EXTRA RETAIL UNIT
By Francesco Librizzi and Matilde Cassani
Graphic design by Tank boys
TIMING 2010, gives the opportunity to improve the commercial system currently based on a net of small retail shops.
Long ground floor sidewalks and porches are characterized as commercial promenades, where small shops open their windows and display their products.
The public space thus becomes a chance to create links and smart knots between small commercial entities, improving their surface, creating new displays and extra facilities usually not included into these very narrow spaces.
Our proposal addresses its interest to the small commercial centres trough out the city.
The retail centres, as suggested, are simply the ground floors of adjacent residential buildings, usually the porch part.
Each building block works as the centre for a system of commercial units, offering some facilities to the inhabitants.
The single shops are usually small and disorganized, the signs are not properly visible from the road and the small windows do not allow to exhibit the products.
Moreover, these “ground floor commercial roads” don’t work as a proper public space.
The project
The aim is to create smart connections between the low density network of small retail shops and the public space. Some smart objects can create additional volume within the city, thus activating non used portions of the road, where everyday paths and trajectories cross the commercial activities. Thus giving rise to an extra-time use of this areas, trough extended commercial functions and unexpected public facilities. The new additional structures can start as temporary plug-in boxes connetted to any shop to provide extra dressing rooms, or extra strorage or additional displays.
But immediately they can permanently change the use of the public space, asking the city rules to deal with the new commercial attitudes activated among the citizens.
The beneficiaries are the shop owners, the inhabitants or either the jay walkers.
Extra Retail Unit.
New small infrastructures can provide extra spaces to supply the lack of space and facilities of the existing shops.
E.R.U work as a space-supply filled with what the shop owner wants to sell and what the consumer needs, just downstairs or around the corner.
E.R.U can be installed just next to the shop from it belongs or either faraway, in a place where this kind of shop is needed.
E.R.U can also allow the shop to stay open after closing time.
Some E.R.U can be distributed around the businnes district, allowing people to find a place to stay even after its active hours.
E.R.U are containers of new acitivities and outposts of private/public space.
During the set up of Italian Pavilion at Architecture Biennale a couple of brilliant architects, Francesco Librizzi and Matilde Cassani, asked us to join them in this project for the Bat Yam Biennale of Landscape Urbanism in Tel Aviv. Their proposal addresses its interest to the small commercial centres trough out the city. The retail centres, as suggested, are simply the ground floors of adjacent residential buildings, usually the porch part. The single shops are usually small and disorganized, the signs are not properly visible from the road and the small windows do not allow to exhibit the products. The aim is to create smart connections between the low density network of small retail shops and the public space. Some smart objects can create additional volume within the city, thus activating non used portions of the road, where everyday paths and trajectories cross the commercial activities. Thus giving rise to an extra-time use of this areas, trough extended commercial functions and unexpected public facilities. Within this project we have created the graphics applied to each unit. You can see other images of the project here.
