‘The Life of Airports’ Discussion and Exhibition

By Matt Owens i2a istituto internazionale di architettura will be organizing a round table on airports and their complexity on Friday, March 16th at 8:00pm in Vico Morcote. Representatives of the fields of airport management and design will be joined by two artists to exchange stories, uses, criticality and design of several airports in and around Ticino. They will be offering a more poetic vision of infrastructure as a reflection on spatial types. This discussion will coincide with the opening of the exhibition The life of airports. Two case studies: Lugano and Santa Maria Island (Azores). More information on the event after the break. The event is part of the program of studies infrarealities on infrastructure and contemporary urban territory launched by i2a in 2011 directed by Jachen Könz, architect and urban planner, and Alessandro Martinelli, researcher in residence and curator at i2a. In this sense, the area that spans from Lugano to the Vedeggio plain and the Ponte Tresa pass is a perfect case study. i2a operates by bringing together the analysis and design work of students from universities around the world (from the Master in Urban Vision and Architectural Design of the Domus Academy in Milan to the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York etc…) and also experts from a variety of disciplines. The goal is to create proposals for landscape management and development, useful for public, private and academic administrations. Taking part in the round table include Alessandro Sozzi, CEO of Lugano Airport SA; Rocco Martelli, Technical director of Orio al Serio-Bergamo Airport; Nicola Marinello, Design and development manager of “Alpha Team architettura e territorio”, currently designing a neo-tertiary (office and residential) development near Milan’s Malpensa Airport; Vicente Padilla Goméz-Guillamón, founder and director of Aertec solution, a Spanish firm that provides consultants and engineers specialising in aerospace and aviation industry; architect Paolo Belloni of pbeb Architetti (Bergamo) who has long been dealing with airport design; architect and video-maker Donatello De Mattia and photographer Giuseppe De Mattia. Contributors will highlight the fact that airports, like other infrastructure, are not a static territorial presence, but rather a living structure under constant development and physical (terminal, runway etc.) and managerial evolution. Which places and forms are characteristic of airport activity? Which realities and practices define it? The exhibition in Vico Morcote illustrates the relationships of balance and unbalance, the paradoxes, ambiguities and latent potential that emerge between an airport and its context. Five films shot by the architect and video-maker Donatello De Mattia capture the space of Lugano airport. Images and sounds illustrate the tight cohabitation between infrastructural, residential and leisure functions, principal characteristic of Lugano airport. On his part, Giuseppe De Mattia presents a report consisting in 30 photographies of different formats (courtesy of Nowhere Gallery in Milan) on the everyday life of Santa Maria Island airport (Azores), which for years has been one of the compulsory technical stops before a transatlantic crossing and a real urban experiment. To open the public to the topic, the exhibition will be completed by a research on the airport of Orio al Serio-Bergamo by the Politecnico di Milano, under the direction of Paolo Belloni, and another by i2a on the typology of Lugano airport. Source: http://www.archdaily.com/214891/the-life-of-airports-discussion-and-exhibition/