Massimiliano Fuksas often notes that customers love the shopping centers and stores he designed, and his customers are always happy with the growth in sales there, but the architect modestly adds that he has no idea why. However, the "why" becomes clear as soon as you enter these structures.
To begin with, it has long been considered "not comme il faut" to design shopping centers in the architectural circles of Europe. Museums, schools, community centers, theaters, residential buildings are another matter. But for working on a shopping mall, one could easily and imperceptibly get the offensive stigma of a commercial architect. Who would like that? So developers had to be content with a narrow circle of designers, for whom this was not a problem.
But Fuksas, as it turned out, did not need to beg for a long time: he did not share the design of shopping centers, schools, museums and everything else for himself according to the degree of status and even always emphasized that only “… untalented architects are tied to typology. It doesn't matter for a good architect whether he is designing a chair, a museum, a train station or a shopping mall, but creating a rich experience is important. If you're lucky, the building will serve its purpose well and people will like it."
For the sake of fairness, it should be noted that this attitude of Fuksas to work on shopping centers did not develop immediately: he admits that this took a certain amount of time and experience. The architect, who has lived in Paris, New York, Rome, says that all the necessary shops were always nearby and at the same time was an "interesting adventure", and he thought it would be great to create similar experiences for visitors to commercial centers, who, as a rule,, are distinguished by their monotonous tasteless architecture.
Shopping for Fuksas is not just a buying and selling process, but a sense of space and situations, comparable to those we get in the city: “I decided to create a rich experience for people who use shopping centers, [similar to] that they received would be in the old city with hidden squares and narrow streets, where suddenly a church, garden or bridge appears, and the view and light are constantly changing. Shopping for me is to drink coffee in comfort, read a newspaper, eat a sandwich and feel what is happening around. It is not necessary to buy, but it is imperative that all the senses work in order to be able to understand the beauty of life. " This is how Massimiliano Fuksas described his first shopping center project, Europark, in the outskirts of Salzburg.
In Salzburg, you can find many works of non-Austrian architects. And the point here is not at all that Austria is very open to foreign architects, or that "there is no prophet in his own country", but that in Salzburg there is a kind of policy of selecting "candidates" who will be allowed to design there. A foreign architect, as a rule, is selected by the local architecture committee and works under it as an advisor, participating in the discussion and solution of city problems, evaluating the results of competitions as a member of the jury, etc. The only thing that is inaccessible to a foreign architect is to design in parallel for Salzburg. When the architect's service as an advisor ends, he already knows this city and its features quite well, and therefore can work here.
In the case of Europark, Fuksas got a plot in the outskirts of Salzburg (although the suburb in this case is a relative concept: it is located 10 minutes from the historic center). The situation there is reminiscent of Moscow and Moscow region shopping clusters with the obligatory Achan, IKEA, OBI, etc. In the same context, the Italian architect had to make his project, and he masterfully coped with the task.
Europark was completed in 2 phases. A second, undulating half with an oval hall for events was added to the part with a rectangular plan at the request of the customers. Fuksas himself says that clients turned to him again because the project was very profitable for them from a commercial point of view and, in addition, received several awards for energy efficiency and quality of architecture.
The building has a very recognizable silhouette with a constructively airy parking lot and communications on the roof. To do such prosaic things so elegantly is a real skill, and the undulating red structures that frame them have been unanimously compared to the sea by all the world's architectural media. Fuksas himself explains his decision to make a parking on the roof: “I prefer that parking spaces are located either on the roof of the building or in the underground level. The mall is a place for people, not for cars. In Salzburg, I created a space for cars on the top floor with an undulating roof above it, which in itself formed the architectural landscape."
Continuing the conversation about the external appearance of the building, it should be noted its two-layer shell, consisting of multi-colored panels folded into the inscription "Europark" and plexiglass. This solution creates the effect of volume for images and inscriptions during the day and looks spectacular at night, illuminated by light from inside the building.
Europark's interior is the most flexible space so that the owner can easily transform it if necessary. Fuksas believes that since the building has to work for many years, changes are inevitable, so it is better to develop a "tolerant" system to them. Today, this approach is supported by the successful transition from the rectangular, rigid space of the 1st stage to the wavy-oval space of the second stage of the project.
Europark pleasantly surprised me. This is not a monument to its author and not empty talk about the importance of people and the diversity of space. This variety really exists here, everything is thought out to the details, and it is really interesting to come to this shopping center - it does not even matter whether it is for shopping or not. How constructs "work" together with a project is also a good (and therefore rare) example. Even the advertising, which annoys us in every mall, is well organized here and seems to be more appropriate decoration of the interior than a discordant element.
My teacher at Moscow Architectural Institute Dmitry Velichkin once told us, his students, a story about how he and Nikolai Golovanov made an apartment, the customer of which, after the completion of the project, invited them to visit and thanked them with shining eyes: he said that he was coming home, and he was here so good that you want to snap your fingers with happiness. This story came to my mind in the Salzburg Europark: good architecture, after all, has no nationality.
