Arts and Architecture

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the conservation and contemporary management of three nineteenth-century shopping passages: the Galleries Saint-Hubert in Brussels, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan and the Passage in The Hague. The submission of the Galleries Saint-Hubert to the World Heritage Tentative List in 2008, presents a unique opportunity for studying this typology in its contemporary environment.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors’ research questions are: what are the characteristics of passages? what are their authentic values? and how can the authenticity of these buildings be conserved by their contemporary management? The applied methodology is a cross-case-comparison, based on the definition of authenticity as presented in the Nara Document on Authenticity. The analysis is presented in the form of a matrix.

Findings – The findings show that the significant value of passages does not only include the architecture of the building but also the versatility of its program and its present urban role. It is only by conserving this combination that these buildings can be conserved in their full richness of authenticity.

Practical implications – Criteria for transnational inclusion in the World Heritage List of several nineteenth-century passages are suggested as the matrix used for cross-case-comparison may be applied to analyse other case studies of passages, as well as for other types of heritage where authenticity of the site is threatened by uncontrolled retail development.

Originality/value – Although passages have been studied extensively within the field of architectural history, retail history and socio-cultural studies, hardly any previous research had focused on the preservation and contemporary management of this building type.

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In the discipline of retailing there is a lot of research coming from marketing and consumer behaviour. More relating to retail design, topics as store identity, store personality, image, brand personality, etc. are widely studied. In such studies, the link between the identity of a brand, or retail brand, with store personality has been established. Though designers benefit from this valuable input, research as such does not offer insight or skills in how to implement or translate such knowledge into a store design. Therefore, we asked ourselves if we could design a framework based on a well discussed - in linguistics - topic: the study of signs (semiotics). Our research question is ‘how can semiotics offer an added value to store design?’. We believe that, in an increasingly competitive market, one way to stand out in the crowd is to use signs in the design of the store to communicate with the consumer on a different level.
We studied three ‘successful’ stores - stores that attract a lot of visitors and have a clear brand image -, ranging from a subtle use of signs to an obvious way of using signs: Apple, All Saints, and Shoe Class. We measured their store personality and analysed the stores semitonically with the theory of Peirce and Barthes. We have found that the measured store personality of each of the three stores, can be explained via semiotics.