Quite a few prominent architects have designed in recent years shops and retail spaces for famous fashion houses and brands. The creation and re-creation of spaces where consumers feel at ease and therefore are more keen on buying and spending has indeed turned into a key issue for many fashion houses who previously relied mainly on the power of their products, on their quality or on the allure of their logos considered as status symbols. Yet there are cases in which such spaces proved hostile to consumers, managing to alienate rather than attract them. So let's briefly look at spaces from the unconventional positions of two interesting figures, Gianfranco Baruchello and Ugo La Pietra.
Baruchello was born in 1924 in Livorno, Italy, and started producing found-object assemblages in his mid-30s, quickly becoming part of an international community of avant-garde artists, writers and philosophers. Between 1976 and 1986 Baruchello produced one of his most ambitious works, "La Grande Biblioteca" - a model of a gigantic library (currently on display in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale together with his work "A chi di ragione (Part A and C)", 1967), represented inside a series of wood boxes covered with glass mounted in a metal frame. This artwork represents the imaginary spaces of a huge library, a sort of world suspended between Joseph Cornell's boxes and Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel.
Italian architect, artist, designer and theoretician Ugo La Pietra already appeared in a previous post on this site in connection with the futuristic retail spaces he designed for fashion boutiques.
In 1983 La Pietra wrote about the memory object or the memory environment. In his opinion they could be perceived as negative when they were passively accepted for fashion or trend reasons or for specific conventions that prevented people from understanding the genuine relationship between the objects and their use. Finished and closed environments like the ones seen in furniture adverts or in sets for TV soap operas, are defined spaces that follow precise rules and regulations and are therefore considered as negative spaces.
According to La Pietra a space achieves a positive value instead when it is built with the same spirit with which an altar dedicated to the memory of someone is erected in a temple - by juxtposing objects and images to create new rituals.
La Pietra suggested that in this way we could create spaces capable of evoking locations, activities or real people, little stages or theatres in which we could be set designers, part of the audience or even actors, protagonists of our own spaces and stories.
Would it be useful to combine the lesson of an avant-garde artist and a futuristic theoretician and designer and create ideal and better environments not just for fashion retail spaces, but also for research purposes and museum spaces?
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