Art and architecture in the service of commerce: a journey through the history of the design of the spaces of goods, from the Viennese stores by Adolf Loos to the ideology of the contemporary shopping mall.
A fluctuating theme, oscillating by turns between projects of architecture and design, interior or stage machinery, display design and communication, for generations of architects and designers the store has always offered remarkable scope for exploring signs and spaces. From Mendelsohn’s design of “Herpich&Sohne” in Berlin in 1927, to the extraordinary Morris Gift shop in San Francisco with which Wright anticipated by ten years the helicoidal staircase at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. From the Olivetti stores and showrooms in the fifties by BBPR and Carlo Scarpa to Albini’s “Rinascente” and the projects by Maldonado for Fiorucci in the sixties, to the shops of Norman Foster for Joseph in the seventies and for Katharine Hamnet, to the designs by Sottsass for Esprit in the eighties, down to Tadao Ando’s stunning “Collection” shopping centre in Tokyo, many architects have explored the design of commercial spaces, often making them a manifesto for concepts that eventually found finished expression in architectural works.