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Genesis umberto napolitano
The door that led me into the world of architecture was labeled “Marcello Canino.” My first design exam, in my first year at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Naples Federico II, was a workshop led by the architect Sergio Stenti, whose pedagogy could have been summed up thus: “survey and draw two works by Canino, then design some social housing in the ‘style’ of Canino.” At the time I didn’t think it ambitious but now, at a distance and with the experience acquired after many years’ teaching under my belt, I have to admit that there’s nothing more educational than the reasoned dissection of the “classics.” The first modern façade I drew was, therefore, part of the Spirito Santo complex in Via Forno Vecchio. The following year I left for Paris. My encounter with contemporary architecture, the Pompidou Center, the Cartier Foundation, the Arab World Institute, Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi and all the others, came as a real shock. I instantly felt as if I was in the place where the history of architecture was in the making, there and then. Instinctively I reformulated my way of learning, pursuing a design culture that was anchored more in the real world and in the present, and putting everything I’d learned in two years of university in Naples on the back burner. When I finished university, I practiced, built and matured. Many years later, during a trip to Naples, Maxime Enrico pointed out how similar the designs of the façades of the Paris-Saclay student residences were to an edifice by Marcello Canino in Piazza Municipio. I have to say that, after more than twenty years, Canino had rather slipped my mind, but his influence on the design in question was undeniable, so I decided to investigate the role these unbidden memories served, in designs and projects. Every architect has their own mental archive, conscious or unconscious, when they have to think about a space, a piece of the city, a road, a staircase. It’s an atlas made up of geographies just as much as spaces, a sort of personal collection of places – those we have lived or worked in, those we have
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Alberto Calza Bini, Marcello Canino, Carlo Cocchia at the Mostra d‘Oltremare, c. 1938
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Genesis umberto napolitano
The door that led me into the world of architecture was labeled “Marcello Canino.” My first design exam, in my first year at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Naples Federico II, was a workshop led by the architect Sergio Stenti, whose pedagogy could have been summed up thus: “survey and draw two works by Canino, then design some social housing in the ‘style’ of Canino.” At the time I didn’t think it ambitious but now, at a distance and with the experience acquired after many years’ teaching under my belt, I have to admit that there’s nothing more educational than the reasoned dissection of the “classics.” The first modern façade I drew was, therefore, part of the Spirito Santo complex in Via Forno Vecchio. The following year I left for Paris. My encounter with contemporary architecture, the Pompidou Center, the Cartier Foundation, the Arab World Institute, Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi and all the others, came as a real shock. I instantly felt as if I was in the place where the history of architecture was in the making, there and then. Instinctively I reformulated my way of learning, pursuing a design culture that was anchored more in the real world and in the present, and putting everything I’d learned in two years of university in Naples on the back burner. When I finished university, I practiced, built and matured. Many years later, during a trip to Naples, Maxime Enrico pointed out how similar the designs of the façades of the Paris-Saclay student residences were to an edifice by Marcello Canino in Piazza Municipio. I have to say that, after more than twenty years, Canino had rather slipped my mind, but his influence on the design in question was undeniable, so I decided to investigate the role these unbidden memories served, in designs and projects. Every architect has their own mental archive, conscious or unconscious, when they have to think about a space, a piece of the city, a road, a staircase. It’s an atlas made up of geographies just as much as spaces, a sort of personal collection of places – those we have lived or worked in, those we have
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Alberto Calza Bini, Marcello Canino, Carlo Cocchia at the Mostra d‘Oltremare, c. 1938
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studied, others we would have liked to have gone to, or which have been described to us, and others still to which we have given shape. I’ve always thought that the awareness of these fragments of reality hidden in some compartment of our memory offered a significant resource. Understanding your own personal history of places is crucial both to the project and to amassing a personal archive of historic, typological, compositional, representational and technical references. After that trip with Maxime, I tried to dig down into my memory, and discovered that my internal resources included not just works by Canino and Cosenza, but a whole panoply of details, elements of vocabularies and assemblages that all derived from the architecture I’d come across in Naples. I also came to understand that the origin of my obsession with cities as the foundations of architectural design was this particular city, above all else. During this period of self-analysis, I told my friend Manuel Orazi about these memories and re-encounters, and the idea of writing a book about them was born. Although we weren’t clear about what form this book might take, there was clearly an interest in a study into a form of “urban resistance” that characterizes certain modern Neapolitan buildings.
The Modern made landfall in Naples in 1930. The work of Cosenza, Canino, Vaccaro, Rudofsky, Moretti and Filo Speziale evidences a singularity defined equally by the constant battle between dogma and reality and by a specific hybridization of past and present. It’s a form of Modernism that has to contend with the impossibility of a tabula rasa, and which, precisely because of this, reveals its most interesting aspect – its hidden capacity for ”city making.“ This attitude is evidenced by morphological, formal, typological and linguistic devices that we thought useful to go back over and highlight. At such a complex time for architecture and the city, and given the difficulty of thinking about design both as the result of a complicated process that starts with the involvement of the community and as a social and cultural evolutionary tool, the built heritage created during the thirty-year period from 1930 to 1960 in Naples could well turn out to be a major resource.
This idea was left in abeyance for quite some time. After the work on Paris and the 2017 exhibition at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, we were finally able to think about Naples. Paris Haussmann was a tremendous experience, not only in terms of the multitude of things we learnt but also because it was an opportunity to put together an investigative methodology which now forms the basis for the LAN research laboratory. So, once the Naples project got the green light, we tried to bring back the same team. First and foremost the photographer Cyrille Weiner, whose singular, sharp eye proved invaluable for the Paris project. As well as the critic Manuel Orazi, the architectural historian Andrea Maglio came on board, as did the architects Gianluigi Freda and Irene Lettieri. It was this group that saw to moving the subject from the realm of personal obsession to become a focus of collective research. The underlying hypothesis of this study is that a latent quality in modern Neapolitan architecture can be determined: the refusal to define abstract and idealized models and the ability, if not the need, to tailor projects to their physical, historic, social and geographical context. There are very few examples of Neapolitan buildings that can be plucked out of their context and considered independently. In the great majority of cases, the context is not just a factor that impacts on the definition of the project concept, it is rather its decisive, essential and explicit starting point. Villa Savoye could never have been built in Naples. Irregular road layouts, continual height variations and existing architectural and archaeological constraints become discriminatory parts of a project even when the mainstream tries to draw up absolute and invariable parameters, as during the period of eclecticism in the nineteenth-century and, especially, during the Modern one.
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studied, others we would have liked to have gone to, or which have been described to us, and others still to which we have given shape. I’ve always thought that the awareness of these fragments of reality hidden in some compartment of our memory offered a significant resource. Understanding your own personal history of places is crucial both to the project and to amassing a personal archive of historic, typological, compositional, representational and technical references. After that trip with Maxime, I tried to dig down into my memory, and discovered that my internal resources included not just works by Canino and Cosenza, but a whole panoply of details, elements of vocabularies and assemblages that all derived from the architecture I’d come across in Naples. I also came to understand that the origin of my obsession with cities as the foundations of architectural design was this particular city, above all else. During this period of self-analysis, I told my friend Manuel Orazi about these memories and re-encounters, and the idea of writing a book about them was born. Although we weren’t clear about what form this book might take, there was clearly an interest in a study into a form of “urban resistance” that characterizes certain modern Neapolitan buildings.
The Modern made landfall in Naples in 1930. The work of Cosenza, Canino, Vaccaro, Rudofsky, Moretti and Filo Speziale evidences a singularity defined equally by the constant battle between dogma and reality and by a specific hybridization of past and present. It’s a form of Modernism that has to contend with the impossibility of a tabula rasa, and which, precisely because of this, reveals its most interesting aspect – its hidden capacity for ”city making.“ This attitude is evidenced by morphological, formal, typological and linguistic devices that we thought useful to go back over and highlight. At such a complex time for architecture and the city, and given the difficulty of thinking about design both as the result of a complicated process that starts with the involvement of the community and as a social and cultural evolutionary tool, the built heritage created during the thirty-year period from 1930 to 1960 in Naples could well turn out to be a major resource.
This idea was left in abeyance for quite some time. After the work on Paris and the 2017 exhibition at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, we were finally able to think about Naples. Paris Haussmann was a tremendous experience, not only in terms of the multitude of things we learnt but also because it was an opportunity to put together an investigative methodology which now forms the basis for the LAN research laboratory. So, once the Naples project got the green light, we tried to bring back the same team. First and foremost the photographer Cyrille Weiner, whose singular, sharp eye proved invaluable for the Paris project. As well as the critic Manuel Orazi, the architectural historian Andrea Maglio came on board, as did the architects Gianluigi Freda and Irene Lettieri. It was this group that saw to moving the subject from the realm of personal obsession to become a focus of collective research. The underlying hypothesis of this study is that a latent quality in modern Neapolitan architecture can be determined: the refusal to define abstract and idealized models and the ability, if not the need, to tailor projects to their physical, historic, social and geographical context. There are very few examples of Neapolitan buildings that can be plucked out of their context and considered independently. In the great majority of cases, the context is not just a factor that impacts on the definition of the project concept, it is rather its decisive, essential and explicit starting point. Villa Savoye could never have been built in Naples. Irregular road layouts, continual height variations and existing architectural and archaeological constraints become discriminatory parts of a project even when the mainstream tries to draw up absolute and invariable parameters, as during the period of eclecticism in the nineteenth-century and, especially, during the Modern one.
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Istituto Nazionale Assicurazioni Headquarters | page 150
The SocietĂ Cattolica Assicurazioni Skyscraper | page 204
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Istituto Nazionale Assicurazioni Headquarters | page 150
The SocietĂ Cattolica Assicurazioni Skyscraper | page 204
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Of a ”Conciliatory“ Modernity: Naples 1930–1960 Andrea Maglio
The refreshing effect of this city, because the nature and beauty of the place are in pride of place. Much more contemporary than Rome and thus epigonicity no longer comes first and foremost … We finally relaxed: tourists. We wandered happily around. Paul Klee 1 Asking oneself whether there is any exceptionality in the architecture of Naples might seem like a fruitless and rather pointless question, if not indeed self-referential. Yet the excessive churning out of meaning and the incessant identity claims in every form of Neapolitan cultural expression trigger this sort of self-interrogation. Place-related osmosis is certainly a characteristic of Neapolitan architecture, and can clearly easily apply to a great deal of architecture all over the world. However, this powerful interaction with location seems to have become a strongly interiorized dynamic in Naples, more so than in many other places, constituting both occasion and need. The expression “porous city” coined by Berlin-born flâneur Walter Benjamin to underscore the coming together of opposing forces in Naples and its constantly changing physical, human and relational forms, poses the same unequivocal questions. Seldom has a concept been more misconstrued and instrumentalized, but clearly Benjamin, reluctantly, obviously, played his own part in perpetuating the myth of the exceptional character of Naples.2 This osmosis with such a singular context could be seen in terms of a “conciliatory” modernity, far removed from apodictic truths and attempts to define an ideal type. This trend, not exclusive but perhaps distinguishing, has been both the cause and the effect of a certain historiographical marginalization of Naples.
Piazza del Gesu. Photograph by Florian Castiglione
History is always written by the victors, and the history of both art and architecture cannot help but be conditioned by dominant schools of thought and culturally homogeneous groups: it therefore has to meet selective criteria, paradigms and artifices that are necessarily simplificatory and in some measure arbitrary. Some architectural historiographers have sometimes highlighted a sort of imbalance in the “stories” and in the canonical readings, in which the gap in the hierarchy between the “center” and the “edge” in architectural phenomenons was too great. In the case of Naples, its centrality has only been seen as relevant during a number of short modern and
1 Paul Klee, Autobiographical essay for Wilhelm Hausenstein, 1919, cit. by Tulliola Sparagni, “Sulle Orme di Goethe e Burckhardt 1901–1902,” in Tulliola Sparagni and Mariastella Margozzi, eds., Paul Klee e l’Italia, Milan: Electa, 2012, pp. 14–45: 22. 2 The writer Antonio Pascale puts this succinctly but extremely effectively, “Napoli: città porosa,” Limesonline, May 6, 2010 (https://www. limesonline.com/rubrica/napoli-citta-porosa).
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Seafront Mergellina
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Of a ”Conciliatory“ Modernity: Naples 1930–1960 Andrea Maglio
The refreshing effect of this city, because the nature and beauty of the place are in pride of place. Much more contemporary than Rome and thus epigonicity no longer comes first and foremost … We finally relaxed: tourists. We wandered happily around. Paul Klee 1 Asking oneself whether there is any exceptionality in the architecture of Naples might seem like a fruitless and rather pointless question, if not indeed self-referential. Yet the excessive churning out of meaning and the incessant identity claims in every form of Neapolitan cultural expression trigger this sort of self-interrogation. Place-related osmosis is certainly a characteristic of Neapolitan architecture, and can clearly easily apply to a great deal of architecture all over the world. However, this powerful interaction with location seems to have become a strongly interiorized dynamic in Naples, more so than in many other places, constituting both occasion and need. The expression “porous city” coined by Berlin-born flâneur Walter Benjamin to underscore the coming together of opposing forces in Naples and its constantly changing physical, human and relational forms, poses the same unequivocal questions. Seldom has a concept been more misconstrued and instrumentalized, but clearly Benjamin, reluctantly, obviously, played his own part in perpetuating the myth of the exceptional character of Naples.2 This osmosis with such a singular context could be seen in terms of a “conciliatory” modernity, far removed from apodictic truths and attempts to define an ideal type. This trend, not exclusive but perhaps distinguishing, has been both the cause and the effect of a certain historiographical marginalization of Naples.
Piazza del Gesu. Photograph by Florian Castiglione
History is always written by the victors, and the history of both art and architecture cannot help but be conditioned by dominant schools of thought and culturally homogeneous groups: it therefore has to meet selective criteria, paradigms and artifices that are necessarily simplificatory and in some measure arbitrary. Some architectural historiographers have sometimes highlighted a sort of imbalance in the “stories” and in the canonical readings, in which the gap in the hierarchy between the “center” and the “edge” in architectural phenomenons was too great. In the case of Naples, its centrality has only been seen as relevant during a number of short modern and
1 Paul Klee, Autobiographical essay for Wilhelm Hausenstein, 1919, cit. by Tulliola Sparagni, “Sulle Orme di Goethe e Burckhardt 1901–1902,” in Tulliola Sparagni and Mariastella Margozzi, eds., Paul Klee e l’Italia, Milan: Electa, 2012, pp. 14–45: 22. 2 The writer Antonio Pascale puts this succinctly but extremely effectively, “Napoli: città porosa,” Limesonline, May 6, 2010 (https://www. limesonline.com/rubrica/napoli-citta-porosa).
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Seafront Mergellina
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