Shops, food, regeneration and a controversial signature building in Turin, Italy

Abstract

The paper focuses on the case of PalaFuksas, a signature building inaugurated in 2005 and located in the central (but marginalized) area of Porta Palazzo in Turin, Italy. Originally designed to host clothing shops, the building had a history of failures and reconversions, and it is currently mainly used as a branded food hall. By mixing archive and qualitative research, the article focuses on the evolution amongst local stakeholders, of different 'expectations', intended as heterogeneous and not fully conscious and rational sets of ideas, imaginaries, forecasts. PalaFuksas was expected to be a successful and functional building to contain businesses, a flagship for the entire city, and to perform distinction and iconicity, acting as a regenerator for its neighbourhood. Failures in meeting these expectations implied a continuous renegotiation of the meanings, functions and identities of PalaFuksas, revealing the complexity of the processes at play in the attempt to sign, re-sign and ultimately 'become' a signature building.

Star architecture and urban transformation: introduction to the special issue

“…As buildings are imaged and referred to in 'The New York Times', for example, their name recognition can elevate other buildings named in articles to the same level of fame, creating a globalized network of a Who's Who of buildings positioned in relation to one another. Heuer and Runde (2021) and Vanolo (2021) similarly highlight the importance of media narratives and media chatter in the success or failure of a star architecture project.…”

“…Local papers, in addition to referring to star architecture projects as harbingers of cultural economies and financial transformations for the city, connect signature buildings to existing structures, supporting residents' creation of complex cognitive maps of the city with the buildings serving as icons of districts or nodes (Lynch 1960), as opposed to of the entire city. (Vanolo 2021) also addresses local concerns in his study of a local star architecture building, which was planned to house retail but repurposed as a cultural venue and then a shopping mall. As the function of the building changed, so did the ideas it represented, not least because of the narrative created around the project's success and failure.…”

“…Buildings are large objects in the landscape, and star architecture projects loom larger than other buildingsoften literally but always metaphorically. Ponzini and Alawadi (2021) and Vanolo (2021) directly address the oversized nature of star architecture projects in the urban imaginary and in processes of urban transformation. Ponzini and Alawadi's (2021) case study is literally big, as the tallest building in the world, and they frame their research in the idea of Bigness taken from Koolhaas (OMA and Mau 1995).…”

“…It is its architecture itself that attracts the funding, expertise, regulatory exemptions and marketing strategies required for the building to succeed as a physical thing, as a financial proposition, and as a spectacle. For Vanolo (2021), similarly, architecture is the nexus of other ideas; buildings are artefacts that embody and reflect social relations (citing Goss 1988), and part of a critical geography of processes and meanings. But, it is the architecture that enables those processes; the building itself can act as an agent in constructing meanings and relations.…”