POLITECNICO DI MILANO

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ALESSIA ANNUNZIATA

CARLOTTA OLIVARI

“Connecting” is the fundamental concept that lies underneath the development of the project for a playground pavilion in EXPO 2020, as the same slogan “Connecting Minds, Creating Future”. Still, connecting minds is not enough, sometimes, to guarantee a real connection between people. Sharing experiences is a key event in the creation of deep and fertile connections among peoples. Doing together, sorting out solutions together, enjoying time together, means being together at a deeper level. One way to achieve this result is to experience reality playfully. To play means, at various levels, discover and give new meanings to the real world. Discovery is, therefore, the main experience that - approached in a playful system – the visitor will be invited to do.

The pavilion is – conceptually – a game. Given the notion of game as the possible set of actions, that happen in a shared system of rules, all the possible actions that take place in the pavilion shape the game of the space and are the pavilion itself, as 

"Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist” . 

There might be three families of actions, according to the grade of impact of the design on the use: shaped, suggested or free (considering a fourth, the family of technical action, that is performed by the pavilion itself). 

The two main components of the pavilion are the “cloud” and the “bubbles”. The shaped actions happen in the bubbles, and are strongly designed; the suggested actions happen in the cloud and feature a number of possible actions suggested by objects
and spatial situations embedded in the design of the cloud; free actions can happen both in the cloud and in the bubbles, being unexpected actions, strongly related to the individual player of the game, that are not related to the architectural structure.

The “cloud” is envisioned as a light structure of round-section white pipes interlaced in coherent yet irregular frames. This object encapsulates and hides variably the bubbles to the sight of visitors, reinforcing the will of discovery them through the “shaped” experience. This framed structure contains within itself different features that are user-activated: ladders, chairs, tables, shaders… that can affect the “suggested” experience; other features are utterly technical (as WCs, PVsystem, lights, HVAC…) that are the manifestation of the game-activated actions.

The bubbles are envisioned as heavy free form structure. These structures are printed on site via a3D printer that will shape, with local sand and clay, the heavy free forms, that will provide space for exihibitions. According to a pre-desiigned caldendar, these bubbles will be destroyed and re-printed, maing the acrion of building fundamental for the life of the pavilion. The setting up of those spaces, that provide the background of the “shaped” set of actions, will accompany the visitor from the analogic to the digital experience, with ludic stagins that will foster the cooperation between peolple, newly met or known friends.

Dismission is fundamental, both according to the brief and to the nature of the pavilion. 

The design process made it fundamental to work and design not only the building, but also the construction site: in fact the pavilion itself wil become a construction site durin the exposition. together, great care is given to the thermal performance, and to the structural behaviur of both the bubbles and the cloud.