UNCONVENTIONAL: Building a Convention Center European Style

[ComandanteCero]

interesting article in the New Yorker about a new convention center in Milan.  it has some interesting observations at the beginning about American convention centers and how they relate to their cities.  Obviously it would be very hard to pull something like the Milan convention center off in an American city, but it just goes to show how different things are.

UNCONVENTIONAL
Massimiliano Fuksas reinvents the convention center.
by PAUL GOLDBERGER
Issue of 2006-07-31
Posted 2006-07-24

Convention centers are supposed to revive cities by bringing in revenue from out-of-town visitors and creating local jobs. But the more gargantuan they become the less happily they fit into the places they are intended to benefit. In terms of architectural beauty, the convention center these days ranks somewhere close to the aircraft hangar, and for some of the same reasons: both must provide acres of space for a continually shifting configuration of objects, and cater to a temporary crowd of people whose minds are on other things. Putting one of these megaliths into the heart of a city is like trying to dock the Queen Mary in the local marina.

Architects have tried various solutions to the problem of enclosing a huge volume of space and making it look palatable, generally without success. San Francisco originally put its Moscone Center underground, but the park on top feels unnatural—like a landscaped roof on a parking garage. Seattle’s convention center sits above a freeway, which makes a little more sense, since one urban intrusion is used to mask another. In Washington, D.C., the architecture firm Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback wanted to minimize the new Washington Convention Center’s impact on the city, but the only design scheme that seemed feasible was to break up the exhibition space into two separate levels, one of which bridges two city streets. New York, it would seem, gave up altogether: the Javits Center, designed by James Ingo Freed, just sprawls along five blocks of the far West Side, a reflective glass wall between the city and the Hudson River. In Pittsburgh, Rafael Viñoly tried a little harder, topping his building with a big, swooping roof intended to evoke the city’s bridges. But generally people seem to want their convention centers to attract a crowd and to disappear at the same time.

Not so the Italians. They know better than to plant something in the heart of a city which doesn’t fit there. The most exciting convention center in the world currently isn’t anywhere near the center of a city. It is the Milan Trade Fair, known as Fiera Milano, which was built on the site of an old gas refinery at the intersection of a couple of highways not far from the Milan airport. Conceived on a scale that makes the Javits Center look like a dinky cottage, the Fiera stretches for almost a mile, and its various sections provide nearly three and a half million square feet of exhibition space. When you first approach the Fiera, it looks like an endless modern factory, the epitome of every bad planning idea in the book. But, once you find your way in, you realize that the architect, Massimiliano Fuksas, has taken the blandness of convention centers as a challenge, a spur to create the kind of architectural flourish that dispels all thoughts of dull functionality.

rest of article--->http://www.newyorker.com/critics/skyline/