University La Sapienza of Rome, studio connected with the course “Organization of Commercial Spaces” (2003-2004, Emilio Vendittelli, with Daniele Arcomano, Riccardo Gaggi, Cristina Gagliardi, Luca Peralta, Piergiorgio Santoro, and Maria Tesse), TA

Commercial spaces were a pretext to address aspects related to interior design. These include the characters of temporariness, the relationship between interiors and the city, the possibility of communicating an interior, continuity or discontinuity between the shell and components, and new technologies of materials, information, and multimedia.

Contemporary environments are linked to image processing and multimedia tools: interior design requires more agile and complex tools than traditional ones. Through the construction of models, classroom discussions, processing of digital and non-digital images, the studio advanced different strategies to conceptualize envelopes and components that animate them.

The working hypothesis was to design a sort of “road to trade.” The shopping center reproduces and alters the urban fabric’s dynamics—through the street, the square. A hybrid relationship space emerges halfway between the commercial interior and the exterior of the city. In this space, rethought and reactivated, students identified new communication paths, new street furniture, new textures of visual signals that short-circuit the relationship between the inside and the outside.