The guide to Expo 2015 for design lovers. If we say SoHo, everyone thinks of a specific area of Manhattan (or London, if you are British). However, in New York City, SoHo stands for South of Houston Street. Here we are at Expo 2015; we are not as clever as in New York, so we have no SoDe (South of Decumanus). That said, if we organized names like in New York (NoLIta, North of Little Italy; NoMad, North of Madison Square Park, etc.), we would get SoDe. The south side of the matter. Piero Ciampi would have said: “[the roaring south](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F08NeU_97qY)”. This area was curated by the Social Media Team Expo 2015. All photos by Beatrice Bianchetti and Anna Chiara Maggiolini.
The only pre-existing building on the exhibition site.
On the exhibition site we don't have a church nor a building for worship. There is a 1:1 scale model of the Madonnina that hovers above the roof of the Duomo – Milan Cathedral – that said, there isn't that typical presence that characterizes every Italian city. Here however, we do have the Pavilion Zero, a genuine lay cathedral that is one of the leading attractions on the whole exhibition site. Designed by [Michele De Lucchi (http://www.micheledelucchi.com/), under the supervision of Davide Rampello, it's huge, and it's now looming over us. We step inside, we get lost in the gloom among a series of tholoi that transport us back to Mycenae or to the Treasury of Saint Lawrence, in the bowels of Genoa Cathedral. The enormity of the space and the gloom crush us in a world where everyone is linked autonomously (and autistically) to his or her electronic gadget, here we are forced to share the experience along with everyone else. Huge screens grab our attention, an infinite library that not even Borges could have imagined, a savvy alternation of image-producing installations that fuse traditional craftsmanship, digital data, visual arts, cinema, and another hundred ingredients too numerous to mention. In the darkness, there is no more distinction between apocalyptic and integrated. The only possible condition is to be apocalyptic and integrated at one and the same time. We're not convinced that this is a great condition (not to mention sustainable), but we love all this stuff. A book worth reading! Umberto Eco, [Apocalypse Postponed](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apocalypse-Postponed-Perspectives-Umberto-Eco/dp/0851704468).
