The architects carried out this work on their own initiative, they did not have a customer, and there are also no plans for implementation - at least not yet. They were prompted to tackle this topic in 2013 because the national Ukrainian pavilions at the World Exhibitions in recent years, including Expo 2010 in Shanghai, left much to be desired.
At the same time, various world exhibitions in different years gave Paris the Eiffel Tower, Montreal - Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome and Moshe Safdie's Habitat'67, and so on. Moreover, for the visitors of the Expo, the appearance of the pavilion is more important than the exposition, since it is the architectural solution that can arouse interest and encourage them to go inside, and not vice versa.
The key idea of the Kiev architects is to reflect in the project the openness of Ukraine to changes and the transparency of their implementation. Therefore, even in the prototype of the project, a mobile object with an area of about 15 m2 and a volume of 30 m3, the ability of the shell to respond to the presence of a person nearby (holes in the form of parametric "roses", reminiscent of national ornaments, open, allowing you to look inside), illumination (with a lack of light, the holes open, when overheated, they narrow) and weather conditions (protection from precipitation).
Human flows will serve as the context of the construction (20 million people have visited Shanghai, 30 million are expected in Milan) - there will be no clearer link in the exhibition complex.
In addition, the project immediately incorporated modularity and prefabrication of the structure, which would make it easy to deliver it to Milan, mount and dismantle it (the latter is a requirement of eco-oriented exhibition organizers), return it to Ukraine and use it as a recreational facility in one of the public spaces. moreover, unified panels and frame parts allow it to be assembled every time in a new configuration.
The modular lattice is based on a truncated octagonal, which is decomposed into smaller figures - a square, a regular hexagon, an isosceles triangle. This variety of panels increases the number of possible assembly configurations.
According to the project of the pavilion, it will cover an area of 625 m2, but only 3 containers will be required for transportation. As in their other projects, architects from Dmitry Aranchia's bureau used a computational design method, in this case they used Lyapunov's stochastic fractal.
The umbrella mechanism for opening and narrowing the holes of each panel is responsible for the movement of the shell: it pulls the membrane between the external static and internal dynamic contours. The mechanism will work on fuel briquettes (in fact, biofuel): this method was developed by a Ukrainian engineer from Slavutych, Vladimir Melnikov.
