The hall has an area of 27,400 m² and was designed for the World Exposition in 2000. The column-free internal space has a minimum clear height of 12.5 m and is covered by a roof structure consisting of a flexural rigid grid of tubular steel girders. For visual reasons, the structure is raised towards the centre. The roof is supported at each corner of the building and in the middle of the long faces on three-storey concrete cores that accommodate the necessary ancillary spaces. The main loads are borne by the cores. A much smaller portion of the loading is conveyed to the ground via the flexibly jointed columns behind the plane of the façade. These also serve to transmit the horizontal loads from the self-supporting structure of the outer skin.