Former fair grounds will host Europe's biggest congress centre

Marco Bellini redesigns one of the Portello pavilions

Milano, 17 nov. (Apcom) - One of the three pavilions of Milano's Portello Fair will house Europe's biggest conference centre with 18,000 seats, an auditorium which holds up to 1,500 people, a 4,500 seat meeting room, 73 modular rooms for up to 2,000 people and a 54,000-square exhibit space in the adjoining areas. The project was entrusted to Marco Bellini, the same architect who designed the current pavilions back in 1997. The Milanese Fair organization will invest 50 million euros for the works.

"Our city is the capital of trade show business, industry and economy, which are the pillars of Italian small and medium companies, and today it becomes a landmark also for the sector of congressional tourism," pointed out Luigi Roth, the president of the Fair Foundation, during the project's presentation. "This is an ambitious plan, which will allow us to host over 200 events every year."

The distinguishing feature of Bellini's work will be the huge 'Comet' made of micro-pierced aluminium and fed by photovoltaic panels. The installation will cover the whole pavilion, like a wavy sheet. All the old pavilions of the city fair grounds will be crossed by a super-elevated footpath and cycle track. The works will start in April 2009 and are due to end by 2010.

Milano, the Italian capital of inventors

In 2008 over 1,600 people patented their ideas

Milano, 17 nov. (Apcom) - In 2008 over 1,600 inventors chose Milano as the place where to register their invention patents. The Lombardy capital seems to be the homeland of the new Archimedes or Leonardo da Vinci, as it hosts a fourth of Italy-based inventors (25.1%). Many of them, one out of five, come from abroad. These are the main outcomes of a survey carried out by Milano's Chamber of Commerce through its Patent office and Italy's Patent and Trademark office (UIBM).

The electronic and mechanical sector gathered the majority of the applications (44% from January to September), then come environment and health (11%), computer science and telephony (9%), transports (8.4%), chemistry and biotechnologies (8.1%). In addition to inventions, also 7,760 trademarks were registered in Milano this year (21.7% of national total) and 418 projects and models (17.8%), so altogether the registered patents were nearly 10,000 (9,785, 22%).

The new European call for bids for nanotechnologies, which offers 140 million euros, involves a large number of productive sectors, both traditional and highly technological, and pays special attention to small and medium companies. As a matter of fact, it includes six specific public announcements for as many kinds of financing in the nanotechnology field.

Foundation Giacinto Facchetti, a propeller for cancer research

The legend of football and his values inspired its creation

Milano, 18 nov. (Apcom) - Researchers have recently estimated that in Italy in 2010 there will be two million people suffering from oncological pathologies and 255,000 new cases. However, from 1996 mortality due to cancer has been constantly decreasing. The project of the Foundation Giacinto Facchetti, the legendary football player and then manager of Inter Milan Football Club who died in 2006 because of pancreatic cancer, started from these figures and from the awareness that clinical-scientific research can give real hopes for the future.

The Foundation, which was presented in Milano, aims at promoting and developing research in the field of prevention, diagnosis and treatment of all the oncological pathologies. Specific attention will be paid to the patients' need, from their reintegration into the labour market to the protection of their private and social life.

"We would like the Foundation to draw its inspiration from the lifestyle of Giacinto Facchetti, who was a wonderful example both as a player and as a man," explained Emilio Bajetta of Milano's Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, the Foundation's president. "The ethical values that guided him in his work and life are the same that will guide the Foundation in its activities of research, study and people's support."

"I think that this is a great idea, because it reflects Giacinto's personality: he was very generous but at the same time professional and careful," underlined Massimo Moratti, the chairman of Inter Milan Football Club and now also the honorary president of the Foundation. "With everybody's help and attention we will be able to achieve a decrease of the frightful figures connected with oncological pathologies."

"Since my father died, two years ago, many initiatives have been organized," said Gianfelice, Giacinto Facchetti's son, co-founder and supporter of the Foundation. "However, some of them focused mostly on the past, this is very constructive, as my father's memory is thrown into the present and also into the future." Then he concluded: "Our family really appreciates a simple act like this, especially if it helps to restore the patient's centrality."

Marjetica Potrc: Design in the service of communities

"Involving users in the designing process to improve their life"

Milano, 14 nov. (Apcom) - Marjetica Potrc, a renowned Slovenian artist and architect, decided to accept the title of designer when she was nominated for the Curry Stone Design Prize awarded by the University of Kentucky a few months ago. More or less at the same time, she agreed to talk of the relation between art and design at Milano's Spazio Oberdan in November. In particular, she focused on her own work practice, the 'Participatory Design', which aims at involving the object's final users in the designing process, in order to satisfy their needs and stimulate their awareness about the issues of sustainability, environmental impact and natural resources.

One of her most representative projects is the 'Dry Toilet': she carried it out in Caracas (Venezuela) in 2003 with an Israeli architect, Liyat Esakov, and the residents of the 'La Vega' neighbourhood, which had no access to the municipal water grid.

"We were asked to study the structure of the 'barrio', the informal side of the city," she recounted. "We soon realized that the main problem in the barrios is not building houses, but infrastructures, which were broken down." "The lack of running water was a major problem for the inhabitants," she explained. "So after some debates, we decided to build a 'dry toilet', an ecologically sound toilet fabricated entirely from local materials which collects human waste and converts it to fertilizer." The innovative building also included a shower, which made use of a rainwater collector placed on the roof. "There were many architects in the district, but none of them had ever come up with such an idea," Potrc added.

The project was a totally new one as it tried to rethink the relationship between infrastructure and architecture in real-life urban practice in a city where about half the population receives water from municipal authorities no more than two days a week. Through this "low-cost sustainable solution", the Slovenian architect pointed to a shift from institutional to individual empowerment by emphasizing the logic of individual initiative and self upgrading. "The barrio's residents themselves shared in the construction of the first 'dry toilet' and today there are several similar fixtures over Caracas."

Two years later Potrc designed a project for the Nobel Peace Centre of Oslo. When local historical preservation authorities refused to authorize her plan, which involved a hybrid wind turbine-solar panel system, she was allowed to relocate these self-sustainable technologies to two other sites: the rural community of the Barefoot College in Rajasthan (India) and the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for teenage mothers in Detroit.

"Here the students and their science teachers built a barn that is fed by a wind turbine and solar panels," she said. "The urban farm activity has turned into an engine of optimism for everybody, that is what I mean with 'people's empowerment'." Also the experience of the Barefoot College, which is totally solar powered and practices the collection of rainwater, is a successful one. "The residents didn't move to big cities and avoid becoming urban poor," the architect underlined. "They preserved their dignity and improved their conditions of life. Furthermore, many cities both in Asia and in Africa have been following the example of this town."

Potrc has taken her 'community projects' to the world's most important art galleries. "I like to define myself as a conceptual artist," she pointed out. "I want the experiences I make on site to be clear to visitors as well and that they understand the practical function of my ideas." The boundary between art and design seems to be getting increasingly weak. "It is not a problem if an artist and a designer, or even an architect, are doing the same thing," she concluded. "What really matters is the design process and how you can do things differently in order to make people's life better."