A new exhibition by OMA/AMO, lR100-Rinascente: Stories of Innovation, has officially opened in Milan’s Palazzo Reale. Marking the 100th anniversary of the classic Italian department store, la Rinascente, the exhibition commemorates the company’s long creative history and experimental spirit that has served as an influential part of Italian design, culture and commerce.
On view from May 24 to September 24, 2017, the exhibition has been envisioned by the architects as a “living archive” that takes the visitor through a sequence of different visual and physical experiences modeled after the logic of a department store. Located within 12 rooms at the historic Palazzo Reale, the individual environments and scene-graphies will cover aspects of the company ranging from industrial design to fashion to communication, creating a retrospective look at Italy’s “first and only” department store.
In addition, OMA/AMO has envisioned eight window displays referencing the exhibition that will be located at la Rinascente’s Milan flagship store throughout the first two weeks of the event.
What is a department store? What is its role in different urban contexts? How has the digital revolution affected the practice and particularities of its shopping environment? These questions are at the core of recent debates on the through other disciplines – art, design, cinema, theater – to name few, mirroring larger gesture of retail. They resonate among both fashion and architecture historians, and reverberate also options of Geo-political history and economy.
There is no precise answer to such questions as there is no way to reduce the notion of “department store” to a single statement. A department store is rather a diverse collection of values and identities, expressing the history of the city it belongs to. More than a place, a department store is an open and adaptable cultural canvas of its location, whether it be London, Paris, New York, Tokyo or Milan.
Today, after the first appearance in XIX Paris more than 150 years ago, at a turning point of the digital evolution, department stores are the ideal lab to re-imagine our physical relationships to products, cities and our everyday context in general.
