Italy
Studio Fukas

Studio Fuksas drapes glass and steel as if it were fabric over its Milan Trade Fair, a convention center for trade and fashion

	Photo © Giuseppe Blengini/Studio Fuksas

By Paul Bennett

The entire peninsula of Italy is about the size of Arizona. Rome, its largest city, has fewer than three million people, and Milan about half that. More important, Italians are accustomed to small things: narrow streets, Fiat 500s, and demitasses of espresso. But something happened on the plateau between Milan and Turin this past year, and for several months Italy contained the largest construction site in the world.

The result was the Fiera di Milano, or the Milan Trade Fair, a mile-long exhibition fairground designed by Roman architect Massimiliano Fuksas. The Fiera covers 2.1 million square feet, provides 20,000 parking spaces and two-dozen restaurants, and by almost every measure stakes a legitimate claim to being called a megastructure.

The Fiera is a convention center, and so from the start Fuksas grappled with the critical challenge that confronts all overly large buildings of this sort: legibility. How does one design a place like this so that we don’t find ourselves spinning around in mind-numbing circles, consumed, in a way, by the ongoing bigness of the place?

Fuksas dealt with this, first, by creating a strong central image for the building that continually draws the viewer’s attention inward: a glass canopy that bisects the complex and loosely binds together its disparate elements. A waving, undulating gesture, this canopy—nicknamed vela, which is Italian for sail, by the workers—is composed of a steel-mesh armature divided into rhomboid and triangular nodes holding triangular glass panes. In addition to slender steel pillars, the roof is supported by vortexlike parabolas of glass and steel that give the impression that the canopy floats, only touching the earth here and there.

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the People Client Fiera Milano Spa Architect Studio Fukas Massimiliano Fuksas www.fuksas.it Designer and Art director: Doriana O. Mandrelli Project architects: Giorgio Martocchia, Angelo Agostini, Ralf Bock. 3D: Fabio Cibinel Engineer(s) Structural: Schlaich Bergermann und Partner (central axis and services centre). www.sbp.de General contractor Astaldi Spa www.astaldi.it, Vianini Spa, Pizzarotti Spa. Photographers Giuseppe Blengini/Studio Fuksas

the Products Structural System/Cladding Glass roof central axis - glass roof services centre: MERO GmbH & Co. www.mero.de Curtain walls: Permasteelisa spa www.permasteelisa.com Steel structure: Icom Engineering www.icomengineering.it, Ask Romein www.ask-romein.com, Carpentieri d’Italia Roofing Roof components: Bemo Systems www.bemo.com Lighting Lighting system: Lampada Lavinia , di Doriana e Massimiliano Fuksas for iGuzzini