the city was dictated by the Fiera's need to expand and become more functional and therefore more competitive in the increasingly lively convention and trade fair market.
But when the Fondazione Fiera Milano, a private corporate entity that controls Fiera Milano Spa, commissioned the project, it decided not to sacrifice form for function. It wanted more than just an exhibition center; it wanted architecture.
"Paying not much more, you can create something very beautiful and fault those who don't invest in beauty," Luigi Roth, president and chief executive officer of Fondazione Fiera Milano, said in his office at the old fairgrounds in Milan.Any intervention, he said, was going to be overwhelming so "the aesthetic element had to keep in mind the extraordinary dimensions of the project."
Hence Fuksas's bold glass sail, which runs from east to west along eight pavilions and above an elongated catwalk flanked by a series of bars, cafés, showrooms and retail spaces that will be open to the public, and not just trade fair visitors, after the new Fiera Milano opened on March 31, 2005.
Ten years ago the glass structure, which floats on for hundreds of meters with no lateral support, would have been impossible to build "because the calculations and simulation of the effects required powerful information tools now available that weren't around then," said Claudio Artusi, managing director of Sviluppo Sistema Fiera, the engineering and contracting company set up to oversee the building of the site and the transformation of the old fairgrounds. "It would have remained in the brain of the artist where it was created if technology hadn't been there to help us out."
The trade fair will be inaugurated with two small shows on April, and gradually more trade fairs will be moved from the crowded old grounds to the new site. But it will only be working at full capacity sometime in 2006.
Smaller fairs, or particular ones like fashion week, will remain at some pavilions in the old fairground."We'll start with four or five fairs to get the machine working properly," Roth said.
And Arcusi said: "My satisfaction will be when visitors and exhibits will be satisfied. It means we've done our job."
Iron Forge takes us into the world of custom forging ironworks for designers!
“Forged or Wrought?”: that's the question by the Los Angeles Book Home...
There is often a quaint and romantic veil surrounding the production of ironwork. The gritty truth is that whether a sword or an elegant dining table is being produced, forging metal is and always has been a very noisy, messy, and physically challenging occupation, as the neighbors of an armourer in 14th century England experienced.
And the basics of ironwork haven’t changed that much since Kings of England used to squeeze himself into their suit of armour. Small workshops still heat individual pieces of metal in furnaces until they are malleable enough to be beaten into shape on the anvil and then bent in a form.
New technology has changed the speed, flexibility and possibilities of iron design, especially with production work. With hand forged ironwork each artisan still creates his work with an individual style which (may not be immediately apparent to the casual eye but is nevertheless) an inherent part of the beauty of hand made creations.... (keep reading..)
