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2 Work for change: the 2014 Annual Confindustria Assembly INTERVIEW 10 Porta Nuova area in Milan WATERPROOFING AND LAYING CERAMICS 20 The new Florence Opera House WOODEN FLOORS LAYING 66 Weinblick Grafinger hotel and winery SUPPLYING CONCRETE ADMIXTURES AND LAYING STONE MATERIALS 68 Donau City tower in Vienna SPECIAL FEATURE AMERICAS 26 The economy and the building industry in Eastern Europe 30 Mapei in Eastern Europe 34 Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos 41 Valamar Dubrovnik President Hotel 44 Valea lui Stan: repairing a Romanian viaduct 48 Paradise Center in Sofia 52 Terme 3000 in Moravske Toplice...

the time has come to build a new Italy Annual Confindustria Assembly, Rome, 29th May 2014 The traditional Annual Confindustria (Confederation of Italian Manufacturing and Service Companies) Assembly was held on 29th May at Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome and was preceded by Confindustria Private Assembly held on 28th May. The public assembly held in a hall bursting with over 3000 people saw more women involved than ever before. On stage alongside the President of Confindustria, Giorgio Squinzi, there was the Italian Minister of Economic Development, Federica Guidi and alongside her, Confindustria’s...

As regards growing Euro-scepticism, Squinzi did not hesitate to point out that “there is a reason for all this malaise: austerity policies have not helped revive the economy or create jobs. There is, in fact, some growth but not in Europe. Global industrial production and world trading are up and running again, although they are less sturdy than before the recession. The facts and figures since 2008 are very clear: the GNP in the USA is +6.3% compared to -2.5% in the Eurozone, with increasing disparity between wealthy nations such as Germany at +3.8% and the poorest nations like Greece at -23.6%....

is no work; divisions take precedence over unity, holding onto privileges becomes more important than merit”. Nevertheless, Squinzi claimed: “We refuse to resign ourselves to being a tired and disillusioned nation, the victim of age-old failings, abstruse and hostile to business, merit and risk-taking”. “This is not the Italy we see every day at the workplace - so the President went on to say - we see a country that is more about manufacturing plants than statistics, which is not concerned about +0.1 or -0.1%, which protects jobs and creates them, which is part of Europe and proudly operates...

stitute for Foreign Trade. “We have great ambitions out on the markets and for many foreigners we are a model to be copied - so the President of the Italian industrialists went on to say – and we have a great opportunity to systematically showcase all this here in Milan, namely the Expo; the whole world will be visiting us. Businesses, visitors, institutions, schools. They will all be coming to Milan to ponder over one of the key issues of today and tomorrow: how everybody can feed themselves in a healthy and sustainable way. But they will not just be coming to Milan for that reason only. They...

Paolo Caputo An architect for a new-look Milan, between urban design and new skyscrapers He has taken part in various national and international contests, and amongst his winning projects is the one for Palazzo Lombardia, the new headquarters of the Lombardy Regional Government in Milan, with the American design studio Pei Cobb Freed & Partners (see Realtà Mapei International, issue No. 35). As one can read in the following article in this issue of the magazine, he was also involved in the Porta Nuova project in Milan along with 20 other international architects, with his name to be found on...

equipped as the most aggressive and experienced private companies, or others from Jordan to China or Morocco that have a slim-line structure and operate very rapidly. I don’t intend this as a criticism of the work carried out by public engineering offices in Italian cities: I can honestly say that the undersized offices of the Milan City Council often work heroically to deal with an enormous amount of work and complex problems within an acceptable timeframe. As everybody knows, we need to implement an intelligent and drastic simplification of procedures by working on the general and needlessly...

The Solea tower, a “sister” of the Solaria and Aria towers in Milan technical round tables with tens and, in some cases, hundreds of experts. many of its design principles on the urban matrix of architecture and I believe it was the first one in Italy, and is maybe still the only one, that trains urban designers. It was of huge benefit to me to undergo this specific training at the Milan Polytechnic, which I then went on to feed thanks to my interest in this area of design. As a professional architect I have cultivated these opportunities and developed them in Italy and abroad, and naturally...

case and, above all, investigate more thoroughly into fields such as energy requirements and the right balance regarding these types of building. Not only that, their congruence will have to be carefully assessed from an historical, morphological, environmental and visual impact standpoint. And then there are the objective consistencies between living in a tall building (especially on the floors from 100 to 130 metres upwards) and specific functions. I find there is a certain incompatibility with buildings that high or even higher that are used as homes, while they are completely adequate for...