L'Arca International N° 110
January / February 2013
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Nourishing the mind
Milan will be hosting a World Trade Fair in 2015, a uniquely important event for the nations that organise them, almost on the same standing at an Olympics or Football World Cup. An event which throughout history has always seen its host nations invest vast resources in terms of both money and design expertise. Architecture has inevitably played a starring role in World Expos, since it has always managed to take advantage of them as unique and major opportunities for experimenting on a design, structural engineering and aesthetic level.
Just take the 1851 World Trade Fair in London, when the construction of the “Crystal Palace” resulted in an incredible leap forward in construction and design techniques that are still widely used today.
Despite all the national capital being invested in Milan, it would seem, in contrast, that the organisation (curiously coming entirely from Milan with very little outside aid) has decided to cast aside any cultural ambition to create something significant in terms of architectural and town-planning quality, as has always been the case with Expos in the past. Perhaps it no longer believes it is possible to astound people through amazingly original projects and has opted instead, at least so it would seem, to focus solely on the far-reaching implications of the Expo theme.
This month, just over two years before the official opening date, this lack of architectural ambition has been made even more clear by the fact that only one architectural competition has been launched to design the Italian Pavilion based on a very ‘malicious? tender: the tender was presented on 30th November (with very little international and national publicity) and entries are open from 17th December-31st January 2013, with projects to be handed in by 20th February 2013.
Entries will not so much be an ideas project as a preliminary project or, in other words, something extremely intricate and tricky to devise in just two months, with no information being provided about the nature of the jury and (something that has never happened before in the case of a national pavilion) selection of entrants being based on the turnover and number of staff employed by the architectural designers. A decision that eliminates ninety percent of European architects and opens up the door for engineering companies and enterprises, once again pushing young professionals out of the picture: perhaps the only people really capable of proposing something innovative.
If this method had been used for the great competitions in the past, destined to leave their mark on the history of architecture, we would never have seen the Pompidou Centre built in Paris, because it was designed by four young Italian and English architects just over thirty years of age after winning a major international competition.
I will not hide that fact that I am, and we are, concerned about the overall urban master plan that is based on an old-fashioned and very simple principle (the kind of cardo and decumanus now only used for centuries) without any information about how the site will be used after the event and without any internal means of mechanical transportation forcing the elderly to walk around for long periods.
At this point it seems obvious that the basic idea is to construct around, illustrate and focus on the main them: “feeding the planet” based solely on nutrition and production in the realm of food for human beings and abandoning any idea of “nourishing” the mind, something equally important and useful for living well and not just surviving.
Cesare Maria Casati
