Forsaking its chequerboard layout, Euroluce’s footprint has evolved to become smart, extraordinarily user-friendly, better connected and more sustainable, thanks to the vision of the Salone del Mobile.Milano and the Lombardini22 design studio. Generating new visibility, opportunities and value for the exhibiting companies and visitors.
The 31st edition of Euroluce – at Fiera Milano, Rho from 18th to 23rd April 2023 in Pavilions 9-11 and 13-15 – promises to be a milestone in the development and evolution of the trade fair format and visitor experience. The Salone del Mobile.Milano entrusted the Milanese architecture and engineering studio Lombardini22 with rethinking the exhibition layout, with a view to creating an increasingly engaging and contemporary business platform.
The architects found themselves faced with multiple challenges: they were tasked with ensuring better connections between the four pavilions, simplifying the visitor path, making it more fluid and easily navigated, whilst also increasing exhibitor visibility, guaranteeing enough space for each single one.
Lombardini22 analysed the trade fair context in its kaleidoscopic entirety and completely rethought the needs of companies and visitors, to come up with a project that would meet everybody’s expectations and create a sympathetic space capable of generating emotions.
The studio took its inspiration from the spatiality of Italian urban centres. Euroluce 2023 will present itself as the new city of lights, boasting an irregular, fluid and free circular route. Rather than being stand-centric, the layout will be human-centric and visitor experiencebased. The variety of urban streets provided the project baseline from a number of angles, from the visibility of all the showcases to the provision of complementary services. Original cultural content concept was developed around this new exhibition plan, with Beppe Finessi responsible for the scientific project and the artistic direction, conducive to structured, polycentric and multidisciplinary exhibition activities and the corresponding provision of public areas and spaces (each designed ad hoc by different architects) devoted to interface, exchange, culture and the arts, combining to create a changing, varied, high quality landscape. One of these spaces, Aurore, the large arena (Pav. 13) designed by Formafantasma, will be a stopping point, like an actual city plaza, providing for synaesthetic experiences thanks to design solutions combining forms, colours, materials, lights and sounds. It is here that talks, conferences and lectures will be held. Business and culture will thus be integrated into the daily workings of the event, ensuring that the space becomes a font of surprises, inspiration and dialogue.
A second important aspect was studying the spatial configuration: assessing the perceptual dimension of the pavilions in depth, and valorising their potential uses. Analysing the way in which spaces influence the flows and movements of visitors enabled the designers to map a layout that would dovetail with people’s natural movements and make for an efficient and intuitive visitor path, involving minimal twists and turns to facilitate orientation.
Finally, Lombardini22 asked themselves the question of how to illuminate Euroluce. The simple yet brilliant answer was to switch everything off. The new layout is designed to be a sort of dark box in which light, channelling poetry and emotion, shines through from the stands of the exhibiting companies.
Juri Franzosi, General Manager of Lombardini22, had this to say: “Lombardini22 retains an authentic start-up spirit, as confirmed by its holistic project for Euroluce. Multidisciplinary skills and design experiments serve to make the event accessible and recognisable, geared to the exhibiting companies and the people visiting the exhibition.”
