Giunti Odeon in Florence: An Hypertopia Challenging the Boundaries Between Heritage and Innovation

The Giunti Odeon in Florence is a remarkable case study when rethinking the relationships and boundaries between heritage and innovation. The contribution will deal with a modern heritage and the concept of innovation will refer to its technical aspects but above all to its cultural and theoretical dimensions. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the former Cinema-Theatre housed in Palazzo dello Strozzino underwent a financial crisis. The latter has represented the opportunity to reinvent this place, a heritage protected by the Ministry of Culture and deeply rooted in the collective memory of the inhabitants of Florence who fought to defend the cinema’s function. Following its opening to the public in 2023, the majestic space restored by Studio Benaim houses in an almost sacred atmosphere a cinema and a bookshop that seem to define an extension of the outdoor public spaces. The complexity of the proposed programme, addressed through a project that appears rigorously elementary, is the strength of a proposal capable of combining economic sustainability, social demands and above all architectural values. The two functions overlap in the central space of the ancient palace inducing silence and respect for the users while working, eating, shopping, reading, watching films or just wandering. Considering that the uncontrolled diffusion of streaming platforms for movies and series has put the Foucauldian heterotopia of cinema currently at risk of disappearing, beyond the various and valuable adaptive reuses of underused architectures as movie theatres, Studio Benaim’s Giunti Odeon appears as a spatialisation of the concept of “hypertopia”. In this sense, the case study will be discussed to demonstrate how a different and inno-vative approach to the modern heritage of heterotopias is possible if the boundaries of design are challenged through a complex design approach that demonstrates a cultural innovation that enhances differences and promotes coexistence.