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.

KEYWORDS:

• Starchitectures
• iconic buildings
• geography of buildings
• urban regeneration
• Turin

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Editors of this Special Issue and the Anonymous Reviewers for their generous help and their constructive feedback. This article is based on a wider research project on transformations in the Porta Palazzo area carried out with my friends and colleagues Panos Bourlessas and Samantha Cenere.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example: La donna della domenica, by Luigi Comencini, 1975; Al bar dello sport, by Francesco Massaro, 1983. A more recent example is Il luogo delle fragole by Maite Vitoria Daneris, 2013.

2 To give an idea of the atmosphere of the place, a movie has been recorded and uploaded. The video has been shot on an ordinary Friday morning, i.e. the 3rd of July 2020, at 10 am It records a walk around and inside PalaFuksas: https://youtu.be/b10DbFh-hmU.

3 The quote, attributed to Councillor Fiorenzo Alfieri, is reported here: https://teoriedelprogetto15.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/palafuksas-torino-maurizio-vaccariello1.pdf (last accessed 30 June 2020).

4 https://it-it.facebook.com/chiaraappendinosindaca/videos/2263074427291856/ (last accessed 15 July 2020).

5 https://www.mercatocentrale.com/format/ (last accessed 15 July 2020).

6 Foodification is also the title of a theatrical piece and its related blog: https://www.foodification.org/ (last accessed 20 September 2020).

7 https://nonsoloturisti.it/2013/09/architettura-palafuksas-torino/ (last accessed 15 July 2020).

8 There is still a Palatinum Facebook page, which has not been updated since May 2016: https://it-it.facebook.com/CentroCommercialePalatino (last accessed 15 July 2020).