Curving canopy on suburban Caputo’s grocery store offers a special on good design

The Angelo Caputo’s Fresh Markets store in Norridge was under construction last winter when the company’s CEO, Robertino Presta, got a phone call after a snowstorm.

“Hey,” the caller said, “I think your roof collapsed.”

It hadn’t. What the caller thought was a fallen roof was the actual shape of a curving, freeform parametric canopy at the store’s entrance.

Part of the canopy — still being built then — dipped low enough to almost touch the ground.

“We had to explain to him that it’s part of the design,” Presta recalled. “[The roof] looked like it had dropped, but that’s the way it was built.”

The canopy was designed to catch the eye, and apparently it did — even while it was being constructed.

The Caputo’s design is most welcome, with its bright, visually-exciting canopy providing a counterpoint to the drab, by-the-numbers store frontages most shoppers encounter.

“The feedback has been extremely rewarding,” said the store’s architect, Peter Theodore, an owner of the Des Plaines design firm Camburas Theodore.

“I mean, the biggest criticism has been [from people who] have that mentality of, ‘It looks like a great skateboard park.’ But I’ll take that over. ‘I don’t like it’ or ‘I don’t understand it.’”

Said Presta: “Customers look at it. And a lot of people take pictures of it.”

‘Design inspired by Southern Italy’

Opening last August at 4410 N. Harlem Ave., the store is the 10th Angelo Caputo’s Fresh Markets, a family-owned suburban Chicago chain founded in Elmwood Park by Angelo Caputo in 1958.

Caputo and his wife Romana were natives of Mola Di Bari, a southern Italian town in the Adriatic Sea. Theodore said the store canopy’s shape is inspired by the waves of the Adriatic and the mountains of Italy.

“While [Caputo] was still alive, [his family was] considering doing kind of a tribute to their heritage, the store and their lineage back to Italy,” Theodore said. “And I took a chance, and it sounded so exciting that they wanted to have this building that would serve as a metaphor for the family, that I actually designed the whole building without a contract — without anything in place — just to see if we could get traction and do something truly unique.”

“It’s a great design and a great tribute,” said Presta, who operates the stores with his wife Antonella Caputo-Presta, who is the founder’s daughter.

Angelo Caputo died in 2021 at age 89. Romana Caputo died in 2004.

The canopy, which cantilevers from the store’s front exterior wall, is composed of tightly-laid, light-colored aluminum shingles covering a steel skeleton. Computer modeling was used to give the canopy its seamless-looking form — and to make sure it would all hold together.

The canopy’s lowest dip sends rainwater into a garden in front of the store. And the garden is fenced in to keep adventurous souls from climbing on the roof, Theodore said.

“I was warned somebody was going to try to climb it — and they literally did climb it,” Theodore said. “We were afraid somebody with a skateboard [would try].”

A blast from the past?

Even though the Caputo’s is only three months old, the design is a partial flashback to those great midcentury supermarkets which used all the tricks of modernist design — glass curtain walls, curved elevations, barrel-vaulted roofs, exuberantly mod signage and lighting — to beckon customers into the store from their wood-paneled Mercury Colony Park station wagons parked outside.

Theodore agreed the design is a bit of a bow to the past.

“Maybe unconsciously I’m influenced by those things,” he said.

David Aldridge runs Pleasant Family Shopping, a nostalgia-themed blog and Facebook page that examines the nation’s postwar stores, malls and shopping centers.

“The store itself was almost used as kind of a billboard — a dramatic treatment just to attract people and just to make an exciting environment,” Aldridge said of the midcentury supermarkets.

“And that really continued into around the mid-sixties, and then a more natural, kind of a more austere look started to take over where you’d see a lot of mansard roofs and things like that.”

Aldridge said the new Caputo’s “really harkens back to that really kind of exciting era,” in store design.

“And it’s neat to see,” he said.

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board.

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