Trade fairs and training: a winning combination to support innovation and creativity

Design and music, Trade Fairs and training: Piano City Milano  – the event which from 19 to 21 May will bring life to Lombardy’s capital, will see the presentation of Piano_Piano Pavilion, the project carried out jointly by the 12 students of the 2nd-level “Touch Fair Architecture & Exhibit Space” Master’s course, organised by the IUAV University of Venice and supported by AEFI, the Italian Exhibition and Trade Fair Association, which supported the launch of the course of study five years ago.

Each year the master’s course, which has the aim of exploring and transmitting the founding principles of the great Italian and international architectural tradition, focuses on a different goal. For the current academic year, as a further stimulus to the students, the internal “Architectural Design & Architectural Fair Design” competition was announced, to design a small pavilion for piano – Piano_Piano Pavilion for Piano City Milano.

Piano_Piano Pavilion represents the tangible proof of the great professional capacity that the students acquire thanks to the master’s course. The project will be exhibited at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan, from 19 to 21 May for Piano City Milano. Light, mobile, knock-down and temporary; a genuine study in architecture for the exhibit.
The new professional figures trained by the master’s will be Architectural  Fair Managers and Architectural Exhibit Designers, professionals increasingly in demand also in international environments which guarantee an awareness of fair organisation and the high degree of linguistic renewal necessary for the new horizons of the sector.
AEFI, which has always been active in support for and development of the trade fair sector, supports the Master’s each year, reaffirming its attention to the training of new professionals and the creation of solid, high-level skills.

The pavilion for piano was developed from a technique that starts from the micro study of natural geometry: for the winner, Maria Clelia Scuteri, it resulted from studying coral, and she took geometrical, construction, material and figurative principles from this. This is a new methodology in the architectural design course of Raffaella Laezza, head of science for the master’s course, which brings together science and architecture and leads to an implicitly sustainable creativity.

AEFI – Associazione Esposizioni e Fiere Italiane, a private non-profit Association, was established in 1983 with the goal of generating synergies between the most important Italian exhibition districts.  AEFI would like to be seen as a privileged partner for operators and institutions alike, and its role is to support members through the development of activities and programmes in the sphere of training, marketing, promotion and research, as well as to provide services for trade fairs through the activities of its Committees: Exhibition Hub Technical Committee, Legal-Administrative Committee, Internationalisation Committee and Trade Fairs Network Committee.
On the internationalization front, AEFI supports members thanks to agreements with strategic markets. To date, partnerships have been agreed with Iran, Taiwan, Lebanon and India and a memorandum of understanding has been signed with AmCham, the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy.
AEFI, together with CFI-Confindustria, CFT-Confcommercio and Unioncamere, has promoted the foundation of ISFCert, the Certification Institute for Exhibition Industry Statistics which, through rigorous methodologies, enables Italian organisers to present and recognise standardised data, in the name of transparency and reliability.
AEFI represents Italian trade fairs in UFI – Union of International Fairs.  Chaired by Ettore Riello, AEFI includes 35 member exhibition districts, which organise over 1,000 events a year over an overall exhibition area of 4.2 million square metres. 95% of international trade fairs, and 85% of all trade fairs, which take place each year in Italy, are held in AEFI-member exhibition districts. www.aefi.it/Aefi/site/en/index