“Cross culture” is a project to create a shop of 300sqm for Altromercato. Altromercato, the non-profit, fair-trade shop, and their main goal are to bring the products and the story behind it from the developing countries into Italy. Products from different countries come together forming a shape of grid, this is where our concept comes from and we want to enlarge it into our shop. This is how GRID became the main concept through out the whole shop.
From the grid concept, we come to our project. Grid, formed by connected lines, showing the characteristic of Altromercato “connecting. By products they connect people, culture, experience, senses. Beside the structure, we create areas to bring out even more what is Altromer- cato. Starting from the entrance area, we create a 24 hours communication tunnel with two panels indicating the char- acteristic of Altromercato through graphic to capture the interest of people passing on the street.
Straight after the entrance is the exhibiting area. Where the shop put different products from different culture and show how different culture can actually fit together.
On the left hand side of the shop we can find the extra functions beside shopping that we create for Altro- mercato, which are the tasting and workshop area. In this two area we invite people to try the product through their sense, tasting and smelling the spices and tea, listening to the music from Africa, reading Altromercato’s magazine with introduction of the producers.
As for the workshop area, time by time there will be producers welcome to the shop and share experience or showthe original techniques of how they create the products.
In home area from the idea of tradi- tional market we create three blocks of structure, with this three blocks we separate the products into kitchen. fabric, decoration.
As for the person area we took ideas of walking closet, to let the costumer have the feeling of walking through their own closet.
