Bologna Pavillion in World Expo 2010

The design, ideally envisioned for the next future, aims to connect material and immaterial culture, intimacy of the architectural space and dynamicity of an urban context, isolation and social networking, real and virtual, continuity and discontinuity, personal dimension and collective interaction, planned event and unpredictability. The target is to virtually recreate the communication individual conditions of the everyday life in the so-called “liquid society”, simulating condition of progressive blurring from private to public, producing unpredictable feelings, simultaneously stressed by huge amount of informations. This target is achieved determining theme-rooms (“wunderkammer” as we called due to the fifteenth century’s origin of the term that means extraordinary objects collection), that are arranged without any hierarchy inside the pavilion. This allows to establish a minimum principle of order for the space arrangement. The rooms represent the four motivations that justified the selection of Bologna in the Urban Best Practice Area and the client request for a corner specifically addressed to commercial and promotional activities, allowing at the same time free use of the in-between flow space. Proposal’s complexity derives  from the simultaneous coexistence of exhibition’s  complementary mode inside each room, that explicit the new vision and interpretation of a “wunderkammer”:  for each of the official motivations- Culture and creativity, Innovation and technology, Human rights and social participation, Urban and infrastructural transformations- emblematic objects of Bologna area excellence production coexist with short movies about the territory and the production’s process, images of the city, drawings and models about the most significant transformations under process, differently targeted publications about the city and the venues. Image’s unmaterialized space interact with the dynamic and changeable behavior of the visitors, that become an active part of the venues: performance, trade’s flows, exhibition activity and commercial’s logic reverberate themselves through the space, multiplying unexpected effects. Opportunity system prompted by  the real city become virtually condensated and accelerated in the human scale dimension of a “domestic landscape”, highlightened by the ultimate design.