#Product Trends
Milan meets Mediamesh®
Europe's largest media façade on the Piazza del Duomo
Milan – city of fashion and design, hub of business and politics, capital of culture …: The names given to Italy's unofficial capital city are as numerous as its facets. Since ancient times Milan has always been a centre of trade and lifestyle, a place of prosperity and art. Great masters like Leonardo da Vinci or Giuseppe Verdi have left their mark and given the city its unique flair as a place where classical tradition meets constant innovation. Countless works of art, monuments, palaces, churches and museums compete with unconventional skyscrapers as radical symbols of contemporary architecture for the attention of sightseers. Milan's Scala and icons of modern fashion like Gucci or Prada typify the cosmopolitan image of the city and its inhabitants. The heart and undisputed centre of its see-and-be-seen culture is the Gothic cathedral with its spectacularly decorative façade and the Piazza del Duomo in front of it. This piazza is bordered and at the same time extended to the north by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan's world famous shopping arcade of glass and marble, steel and stucco, while to the south lies the Palazzo Reale with its various museums. Here beats the heart of Milan – il cuore della città.
A perfect forum
The total renovation of Milan's former city hall, the Palazzo dell'Arengario, situated next door to the Palazzo Reale and directly across from the Gothic Duomo, offered unimagined potential for an art-and-culture event in this highly frequented urban space. For safety reasons, the scaffolding on the Palazzo needed to be completely clad. The Milan agency Urban Screen S.r.l. was commissioned to devise a form of cladding that would enhance the piazza in the eyes of locals and tourists alike. Urban Screen's idea was to create a temporary counterpoint to the decorative Gothic façade of the cathedral in the form of a 21st century screen made of Mediamesh®.
Transparent medialised façade
This medialised mesh system by GKD – Gebr. Kufferath AG consists of stainless steel wire mesh with LED profiles woven into it. As a transparent mesh cladding, Mediamesh® allows a glimpse of the building behind it, while at the same time functioning as a media platform for a wide range of urban communication. Live transmissions from Milan's Scala or from the Giuseppe Meazza Stadium, fashion features or artistic performances, city information or image films – there are no limits to what can be displayed. Urban Screen uses Mediamesh® as a system to exploit a synergy between cultural communication and advertising, and thus to underline the connection between tradition and commerce in this unique piazza in front of Milan's cathedral.
Brilliant displays
After just five months of planning and production, at the end of December GKD put what is currently Europe's biggest media façade into operation on the upper half of the scaffolding's north façade. This media façade, spectacular not just because of its sheer size but also because of its high image resolution and live video capability, consists of about 480 square meters of Mediamesh®. First of all, carrier sleeves are woven into the GKD mesh type "Tigris". Then, after the weaving process, special round profiles open towards the front are inserted into the sleeves. These profiles, containing the LEDs sealed in with waterproof resin, are then cabled together so that they can be connected via control units with a central server inside the building. The size of the Milan media façade – consisting of eight panels of Mediamesh® each measuring 16.54 m x 3.64 m with vertical and horizontal intervals between the LEDs of just 5 cm – provides a grand total of 194,000 pixels. In combination with the viewing distance that onlookers automatically take because of the sheer size of the installation in Milan, this huge number of pixels ensures an absolutely brilliant display of graphics, video sequences and even live transmissions. The metal mesh was attached to a flexible steel substructure which was added to reinforce the scaffolding. This substructure withstands the enormous tension of the Mediamesh® installation and allows exact adjustment of the individual panels and LED profiles – an absolute requirement to guarantee permanently distortion-free display of images, even under heavy wind load.
A mature concept
For Urban Screen, the main argument for the use of Mediamesh® for architecturally integrated façade medialisation was the maturity of the system's technical concept. The visual elegance of the shimmering metallic mesh does more than adequate justice to the character of the piazza and the surrounding buildings. In spite of its translucency, the material provides enough opacity to conceal the activities on the construction site behind it. With its design orientation, Mediamesh® fits perfectly into the cultural and architectural context of Milan and is completely different to conventional solutions. As medialised cladding for the scaffolding, the screen with its optimal image resolution cannot fail to capture the attention of passers-by. In addition, Urban Screen was also won over by specific properties of stainless steel wire mesh like its long service life, fire resistance, easy maintenance, recyclability and sturdiness.
New horizons
In Milan's history, there is a long tradition of decorative architectural structures, temporarily constructed for special occasions, that turn the Città into a backdrop, the Piazza into a stage, and the inhabitants into actors, spectators and critics. Now, as a design-oriented media portal, Milan's Mediamesh® façade opens up new horizons, blending historical significance with state-of-the-art technology.
