Tickling the Giant: Restructuring the Hypermarket

Abstract

Big scale consumption culture has overtaken practically all the spheres of our life and territories available. One of the specific typologies incubated during mid-20th Century is the hypermarket, specific and complex device of capital accumulation – where collective freedom disappears – defined by a generic and flexible structure in which we can only exist as individual consumers. In the last few years, the hypermarket model, temple of agribusiness and mass production, started to suffer from the changes in consumer’s habits: the development of online market and the shift towards customization – or better said, the will to come back to a more human way of consuming – have put in check the overscale offer provided by these retail structures. Architecture has a lot to say within these new frame and conditions. As a form of common strategic knowledge, it can actually contribute in the process of reforming obsolescent and conventional models with a clear agenda. The hypermarket is just one of the models that can be subject to correction and transformation in the context of the necessary commonalization of the world.