Across Italian cities, thousands of kiosks remain standing without functioning. Having been integrated into the rhythms of urban life – occupying strategic corners, squares and transit routes, acting as hubs where information, commerce and daily ritual converged – these small structures have been left behind by the collapse of print media, unclaimed by anything else. Surviving as fragments of a previous urban order, physically present but socially suspended, these tiny architectures – whose original purpose has dissolved – continued to expand their spatial potential, but without any direction.
Booth 518 in Perugia (Umbria region of Italy, in the center of the peninsula) offers a contribution worth considering in this context: it was founded a decade ago as an independent stand for books and magazines, located along the historic staircase of Sant’Ercolano – where, according to local legend, the city’s patron saint was beheaded by Roman soldiers – has spent ten years operating on the edge of what might be a kiosk, curating independent publications, building a local audience, occupying one of the city’s most charged urban thresholds.
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Stand 518, Design Giuseppe Arezzi © Giovanni Emilio Galanello
Listening before building
When the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture launched her open invitation Contemporary Creativity Workshopthe Edicola 518 applied with a proposal entitled The Edicola I Would Like – the booth I would like – and he won. The result, designed by Giuseppe Arecireopened on June 1, 2026, with her support Seed Festival and Umbra Acqueis what Arezzi describes as “urban oasis for cultural display.”
But the brief itself, the new destination for this space, was not designed in isolation – over the previous year, the collective had placed boards across the city inviting passers-by to write what they wanted from a public space. They ran a self-operated radio, organized improvisation workshops inside the pavilion, held open meetings on its steps, and the functions that ultimately organized the renovation – rest, reading, water, self-organized gathering – were not imposed from above but drawn from a process of continuous public listening. Which means that the architecture here did not precede the community but followed it, a sequence that is less common in urban regeneration than it should be.
A booth turned inside out
The intervention maintains the existing shell – black steel frame, hinged glass panels, protruding canopy in red – while radically reorganizing the internal logic. What was an enclosed trading space has been turned outwards: folding glass doors open wide on the staircase, collapsing the distinction between inside and outside and turning the pavilion into a kind of inhabited stage. The interior is entirely clad in deep red-orange tinted wood paneling, a color decision that makes the structure immediately legible from a distance and produces, at night, a warm glow that turns the pavilion into an autonomous landmark within the medieval fabric of the city.
A solid stainless steel fountain with an arched back plate occupies the center of the counter unit. Folding stools in the same orange-red, stored inside the cupboard doors and deployed on the steps when the pavilion is opened, extend the usable space outward into the staircase itself, blurring the lines between architecture and street furniture in a way that is less about formal invention than about restoring a kind of urban hospitality that most modern cities have retired.
On the roll, a fresco by Nick Alessandrini depicts the head of Sant’Ercolano – an image that has already sparked local controversy and that connects the work to the founding history of its precise location in ways that mere proximity to a famous staircase does not.
The work continues Arezzi’s ongoing research into minimal space and multifunctional furniture, a body of work that treats spatial economy not as a constraint to be overcome but as a design condition in its own right, similar to Alexander Klein’s Existenzminimum and turn-of-the-century rational theories, but in a more popular way. An idea that tends to produce objects and environments of greater relational density than their scale would suggest, but where every surface serves multiple functions and every element can also become something else.
And, in this new asset, Booth 518 completely abandoned the commercial activity – there is nothing for sale, because the space was given to the city, in a rejection of the retail model that is, perhaps, the most architecturally and politically accurate gesture of the project: the pavilion as a public infrastructure, without qualifications. A space to be and act as a space, and nothing else.
What makes the work relevant extends beyond its quality interiorhowever. Booth 518 it was already embedded in the rhythms of a particular neighborhood before the renovation began – it had an existing community of readers, an established curatorial identity, a decade of use behind it. The open call Laboratorio di Creatività Contemporanea provided the institutional and financial context to deepen this presence architecturally, rather than displacing it with a general cultural perception.
The risk of a model
It is a distinction worth making, because the model Booth 518 The helped found meanwhile has been widely reproduced – and in this reproduction a different logic has prevailed, one in which the independent pavilion becomes a vehicle for the utilization of residual urban space rather than a genuine reinvestment in public life. Former kiosks across Italy have been transformed into branded pop-ups, hawker concepts and temporary cultural spaces, trading one commercial function for another, while the underlying scarcity of spaces where it is possible to simply be, not consume, is not addressed. The gap between adaptive reuse and adaptive relevance, in other words, is not just theoretical.
Reactivating these structures requires preserving an architectural object, but also rethinking how information, community and public life can intersect within cities whose spatial organization is increasingly structured around consumption rather than use. Ten years on and newly opened, this story suggests one way that rethinking might begin – not with a spectacular gesture, but with the careful elaboration of something that already exists.
