RIGA, LATVIA 2013

The concept of a supermarket, which was invented about a century ago, has been growing in size (becoming hyper-market mega-store, etc.) but gradually lost many of the qualities that characterize the traditional market and small street shops, such as a personalized service and attention to detail, reducing the act of buying to just a careless action, which does not draw particular pleasure. The space was gaining physical dimension without paying attention to architecture and its sensory qualities.

In economically developed societies, the shopping experience begins almost always by the desire to buy, and this often is related with the pleasure of enjoying a space, even before the act of buying itself. Thus, we propose to create a stimulating and welcoming space, housed beneath a ceiling (like a private sky), with an undisguised architectural presence, but efficiently simple and constructively rigorous and modular, allowing to adapt the project principles to other deployment locations.

We designed a large and luminous ceiling, technical, orientative and communicative, which extends both over the store as well as over the covered spaces of pedestrian pathways and entrance, and also the car parking areas, providing a bright light and building a powerful image for the supermarket chain, connected in a simple and comprehensible way with its brand.