The Italian Pavilion by baukuh

The baukuh project for the Italian pavilion in Shanghai is a squarish box that contains a single room

The main element that the pavilion exhibits at the Expo is the pavilion itself. As such, more than a building, the pavilion is a model, an example of the culture to which it belongs. A pavilion does not host functions, or satisfy needs. Rather, it is merely a model for other possible buildings: a building that embodies an entire set of other potential buildings. The Italian pavilion for the 2010 Shanghai Expo is a spectacular building. The Expo, in fact, is a fair or a festival, and the pavilion therefore has to be a festive building. Yet the compulsion to amaze that contemporary architecture cannot escape cannot be the reason for vulgar, nonsensical solutions.

The pavilion has to amaze and to remain inside of a rigorous idea of architecture. The spectacle produced in the pavilion has to be a spectacle of space. The pavilion is a squarish box (68 x 68 x 20 m). It contains a single room. This room functions as a square. A simple border defines a precise architectural condition for a field that will mutate, accepting different activities. The complexity of the program coincides with the simplicity of the space. The largeness and neutrality of the room allow that staging of all kinds of events, including exhibitions, parties, fashion shows, concerts, theatrical performances and ballets. A 5-metre-wide strip encircles the room, which contains conference rooms, restaurants, offices, washrooms and storage areas. A door has been placed in the middle of each side of the room. The pavilion has only one level, allowing maximum access for handicapped visitors and permitting the easy movement of the machines required to lay out the materials exhibited. The ceiling of the room is 15 m deep and floats 5 m above the ground. The ceiling is made of white sound-absorbent tissue wrapped around a metal structure. A sequence of vaulted spaces are carved out of the ceiling.

The voids dug into the ceiling float above the ground. In the roof remain the traces of an invisible building, lost to another time, whether that time be in the past or the future. The roof floats as a sort of ruin whose foundations (rather than the vaults) have been lost. The large room is entirely white and is covered in sound-absorbent material. The spaces trapped in the ceiling are not reachable, but are merely displayed as possibilities of an architecture that the pavilion simply anticipates (or remembers). The building suggests spaces without fully realizing them; it remains a catalogue of spaces, an ephemeral landscape of vaults, a cast of an entire set of invisible and absent buildings. The pavilion is as simple as a storage space, as silent as a snowy desert, as monumental as the wedding cake of a tyrant, as innocent as a toy and as fake as all the things just listed.

The Italian pavilion functions as an oasis of silence inside of the noise of the Expo. The ceiling is entirely created from sound-absorbent material, and thus produces a muffled, relaxed atmosphere, suspending the exhibited materials in a slightly displacing state. The articulation of the ceiling produces different acoustic conditions inside of the large room. In fact, the higher spaces allow better acoustic conditions, whereas the lower ones create a state of almost complete silence. A complex, immaterial, acoustic geography thus organizes the different areas within the room.

The classical spaces accumulated in the ceiling are realized through the use of a simple and light-weight technology. Cables connect a subordinate aluminum frame with the main spatial reticular truss. The aluminum frame allows the placement of the fabric surfaces that define the vaults. Experimental types of fabric will be applied during the pavilion's construction, thereby exhibiting the excellence of the products of the Italian textile industry. All components of the building will be recycled, from the steel trusses and aluminum frames to the sound-absorbent fabrics.

Competition: 2008
Place: Shanghai, China
Program: pavilion
Competition promoter: Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Structures: S. C. E.
Video: Maki Gherzi, Nicola Gotti, Martina Albasini
Collaborators: Valeria Iberto, Chiara Kielland, Alessandro Perotta,

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