Amidst the city and its surrounding territory, a new building for Milan Trade Fair.
The manner in which the city of Milan, as it encounters the cities of Rho and Pero and subsequently seeks out and defines a new form of interaction with the landscape, has been and will continue to be a “threshold” where the city turns into land and the land starts to become a city, metropolis and space suspended between nature and artifice.
The axis and desire to look west, towards Turin and France, was once boldly outlined by Napoleon, when Sempione was the shortest road link between the fairs in Champagner in northern France and business centres in Northern Italy, particularly Milan.
Today these links have finally been strengthened and will permanently look towards Europe from west to east - at least that is the plan - and infrastructural strategies have been backed up and supported by important building projects such as the new Trade Fair, the forthcoming Expo 2015, and transformations to bordering areas, which, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, will raise Milan to a new international status, provided they are studied and developed intelligently based on scenarios drawing on a new overall vision (for Milan and its surrounding territory) and specific solutions.
This introduction is not supposed to be a mere preamble to an important architectural project, designed to fit into the present and future "scale" of the area in question. Our attitude to the architecture is that of proposing a project which provides a specific solution to a specific "setting", shunning the idea that a sign, icon and/or stylistic idiom can define themselves alone in a self-referential manner as the answer to every problem.
The setting is what we find looking at things as they are, understanding why they are so and the values of their "real" being; the project aims to respond to this input and propose something new, transforming "reality" in a responsible and non-cynical manner. Unfortunately, nowadays architecture runs along the dangerous lines of self-reference and cynicism.
We are now fortunate enough to be taking on a project which has managed to provide a balanced, pragmatic and visionary solution, capable of creating and inventing a place (never previously there) and "constructing it" through a vision based on accumulation, stratification and interaction. The Trade Fair, just like other important public buildings set along the axis of Sempione, has managed to create a place with its own distinctive identity, so we would like to confront and dialogue with the setting without overwhelming or being overwhelmed by it.
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