ESALA MArch 2 Design Thesis - (Un)doing Thresholds; Door / Ways to New Neapolitan Practice(s)

T H R E S H O L D S

(Un)doing

[ 2020 ]

CITY FRAGMENTS: NEAPOLITAN POROSITIES

design.

[animate drawing] [performative construction] [tectonic assemblage]

(Un)doing Thresholds Door /Ways to New Neapolitan Practice(s) (Un)doing Thresholds explores the temporalities and architectonic specificities of porous conditions of Naples, where (un)doing is presented through Andrew Benjamin as a productive conception of urbanity; one in which porous architectures are (un)done, drawn through one another, in a constructive overwriting founded in the immediacy of the city.

Exploring architectures of the ruin, labyrinth and theatre, be they programmatically labyrinthine or theatrical, or materially or spatially so, the thesis considers their interpenetration: each space becomes a threshold to another space. It promotes an expression of presence in the city, gathered in collectivity, that takes possession of space as a protagonist in constructing an experience of Naples that goes beyond the control of fixed political and historical representations of the city.

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joseph coulter eirini makarouni katy sidwell katerina saranti

(Un)doing

T H R E S H O L D S [design report] (Un)doing Thresholds Door /Ways to New Neapolitan Practice(s) (Un)doing Thresholds explores the temporalities and architectonic specificities of porous conditions of Naples, where (un)doing is presented through Andrew Benjamin as a productive conception of urbanity; one in which porous architectures are (un)done, drawn through one another, in a constructive overwriting founded in the immediacy of the city.

Exploring architectures of the ruin, labyrinth and theatre, be they programmatically labyrinthine or theatrical, or materially or spatially so, the thesis considers their interpenetration: each space becomes a threshold to another space. It promotes an expression of presence in the city, gathered in collectivity, that takes possession of space as a protagonist in constructing an experience of Naples that goes beyond the control of fixed political and historical representations of the city.

[ 2020 ]

CITY FRAGMENTS: NEAPOLITAN POROSITIES

* joseph coulter / MArch 2 * eirini makarouni / MArch 2 * katy sidwell / MArch 2 * katerina saranti / MArch 2

*chris french *maria mitsoula

Setting up thematic cues and a framework for intervention within the city.

c i t y f r ag me n t s : n e a p o l i ta n p orr o s i t i e s

“architecture should be seen not as a summary of totalities but rather as an open collection of fragments assembled to… produce a world that is recognisably unreal but ordered, where the technology of architecture reveals the reality being simultaneously surveyed and designed…” 1 “City Fragments: Neapolitan Porosities is the second in a series of studios exploring cities and themes framed by the idea of the ‘fragment’. This brief sets out the themes and agenda for the studio, and offers potential methodologies and frames by which to develop projects and theses for Napoli (Naples). It aims to instigate both the development of representational and spatial strategies for and deriving from the specific conditions of Napoli, and to encourage the development of architectures that emerge in response to a range of key themes relating to the intersection of architecture and landscape. It offers entry ways into thinking about Napoli, about the specificities of this city and its landscape, and about architecture and the city more broadly.” 2 The studio will pursue design-research methodologies to develop theses of ‘porous’ architectural speculations–to consider the interplay of porosities and to explore the implications of thinking of architecture as porous–for Napoli, a ‘porous’ city of fragments.3

1.

Marco Frascari, 1985. “Carlo Scarpa in Magna Graecia: The Abatellis Palace in Palermo.” AA Files. Vol.9: 9.

Chris French and Maria Mitsoula, City Fragments: Neapolitan Porosities, Project Brief: Vol. 1, Edinburgh School of Architecture & Landscape Architecture, September 2019. p. ii. t 3. Chris French and Maria Mitsoula, City Fragments: Neapolitan Porosities, Studio Overview, Edinburgh School of Architecture & Landscape Architecture, August 2019. p. 2.

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City Fragments:

NEAPOLITAN porosities Brief 1: Animate Drawings (Representing porosity) Studio Leaders: Dr Chris French & Dr Maria Mitsoula MArch (Modular Pathway) 2019-20 Programme Director: Adrian Hawker

Imagery sourced from studio brief.

preface / studio agenda

figure 1.

chapter title / page title

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Proposed Axonomteric Field Drawing. (originally drawn at 1:1000)

Reading Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of cities, Graeme Gilloch notes Benjamin’s recurrent use of the terms ‘ruin’, ‘labyrinth’ and ‘theatre’. If Benjamin’s Berlin, as Gilloch suggest, is the labyrinth, his Naples is “the perpetual ruin, the home of the nothing-new” where “the cultural merges into the natural landscape, becoming indistinguishable.” 4

‘(Un)doing

Thresholds’

explores the temporalities and architectonic specificities of porous conditions in Naples, a place in which (un)doing is—as described by Andrew Benjamin—a process vital to the

Exploring architectures of the ruin, labyrinth and theatre, be they programmatically labyrinthine or theatrical, or materially or spatially so, the thesis considers their interpenetration: each space becomes a threshold to another.

It promotes an expression of presence in the city, gathered in collectivity, that takes possession of space as a protagonist in constructing an experience of Naples that goes beyond the control of fixed political and historical representations of the city.

Making space for figures not to guard thresholds, (this would be anathema to Benjamin’s description of the threshold), but to inhabit them; they are not policemen responsible for borders (real or perceptual). Rather they maintain the threshold, extend the spaces between things, providing both separations from and thickenings of the spaces of the city.

4. Graeme Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City.

Cambridge: Polity Press,1996, p. 26.

5. Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, “Naples” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings edited by Peter Demetz, 163-173.

New York: Schocken Books, 2007 (1978), p. 167.

(un)doing thresholds / thesis abstract

But this, as Gilloch subsequently notes, is to simplify Naples.

In this merging of culture and nature—what Benjamin might describe as an interpenetration, a porosity—the city becomes labyrinthine. Boundaries blur and territories bleed, definitions lose their definition, terms are redetermined. These processes, as Benjamin and Lacis observe, are performed in the city, “buildings are used as a popular stage.” 5 The theatrical, the ruinous and the labyrinthine themselves, coexistent, porous conditions of Naples.

formation of the city, one in which porous architectures are (un)done, drawn through one another in a constructive overwriting founded in and based upon the immediacy of the city.

n a pl e s i s “ t h e p e r p e t ua l r u i n, t h e h ome o f t h e n o t h i n g n e w ” wh e r e “ t h e c u lt ur a l me r g e s i n to t h e n at ur a l l a n d s c a p e, b e c om i n g i n d i st i n g u i s h a b l e. ” 4

figure 2.

Through a methodological commoning—a making-common and a making-in-common—(Un)doing Thresholds brings disparate sites and functions into relation. As an ongoing piece of research by design, the thesis presents a collection of interventions across the city. These sites look to Santissima Trinita delle Monache, an abandoned monastery on the hill above Montesanto, creating Door / Ways to New Neapolitan Practice(s) through social amenities for residents of the Quartieri Spagnoli.

The proposals are curated to be read together as a coherent body of work towards an overarching thesis under shared authorship. They are however composed of components within such a framework that explore elements of the enquiry more explicitly with reference to the specificities of particular programme(s) and/or scale(s). In this sense, the set of proposals that the thesis offers for the Santissima Trinita delle Monache may be approached holistically as one response to the site, or de-constructed as works that pertain to the work of two pairs of authors with specifically domestic or institutional oriented focuses, or as works under singular authorship within those pairs that are construed more definitively by programme.

*the document explores the ‘porosities’ of this working methodology further under the title heading ‘Methodological Commoning’ in the ‘Fields’ chapter.

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A R E S P O N S I V E S E QU E N C E O F N E A P O L I TAN U R BAN I T Y

Door / Ways to New Neapolitan Practice(s); making-common & making-in-common.

( un ) d o i n g t h r e s h o l d s

In such an architecture, spaces become thresholds to other spaces, gathering people into collectivities in a manner that enables a form of possession of space in which an experience of Naples is constructed where the social politic evades the rigidities and restrictions of bureaucracy and antiquity. An operative tectonic language of performativity and mobility, extends, encloses, makes present and gathers spaces between things. It presents the city in a way that no longer offers up spaces bounded by pure interior and exterior, but rather as a continuous and responsive sequence of urbanity.

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figure 3.

Culmination of a thetic animation of gestural proposition(s) for the site.

M E T H O D O LO G I CA L P R AC T I C E ( S )

(un)doing thresholds / methodological practice(s)

The following document is organised to present a comprehensive understanding of the process(es) and conditions which lead to the work(s) produced under the thesis (Un)Doing Thresholds. It describes various architectural proposals and interventions across a variety of scales and and reflects upon the methodologies and modes of practice employed in the development of the thesis.

x

The thesis, and as such this document, works with, and refers to three key thematic frameworks offered up by the design studio. These have been taken on, challenged and re-defined by the thesis as productive constructs for its ongoing development. Each can be identified as an ‘act’ and/or ‘output’ of the thesis and are determined as follows;

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AN I M AT E D R AW I N G ;

Provides the grounds for the gesture of drawing and recording conditions of the ongoing enquiry to become a porous register of its architectures and their relationships through time and across space. It allows porosities to be drawn and re-drawn through each other by which ‘Animate Drawing’ becomes a way to represent porosity assumed by the thesis both in its making (methodologically) and as made (tectonically).

P E R F O R M AT I V E CO N ST RU C T I O N ;

Is seen as a way of holding speculations of porosity on and in the city and are articulated as explorations of an architecture emerging from the thesis.They are moments at/in which the gestures of ruin, labyrinth and theatre (porous conditions of the thesis) are (un)done and re-framed as spatial, material and architectural thetic devices. In this way,‘Performative Constructions’ operate (perform) to reveal (construct) a tectonic language inherent of the thesis and of the city.

T E C TO N I C A SS E M B L AG E ;

figure 4.

Still taken from ‘Animate Drawing’ construction sequence projection.

(un)doing thresholds / methodological practice(s)

Manifests in the composition of strategies and fabrication of architectures that are held at the centre of a reading of the city (un)done by the thesis.They employ the tectonic language established by the overarching enquiry to produce architectures with the material, functional, formal and technological complexities of the porous. As such, ‘Tectonic Assemblages’ present a conception of porosity and articulate the specificities of this conception (be they ruinous, labyrinthine or theatrical) by means of architectural proposition.

THETIC VO CA B U L A RY

(un)doing thresholds / thetic vocabulary

Other, more specific working methodologies emerged as the thesis developed. These are folded into the discussions within the document which is structured around key terminology that together construct an interplay of porosities and explore the implications of the way in which (Un)Doing Thresholds considers its architecture(s) porous.

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The chapter titles refer to these terminologies to describe moments of these architecture(s) and the way they came in being as part of the wider investigations.This thetic vocabulary can be considered in architectural and/or methodological contexts and manifests as follows;

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P O RO S I T Y;

‘A dynamic social, material and/or spatial condition of Naples established by the thesis to constitute of three interpenetrative fragments in ‘ruin’,‘labyrinth’ and ‘theatre’ and which operate to create ‘openings’ across ‘fields’ of ‘thresholds’.

THREHSOLD(S);

‘The architectonic components and adjoining space(s) that contribute to, and are immediately affected by, the theatrical performance or mobility of an architecture.’

OPENING(S);

‘An architecture or spatial gesture that performs or constructs an availability or inherent capacity to advance.’

FIELD(S);

‘The spaces and/or sites that constitute the regions bound into territories affected by or associated with a particular threshold.’

RU I N ;

‘The memory, or remnants of an architecture that facilitates the performance or agency of a given theatre.’

L A BY R I N T H ;

‘The register of a means of connectivity between architectures and/or fields that at once disconnects someone through the journey or experience of its discovery.’

T H E AT R E ;

figure 5.

Still taken from ‘Animate Drawing’ construction sequence projection.

(un)doing thresholds / thetic vocabulary

‘The mobility or agency of an architecture to change, choreograph or calibrate the quality of a space.’

M E T H O D O LO G I CA L ‘ COM MO N I N G ’ Though collectively, as previously alluded to, the design research put forth by this design report is a result of a joint investigation and should be accredited to all parties, there are two pairs of proposals that are presented in this report under the (Un)DoingThresholds thetic enquiry.

They are each attributed to different authors, engage with each other in numerous ways and can be characterised as follows;

Project 1; ‘Into & Out of Everyday Thickness(es)’

a; Live / Work (Vico Paradiso) b; Bath House (Il Campetto)

Project 2; ‘(In)Between Urban Thickness & Void’

a; Gallery (Via Pasquale Scura) b; Library (Via S. Lucia a Monte)

*The works of these sub-enquires is interspersed to be presented coherently as one piece of research by design, to understand the nature of these proposals more explicitly as respective projects by author, please refer to the full folio appendix.

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figure 6.

Proposed Axonomteric Field Drawing. (originally drawn at 1:1000)

(un)doing thresholds /project 1a & b

i n to a n d o u t o f e ve ry day t h i c k n e ss ( e s ) xvi

Performing densities of domesticity for the Neapolitan everyday.

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figure(s) 7 & 8.

O N I c

A G E ( S )

es): (un)doing skins & passage(s)]

of the ‘Vicolo’ in the Quarters, the proposals aim to create hips’ that are open to exploration. ‘Theatrical Skins and sheets become ‘Performative Nodes’ that control, extend s. Folding spaces ‘into’ and ‘out’ of each other,Thresholds ocation of the labyrinth while the theatrical skins perform to the fields in which the ‘bassi’, workshops and bathhouse

‘Into & Out of Everyday Thickness(es)’ brings a density of the everyday to the Santissima Trinitnà delle Monache by re-establishing programme(s) of domesticity and bearing a thickness of the Spanish Quarters in a porous ‘(un)doing’ of the site where it encounters Vico Paradiso into Montesanto.

Legend

Legend

Public Pools & Private Bath House

A. ‘Theatrical’ Skin; Opening to ‘Pools & Specator’s Courtyard B. ‘Theatrical’ Skin; Opening to ‘Pools & vico paradiso C. ‘Urban Gateway’ to Public Pools & Private Baths D. ‘Theatrical’ Skin; Opening to Dive Pool Spectator’s Courtyard E. Threshold [bridge link to Unit B (*see plans for unit breakdown)]

Live/ Work (Urban / Public Gestures)

F. G. H. I. J.

Threshold [staircase link to Unit A] Portico [doorway to atrium; Unit A] Portico [doorway from private garden] Portico [doorway to apodeterium; changing rooms] Passageway to Pools & Private Baths

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

‘Urban Gateway’ to Workshop(s) & Public Pool(s) ‘Urban Gateway’ to Priavte Baths & Lime Garden Urban Lime Garden ‘Urban Garden’; Domestic Lime Terrace Dive Pool Spectator Courtyard Garden

Components taken from exploded axonoteric exhibiton drawings. (originally drawn at 1:200/500 respectively)

Together, the proposals fold into and out of each other, creating a series of thresholds connections that overwrite the exiting site as a ‘ruinous’ condition of the city and which become (un)done to promote the uncertainty and dislocation of the ‘labyrinth’.

‘Theatrical’ skins perform to choreograph spatial conditions and ambiguities that operate to the specificities within the fields in which the ‘bassi’, workshop and bathhouse function.

Legend

6. Internal ‘Vicolo’ Courtyard(s) 7. Covered Street Courtyard 8. Public Stair to ‘Urban Pavilion’ 9. Viewing Platform 10. Public Stair down to Urban Lime Garden

Live / Work (Domestic / Private Gestures)

i. Domestic Opening to Perpedincular ‘Vicolo’ ii. Full Height Voided Courtyard(s) & Garden(s) (*anchor(s) to FF Internal ‘Vicolo’ Courtyards) iii. Flexible Live / Work Kitchen / Dining Room(s) iv. ‘Bassi’ Entrance(s)

( i n ) b e t we e n ur b a n t h i c k n e ss a n d vo i d

Performing new institutional urbanities for the city on stage.

‘(In)Between Urban Thickness and Void’ responds to the public and institutional functionalities of the former monastery, reconfiguring these programmes in a contemporary rewriting of the southern side of the site, where the monastery complex meets the neighbouring Quartieri Spagnoli.

As a pair, the proposals put the terms of the thesis–Ruin, Labyrinth,Theatre–into practice, using them to determine and test programme and spatiality in an ‘(un)doing’ that challenges, produces and thickens thresholds within the site and outwards across the city. In response to their situation, the Gallery and Library employ an architectural language of void, thickness and performance at different scales, in an urban reconfiguration of the edge condition of the site. xvii

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Components taken from exploded axonometric exhibition drawings. (originally drawn at 1:200/500 respectively)

(un)doing thresholds /project 2a & b

figure(s) 9 & 10.

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Performative Construction(s): field of performative architectures. + Vico Lungo Montec alvario

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City Fragments: Neapolitan Porosities

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Thesis Abstract...............................................................

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vi.

Thesis Abstract...............................................................

1 1.

Napoli: the place, its porosity and a thesis........................

pa r t pa r t

2

25.

pa r t

3

55.

Thresholds, protagonists and their practice.....................

Opening(s) to the Santissima Trinità della Monache........

4 79.

A ‘field’ of fragment(s): in context. in practice.....................................

pa r t

5 101.

Sites of ‘ruin’ & anchors of transience...........................

pa r t pa r t

6

133.

pa r t

7

165.

Filtration through streets of ‘labyrinth’...........................

‘Theatrical skins’; interstice(s) & passage(s)........................

01

N A P O L I ; ‘The instigation of a thesis of ‘porous’ architectural speculations–one that situates an interplay of porosities and explores the implications of thinking of the city and its architecture(s) as porous.’

Napoli: the place, it’s porosity, and a thesis Benjamin and Lacis begin their description of Naples through the recollection of story; they describe the event of a priest being carried on a cart through the streets of Naples, forming an opening which moves on to a discussion of the porosity of the city.

Rather than opening through a specific situation or site to describe porosity, we are introduced through what Andrew Benjamin describes as a “threshold” which avoids “the

The city is recognised as part of a wider urban field, framed through an understanding of its regional and cultural formation, as well as through specific situation and event; porosity is situated and framed in the city through the interweaving of urban fabric and action, interpenetrating spatial and temporal porosities founded in the immediacy of the city.

complete identification of the text within Naples.” 6 Through

this introduction, we come to understand Neapolitan porosity as temporal, not purely spatial, at the opening and throughout Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Naples.

Informed by this opening into Naples, the thesis seeks to understand Neapolitan porosity through both situation and event, engaging in an exploration of the city at different scales.

6.

Andrew Benjamin, “Porosity at the Edge: Working through Walter Benjamin’s Naples”, Architectural Theory Review, 10(1), (April 2012), p. 36.

introduction / napoli: the city

NA P O L I ; THE CITY Naples belongs to the Volcanic regions of Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei of southern Italy.

It is a city made and re-made on and of the earth of these fields; of tufo—a sandstone of compressed volcanic ash—quarried from subterranean seams.7

“occupies a marginal position in the European urban hierarchy, which is losing its identity as a focal point on a regional scale.” 8

figure 12.

The project explores Naples at a time when the city is going through a prolonged period of widespread social and economic crisis whereby the “role of the historical centre of Naples as the principles node for social life is declining,” 9 and has necessitated a profound re-examination of its future and the nature of its development. 10

Figure ground plan situating Napoli in the Phlegraean Fields - between Vesuvius & Campi Flegrei

Upholding various roles throughout Italian history since its inception, the city has been in a perpetual state of ‘becoming’ as a result of the different cultures, religions and regimes which have overtaken it.The consequence is a city that

7. French and Mitsoula, City Fragments: Neapolitan Porosities, Studio Overview, p. 1.

8. Simona De Rosa and Luca Salvati, “Beyond a ‘side street story’? Naples from spontaneous centrality to entropic polycentricism, towards a ‘crisis city’”, Cities, 51 (Jan 2016), p. 78.

9.

10.

2

De Rosa and Salvati, “Beyond a ‘side street story’ ?”, p. 78.

Giuseppe Mazzeo, “Naples”, Cities, 26(6), (Dec 2006), p. 363.

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introduction / napoli: the city

t h e c i t y h a s b e e n i n a p e r p e t ua l stat e o f ‘ b e c om i n g ’ a s a r e s u lt o f t h e d i ff e r e n t c u lt ur e s, r e l i g i on s a n d r e g i me s wh i c h h ave ove r ta ke n i t.

T R AC E S O F A ‘ L AY E R E D’ C I T Y.

napoli / the ‘layered’ city

We are introduced to the city’s history by Serenella Iovino as “spatiotemporally porous: a city upon other

predecessor, (becoming one of the foremost cities of Magna Graecia), which now forms the Centro Storico - the historic centre of the city as we know it today.

cities, where traces of the Greek and Roman settlements, preserved in the underfoot layers, systematically overflow onto streets and corners”.11 In more recent history, the city opened out to the

The city was founded as Parthenope, a small commercial port, which expanded around Monte Echia on the South coast of the city, in the 8th and 9th Century BCE by Greeks from the city of Cumae, who had themselves settled from Euboea (now Evia).12 In the 6th Century BCE, this first iteration of the city was renamed Neapolis (the “new city”), overwritten in the Neapolitan plains to the North-East of its

4

West in the 16th Century with the formation of the Quartieri Spagnoli, taking its name from the Spanish viceroys, rulers of the city for the next 200 years.

Today, ancient history and contemporary events interpenetrate. “The Greek Neapolis and the present-

day city are not separated by millennia but by metres of soil under the ground. The past is not placed in a glass case or forgotten, but peeps out in some parts of the present-day city.” 13

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This provides the thesis with an opening reading of how the city might be understood as porous.

One that engenders a spatio-temporal porosity introduced by interpenetrative material conditions of the city’s history; for “in such

corners one can scarcely discern where building is still in progress and where dilapidation has already set in. For nothing is concluded.” 14

fig. 15.

11.

Serenella Iovino, “Bodies of Naples: Stories, Matter, and the Landscapes of Porosity” in Material Ecocriticism edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 97-113. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2014, p. 100.

12. French and Mitsoula, City Fragments: Neapolitan Porosities, Brief One, p. 7.

13. “Catacombs of San Gennaro,” Catacombe Di Napoli, accessed November 30, 2019. http://www.catacombedinapoli.it/en/places/catacombsof-san-gennaro-naples#.

14. Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 166.

figure(s) 13 & 14.

Napoli on film; contextual city photograph(s)

napoli / the ‘layered’ city

t h e l aye r e d c i t y Theatrical layering’s of landscape, topography and ruin.

napoli / the ‘layered’ city

Engaging with questions of ‘porosity’ framed by Walter Benjamin & Asja Lacis.

i t s ‘ p or o s i t y ’

“As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen constellations.The stamp of the definitive is avoided.” 15

&

“Writing in the city in 1924, Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis describe the city as porous, as made up of porous architectures, of grottoes, tenements and gallerias. This spatial porosity engenders an attendant programmatic porosity.” 16 “Building and action interpenetrate” and “the street migrates into the living room.” The buildings are “divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres” in which all occupants participate in “pictures

napoli

of Neapolitan street life.” 17

The enquiry brings the nature of the ‘ecology of porosity’ described by Benjamin and Lacis into question and positions a brief to challenge, contest or accept whether Naples might be thought of as porous, and how porosity might manifest means by which to develop architecture and urban design practices. 18 In ‘Myth and Metropolis’, Gilloch suggests Benjamin’s visions of porosity appear through recurrent use of the terms labyrinth;

a place of losing oneself and disorientation, ruin; a site of decay and transience, and, theatre; a place of spontaneity and performance.19

As such, this thesis takes on Graeme Gilloch’s three conditions of Benjamin and Lacis’ ‘porosity’ as a working hypothesis for working in and on Napoli and the project will therefore explore the implications of these interpenetrative conditions of porosity as architecture(s) and urban intervention(s) that will become intrinsically porous.

15.

Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 165 -166.

16.

French and Mitsoula, City Fragments: Neapolitan Porosities, Studio Overview, p. 1.

17.

Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 167.

An “ecology of porosity” as defined in by French and Mitsoula in City Fragments: Neapolitan Porosities, Brief One as (eco-, from oikos, meaning ‘house’ or ‘household’, and -logic, from logia, meaning ‘study’), echoing Isabelle Stengers’ description of an “ecology of practices.” See Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics, Vol.1, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

18.

19.

8

Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 34.

A P O RO U S C I T Y O F ‘ ( U N ) D O I N G ’.

- Walter Benjamin & Asja Lacis

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figure 17.

Vico Scassacocchi: Threshold(s) of ruin; labyrinth; and theatre.

napoli / and its ‘porosity’

P O RO U S CO N D I T I O N S O F NA P O L I .

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( un ) d o i n g a r ch i t e c t ur e s t h at a r e t h e atr i c a l , ru i n o u s & l a byr i n t h i n e .

napoli / and its ‘porosity’

As a working methodology that might foster, through architectural design, such an ‘ecology of porosity’ the thesis turns to practice another reading of porosity.

The thesis will engage with this process of ‘(un)doing’ as a way to represent (draw, record and install) porous architectures that are theatrical, ruinous and labyrinthine, themselves, co-existent, porous conditions of Naples.

Street Life in Colours; contextual street photograph(s).

20. Benjamin, A. “Porosity at the Edge”, p. 38-39.

21. French and Mitsoula, City Fragments: Neapolitan Porosities, Studio Overview, p. 1.

napoli / and its ‘porosity’

Working through Walter Benjamin’s ‘Naples’ in ‘Porosity at the Edge’, Andrew Benjamin notes of the way that porosity re-defines the relationship between spaces as one of “interpenetration,” 20 whereby an “undoing” of borders or boundaries leads to a more ‘provisional’ occupation of space: a productive conception of urbanity in which porous architectures are (un) done, drawn through one another, in a constructive overwriting founded in the immediacy of the city.21

figure(s) 18 & 19.

overlapping frames given

temporality through promenade.

p or o u s str e e t s c a p e ( s ) Boundaries blur and territories bleed; definitions lose their definition.

napoli / and its ‘porosity’

14

napoli / and a ‘thesis’

page

b o un da r i e s b lur a n d t e r r i tor i e s b l e e d ; d e f i n i t i on s lo s e t h e i r d e f i n i t i on ; a n d t e rm s a r e r e - d e t e r m i n e d .

15

figure 21.

Animate Drawing(s) installed in Matthew Gallery, Minto House, November 2019.

“So the house is far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out” Benjamin describes.22 “Life bursts from doors”; “the living room reappears on the street”, and porosity is performed through threshold.23 In such ‘active dimensions’ borders are refused; boundaries blur and territories bleed; definitions lose their definition; and terms are re-determined.24

The emerging thesis will take these ‘thresholds’ as unequivocal sites of porosity: as origins for exploration into realising architectures, and an attitude toward how those architectures might engage with the misalignment of development in city.

By ‘(un)doing thresholds’, extending the spaces between things, providing both separations from, and thickenings within spaces of the city, the thesis will bring disparate sites into relation, (programmatically, materially and spatially), and together its projects will look from the city toward Santissima Trinita delle Monache, the abandoned monastery on the hill above Montesanto.

22. Benjamin. W and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 171.

23. Ibid.

24. Benjamin. A, “Porosity at the Edge”, 38.

napoli / and a ‘thesis’

It will question to what extent the values and physicalities of ‘threshold’ be reevaluated? Whether the ruin; labyrinth; and theatre can be re-figured, (un)done, to introduce a new tectonic language for working in and on the city? And how it will employ this language to propose ‘new Neapolitan practice(s)’ for a more viable inhabitance of this porous city?

napoli / situational porosity

‘ T H E F I R E GA M E S O F NA P O L I ’

In Naples the tradition has evolved: kids from various inner-city neighbourhoods spend months stealing and stashing Christmas trees in the lead up to the event so they can build the largest fire possible, a sign of their patch’s superiority.25 The celebrations, now commonly known as ‘Il Cippo’ take place across the city in various guises, the thesis however, concentrates on those in the Spanish Quarters that have been well documented in the films “Il Segreto” (2013) and “Fire Games of Napoli” (2018) by Italian street artists Cyop & Kaf and Neapolitan film maker Victoria Fiore respectively.

25. Ruth. Faj, “Understanding the ‘Fire Games of Napoli’”, Vice, January 2, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ paqa5z/understanding-the-fire-games-of-napoli.

26.

Victoria Fiore, Interview by Ruth Faj (Vice) in “Understanding the ‘Fire Games of Napoli’.

16

figure 22.

Each year, on the 17th January, teenagers in Naples come together to light a bonfire to mark San Antonio day. The celebration dates back hundreds of years and evokes a collective sense of renewal for the year ahead. Recently however, the celebrations have have come to be controversial with many locals arguing that it has become out of hand, a rite of passage that schools young people in criminality.

Still take from ‘Fire games of Napoli film.

As a situational opening into Naples, and an ongoing contextual frame of reference for the project, ‘Il Cippo di Sant’Antonio’ is introduced as a contemporary condition of the city through the lens of ‘porosity’ as so far described by the ongoing thesis. It serves as an initial frame of reference through which the thesis begins to unpack Gilloch’s terminology and places a focus on the Quarteri Spagnoli as pertinent grounds for further speculation.

page

17

napoli / situational porosity

“ t h e r i ch e st pa r t o f n a p l e s i s on t h e h i l l , n o t fa r f r om s pa n i s h qua r t e r s . t h e y ’r e r i g h t n e x t to e ac h o t h e r bu t wor l d s a pa r t . � 2 6

T H E RU I N ; ‘ I L CA M P E T TO ’

napoli / the ‘fire games’ of napoli

The site that plays host to the events of ‘Il Cippo’ is one of many “spaces that lie abandoned and

become ever more porous to those who wish to make use of it.

its foundations over forty years following earthquake damage, is at a premium for a society that has always paid the consequence for conditions of widespread social and economic degradation.

for the children of the neighbourhood. Sadly, despite now being listed on Google Maps as ‘Il Campetto’ (the pitch), the initiatives and speculations that have attached themselves to this site over the past decade continue to be ignored by the municipality; wasting its potential and the opportunity, for change towards a possible future.

in the general disinterest in one of the “youngest” neighbourhoods of the city.” 27 Where the lack of open As well as being at the centre of the ‘Fire Games of space and meeting places is increasingly felt by the Napoli’, the residents of the Quarters continue to residents of the Quarters, the ‘ruin’, reduced to petition for the site to be rehabilitated as a football field

The remains of the residential tower continue to contribute as echoes of the past: left behind, but facilitating contemporary actions of ‘theatricality’ and ‘temporality’ across the city. Despite measures being taken to keep people from entering the site, its abandonment blurs the boundaries of its inhabitance.

An enzymatic agency of the past, its ‘thresholds’

18

27. Antonio Folle, “Quartieri Spagnoli, a Napoli un campetto da calcio al posto del degrado.” Il Mattino, February 26, 2020. https://www.ilmattino.it/napoli/cronaca/quartieri_spagnoli_ campo_calcio_area_abbandonata-5076525.html

page

19

napoli / the ‘fire games’ of napoli

T H E L A BY R I N T H ; ‘ QUA RT I E R I S PAG N O L I ’

20

ur b a n r e - c o l l e c t i on s ”

28

“ t h e c i t y i t s e l f b e c ome s t h e me d i um f or

napoli / the ‘fire games’ of napoli

page

21 One might begin to understand the taking place of these events in the world of the ‘labyrinth’: a way to conceive the urban landscape as a field of interstitial spaces defined by the discovery or experience of the thresholds that define them.

If we return to Walter Benjamin’s recurrent depictions of the labyrinth, they can be recognised as both ‘physical’ and ‘experiential’ conceptions of the term in so far as “the city [as labyrinth] becomes the medium for urban recollection”. 28 In this sense, and through the ‘Fire Games of Napoli’, the thesis begins to speculate that the Neapolitan metropolis has a labyrinthine structure in that the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ as well as the ‘above’ and ‘beneath’ of the city are experienced in a new way that binds in the lives of those who encounter it.

spaces in a labyrinth, is continually encountered again, returned to from different directions”.31 By the children implicated in the actions of these ‘games’, we are presented with a representation of these conditions of the ‘labyrinth’. The Quarteri Spagnoli is elevated from a location or a place to live, to a ‘labyrinth’, a mechanism for these children to find a ‘way to’ live.

28. Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 67-68.

29.

Heinz Paetzold, “Walter Benjamin and the Urban Labyrinth”, Filozofski Vestnik, 22(2), 2001, 111-126, p. 121.

30. Benjamin, One Way Street, Benjamin, London: Penguin, 2009, p. 295.

31. Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 67.

Benjamin describes such an experience as

“setting out the sphere of life”,30 whereby ‘memory’ becomes city like: “the dense networks of streets and alleyways are like knotted, intertwined threads of memory […] the past is not left behind as one moves on, but, like the

figure(s) 25 & 26.

Still(s) take from ‘Fire games of Napoli film.

napoli / the ‘fire games’ of napoli

t h e f i r e ga me s o f n a p o l i An understanding of Neapolitan porosity through both situation and event.

T H E T H E AT R E ; ‘ I L C I PP O D I S AN T ’AN TO N I O ’ “ t h e s e k i d s, wh o ’ d s c r e a me d a n d we r e

e x c i ta bl e f or t h e wh o l e f i l m , to f i n d t h e m s i l e n t l i ke t h at wa s 3 2me s me r i s i n g. i t wa s h on e st ly m ag i c a l b e i n g t h e r e ”.

32. Fiore. Interview by Ruth Faj (Vice) in “Understanding the ‘Fire Games of Napoli’.

napoli / the ‘fire games’ of napoli

02

T H R E S H O L D (S); ‘The architectonic components and adjoining space(s) that contribute to, and are immediately affected by, the theatrical performance or mobility of an architecture.’

Thresholds, protagonists and their practice.

To return to Benjamin and Lacis, “expressive acts of encounter” or performances in which “building

and action interpenetrate”

become a porous practice that perforates perimeters.33 It opens up and moves into thresholds that fall across distinct regions where boundaries blur and territories bleed.

The thesis draws further on his conception of thresholds as “spatial entities” that are performed in

“constructions that endure over time” or are temporarily choreographed

“through use” or “ephemeral appropriation” to explore their implications as architectural and spatial devices.36

Thresholds which “loosen” such boundaries that are erected to conform to and preserve strict spatial and social order.34 This thetic perception of the term at once become synonymous with mobility and the act of passage, yet to be ‘on’ the threshold of something also demands for a temporal staticity or a prior holding in place.

In a comparable description on the experience of porous urban space Stavros Stavrides refers to this as the way “thresholds both symbolize and

concretize the socially meaningful act of connecting while separating and separating while connecting.” 35

33. Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 165.

34. Stavrides, “Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Urban Space”, p. 175.

35. Ibid, p. 176.

36. Ibid.

“Just as the living room reappears on the street with chairs, hearth, and altar, so, only much more loudly, the street migrates into the living room.” 39 - Walter Benjamin & Asja Lacis It is perhaps here that we are offered the most direct illustrations of Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of a spatial/architectural porosity in the mingling of public and private spheres.

Every street has its ‘bassi’, ground-floor apartments of only one or two rooms with opening directly into the streets where the inhabitants openly share their lives with passersby.

“Transience is marked by the instability of boundaries, the reversal of interior and exterior”; the relationship between public and private domains, a key theme in all of Benjamin’s cityscapes.40

The thesis now looks towards the work of contemporary street artists ‘Cyop & Kaf’ as protagonists for intervention within this community.

Interactive online map highlighting the work of street artists Cyop&Kaf.

At the centre of the thesis is the long impoverished ‘Quartieri Spagnoli’. “The Spanish Quarter takes its name from the Spanish viceroys, rulers of the city for 200 years, beginning in 1504. Don Pedro de Toledo first laid out the thoroughfare still known as Via Toledo, now the neighbourhood’s downhill border, then developed the Quarter as troop housing. The general population flooded in thereafter, but the layout retains a military grid.”37 Its east-west vicoli climb the slopes underneath Castel Sant’Elmo and Certosa di San Martino, most of which alleyways turn into stairs. “Its north-south parallels rise and fall only slightly less. And none of the buildings have elevators.” 38

figure 28.

quartieri spagnoli / neapolitan threshold(s)

QUA RT I E R I S PAG N O L I

37. John Domini, “Two Neighbourhoods, One Naples.” New York Times, September 14, 1997. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/14/travel/twoneighborhoods-one-naples.html.

26

38.

Domini, “Two Neighbourhoods, One Naples”.

39.

Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 171.

40.

Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 26.

page

27

quartieri spagnoli / neapolitan threshold(s)

“ Transience

is marked by the i n s ta b i l i t y o f b o u n d a r i e s

�.

40

n e a p o l i ta n t h r e s h o l d ( s ) The heart of the Quartieri Spagnoli, May 2015.

quartieri spagnoli / neapolitan threshold(s)

CO N T E M P O R A RY ST R E E T W R I T I N G (S)

contemporary street writing(s) / cyop & kaf

“Soft, sinuous and sometimes sharp. Colourful, simple, but above all, urban. They are the monsters of the historical centre of Naples, good monsters that suddenly appear to snatch a smile, a reflection, or even just a photo.” 41 The works are part of the re-writing project in Quartieri Spagnoli of the Neapolitan duo ‘Cyop & Kaf ’ which initially concerned themselves with buildings (destroyed by the earthquake and never restored) considered a ‘no man’s land’.

Through the performance of their acts in the streets and their contribution to Neapolitan life, their works soon spread from basso to basso and garage after

30

garage, to satisfy all the requests of those requesting their very own ‘monsters’; embedding their practice in the everday communal life of the city.42 The thesis identifies this practice and the sites of their intervention as ‘porous’. There is an inherent connection between the distinctive ‘threshold’ condition of the Neapolitan ‘bassi’ and those created at a wider urban scale through the implementation of these works.

“They speak to the Neapolitans, to distracted passers-by, to curious tourists, to children who live in the street, to students and football supporters […] and they do it 365 days a year.” 43

page

31 A focus on the doors as thresholds intrinsic to the ‘bassi’ became a key focus for the fieldwork undertaken in Naples and drove a move to work with sites and interventions that become discovered through disorientation. By getting lost in the labyrinth; the dense meshwork of the Quarters; an often unexplored heart of the city; simultaneously a place “of intoxication and inhumanity” and; a “paradox that animates and pervades” its streets.44

figure(s) 30 & 31.

Street paintings in Quartieri Spagnoli, Cyok&Kaf.

41. Racna Magazine, “Cyop & Kaf, Mostri Lunghi un Anno.” Racna Magazine, June 5, 2014. http://www.racnamagazine.it/cyopekaf-mostri-lunghi-un-anno/ 42. Cyop&Kaf, “Quore Spinato”. Cyop&Kaf.com, Accessed December 2, 2019, http://www.cyopekaf.org/en/qs/.

43. Racna Magazine, “Cyop & Kaf, Mostri Lunghi un Anno.”

44. Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 36.

contemporary street writing(s) / cyop & kaf

“No other neighbourhood in Europe […] offers so close an approximation of medieval city experience, footbound and communal. Every street has its bassi, ground-floor apartments of two rooms or even one, and the inhabitants openly share their lives with passers-by. Hole-in-the-wall restaurants bear out the urban wisdom that cheap amenities mean good food.”45 The ‘bassi’, also described as ‘Neapolitan di ‘o Vascio’ are the smallest of ground floor apartments

In spite of this, the ‘bassi’ manage to encapsulate something of the ‘porosity’ described by Benjamin and Lacis: the very essence of

Neapolitan life.

Perhaps it is the bassi’s immediate absence of ‘threshold’ between the home and the street, the public and private, and, inside and out, that has encouraged its residents to exhibit their own. Doors are always open because there are no windows; Activity spills out and the streets re-choreographed to enter the successive phasing of daily life; passers-

down the sheets and the hour you get into bed.46

However impoverished life is behind these doors, these residents, Neapolitan to the core, hold the key to keeping this way of life in existence. Widely remaining as the last units or apartments of large urban blocks to be acquired by the municipality, they continue to suspend the extensive gentrification of significant areas of the city and instead advocate bespoke, site specific development around them: development by means of a ‘porous overwriting intrinsic to Naples’.

figure(s) 32 & 33.

Photographs of typical ground floor ‘bassi’ inhabitation.

45. Domini, “Two Neighbourhoods, One Naples”.

46. Rompipalle, “I bassi”, Under the Neapolitan Son (Or,

Kicked in the Shin: Naples and the Italian Experience to

Tear Down your Tuscan Farmhouse Fantasy) February 15, 2007, http://undertheneapolitanson.blogspot. com/2007/02/i-bassi.html

neapolitan thresholds / the ‘bassi’

with direct access onto the streets. This unique Neapolitan housing typology is characteristic of the Spanish Quarters, and continues to be considered a widespread expression of urban and social decay.

by know what you’re having for dinner even if they’ve lost their sense of smell; know your favourite TV shows (and sometimes gather round to watch them with you).They know when you turn

n e a p o l i ta n t h r e s h o l d ( s ) The heart of the Quartieri Spagnoli, May 2015.

quartieri spagnoli / neapolitan threshold(s)

animate drawing(s) / ‘into the city’

3 DOORS; ‘ I N TO T H E C I T Y’ ‘(Un)doing Thresholds’ becomes a methodological act that defines the Animate Drawing.

As a result, the doors make the Animate Drawing porous in scale, being layered up and overwritten by Napoli’s urban fabric and knitting together fragment(s) and gesture(s) into an improvised choreography. The values and physicalities of the doors as thresholds in their own right, transform this ‘field’ from an empty surface into a spatial field ready to receive speculation on Naples.47

figure 35.

The door is no longer a boundary but rather a suggested passage: a threshold that holds bodies, spaces and landscapes together, and navigates the connections between them.

The ‘making of’ the Animate Drawing through several stages of projection.

With reference to those found in the Quartieri Spagnoli, it uses three doors as a foundation a surface that immediately sets the drawing at the scale of the body, elevating the process of making to a gestural performance.

47. ‘Field’ defined as ‘the spaces and/or sites that constitute the regions bound into territories affected by or associated with a particular threshold’ and interrogated further in part 03.

36

page

37

animate drawing(s) / ‘into the city’

t h e d o or i s n o lon g e r a b o un da ry bu t r at h e r a s u g g e st e d pa ss ag e : a t h r e s h o l d t h at h o l d s b o d i e s , s pac e s a n d l a n d s c a p e to g e t h e r .

38

animate drawing(s) / representing porosity

page

39 f r ag m e n t s t h at o p e n u p , r e c o r d a n d a r e i n d i a l o g u e w i t h s i t uat i o n s ac r o s s t h e city.

figure 36.

Digital iteration of an Animate Drawing composed with overlaying layers for projection.

The ‘Animate Drawing’ explores the interrelation between Gilloch’s recurring terms: ruin, labyrinth, and theatre. Through it, we are to test the nature of the way that these porous conditions exist in Naples.

As an origin for exploration, the drawing also engages with the bodily nature of its ‘making’ by treating the drawing as a gestural act - an opening form - that as Jean Luc Nancy describes

“evokes more the gesture of drawing than the traced figure and indicates the figure’s essential incompleteness, a non-closure or non-totalising of form.” 48

In this sense we can return to the fact that we begin to record the way thresholds act out in the city, the way boundaries blur and territories

bleed, definitions lose their definition and terms are re-determined, and the manner in which the

theatrical, the ruinous and the labyrinthine coexist in the city.

48. Jean Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. P. Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), p. 1.

animate drawing(s) / representing porosity

The Animate Drawing presents parts of the drawn figure; fragments that open up, record and are in dialogue with situations across the city as well as being able to operate independently.

Fragmented ‘ruins’, ‘labyrinths’ and ‘theatres’ are mapped on a new field, frequently overlapping or erasing each other, creating a new urban topography of Napoli.

animate drawing(s)

me t h o d o lo gi c a l i n d e x

t h e f i e l d u p on wh i ch t h i s n e w c on c e p t i on o f n a pl e s r e st s.

40

page

figure 37.

Library of indexed drawings and conditions of porosity as installed in Studio 2 workspace.

As a methodological gesture, the drawing assigns material and colour to found conditions of porosity that have been described in Naples. These form a ‘Methodological Index’, the basis for a ‘series’ of Animate Drawing(s). 49 The bare plywood illustrates the municipalities, the formal territories that the city is split into, where, the gesso, describes the more erratic nature of the topographical landscape that these territories occupy. The grey paint is labyrinthine, part of the streets with theatrical white blocks within them drawing attention to where performance is held. The ruins are black, typifying their historical and cultural prominence and positioning within the city’s underground realm.

The red becomes the field upon which this new conception of Naples rests: in essence, this becomes situational of a new language throughout the thesis, and here brings attention to specific sites of intervention. Etching and engraving mark points of reference, (contour lines and primary axes) that

help situate the drawings, whilst the overlapping of scales allows for parts of certain, more detailed spatial porosities to impress themselves upon the urban fabric of the city.

The accompanying film records the Animate Drawing through three different lenses.The ‘Projection’ becomes gestural performance of our ‘(un)doing’.The ‘Methodological’ footage shows our gestures of making or those from the people of Napoli and finally, the ‘Situational’ city footage, locates the conditions drawn within the city.

animate drawing(s) / methodological index

49. Please refer to folio for drawn reference to this index and the spatial dimension that gave rise to such Animate Drawing practice(s).

AN I M AT E D R AW I N G P R AC T I C E (S)

41

ge st ur a l l a n g uage

animate drawing(s)

“The language of gestures goes further here than anywhere else in Italy.The conversation is impenetrable to anyone from outside.” 50

projection became a gestural ritual: a process filled with performance and improvisation.

“The ordering of the drink, its consumption and the passage out from the cafe, all need to be understood within the rhythm of the gesture. Space is positioned - and therefore created - by one particular rhythm rather than another.What occurs within the cafe is the inter-articulation of spatial positioning and the rhythm of the body […] Time, space and the rhythms of the body work together. If there is a way into the general sense in which porosity figures within Benjamin’s writing on Naples, then it resides in its effects [...] Porosity, if only as

It is situated between spontaneity, intuition and a carefully rehearsed act of drawing. It is an elaborate choreography of methodological practice(s) and overwriting or ‘(un)doing’ of ruins, labyrinths and theatres of Naples, whilst touching upon the city’s theatrical character.

a beginning, provides a way of making space and time work together to define both the urban condition and the body’s place within it. Time is integral to an understanding of urban affect.” 51

The ‘act of making’ the Animate Drawing and the duality of its bodily 42

It becomes a gestural drawing.

figure(s) 38 & 39.

The ‘making of’ the Animate Drawing through several stages of projection.

50. Benjamin. W and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 173.

51. Benjamin. A, “Porosity at the Edge”, p. 34-35.

page

43

animate drawing(s) / gestural language

G E ST U R E (S) O F ‘(UN)DOING’

Installation of the ‘Animate Drawing’ for cross-studio review series.

a n i m at e d r aw i n g ( s ) ’ s i t u a t e d b e t w e e n s p o n t a n e i t y , i n t u i t i o n a n d a

c a r e f u l l y r e h e a r s e d a c t o f d r aw i n g . ’

animate drawing(s) / installing porosity

A R E - E X A M I NAT I O N O F P O RO U S R E P R E S E N TAT I O N (S).

46

“ t h e r e - m a k i n g o f on e wor l d i n to a n o t h e r, t h e tr a n s l at i on f r om on e me d i um to a n o t h e r � . 5 2

animate drawing(s) / translation of language

Taking the different forms and conditions of representations applied to the ply fragments—white gesso as landscape, black stencil as ruin, grey paint as labyrinth, white spray paint as field—we applied these to the survey drawings. The methodological indexing of techniques was applied and re-examined at the scale and context of the sites by identifying analogous conditions in the chosen sites to those in the drawing of the city.

What we begin to understand through this act of translation is the “remaking of one

world into another, the translation of one set of structured meanings or impressions from one medium into another” in a way

that opens up a new way to examine the conditions found in these existing sites.52

figure(s) 41 & 42.

The ‘making of’ the Animate Tracing(s) through several layers of recording(s).

52. John Whiteman, “Site Unscene – Notes on Architecture and the Concept of Fiction. Peter Eisenman: Moving Arrows, Eros and Other Errors.” AA Files, 12 (1986), p. 80.

animate drawing(s) / translation of language

On returning from Naples, the project began to address how to apply the practice(s) and technique(s) used in its ongoing explorations of ruin, labyrinth and theatre in the representation of particular sites: opening up a means by which to approach these situations and expose the porosity of their conditions.

Using brown paper as a newly interpreted ‘tablet’— a surface akin to the ply fragments pinned to the doors—the drawings began to translate the language of the Animate Drawing to the scale of the survey.

Creating a porous ‘viscosity’ to draw from: providing space to find new values to ascribe to the city.

p r o c e ss o f ove rwr i t i n g Through the overlaying of plans, sections, fields and fragments, the sites were drawn as recompositions of their existing conditions, taking the “set of structured meanings” of the static survey drawing to the medium of the Animate Drawing. 36 In this act of translation, the situations were remade from “one world into another,” using the material and context of the sites to open new understandings and these situations. 54 Through this methodology, the sites are treated not as static

48

structures but as “a palimpsest and a quarry,” as situations “containing

traces of both memory and immanence”, opportunity in which

space may be found to intervene.55

Rather than being compromised by a ‘fear of erasure’, the tablets function as animate surfaces for marking and overlaying specific site conditions and measured surveys.

The overwriting or productive ‘(un)doing’ resisted the preservation of the immediate legibility of each individual layer, instead creating a porous

‘viscosity’ to draw from: providing space to find new values to ascribe to the drawing and the ones that are to follow. 56

“There can be a fluid relationship between these layers. [Drawings] and erasures are superimposed to bring about other texts or erasures.A new erasure creates text; a new text creates erasure.” 57

Process of ‘overwriting’ with layers of measured surveys and proposed speculation(s).

53. Whiteman, “Site Unscene,” p. 80.

54 & 55. Ibid.

56. 53Richard Galpin, “Erasure in Art: Destruction, Deconstruction, and Palimpsest” in Destruction: Documents of Contemporary Art Anthology edited

by Sven Spieker. Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2017.

57.

Galpin, “Erasure in Art”.

58. Ibid.

animate drawing(s) / process of overwriting

figure 43.

Conserving traces, and being receptive to new writings, the tablets were returned to and reworked; engaging in this process of constructive overwriting in their conception; and leading to new configurations and meanings with the application of new layers of speculation.58

T H R E S H O L D S

N E A P O L I T A N

animate drawing(s) / between porous practice(s)

A.

P R A C T I C E

1.

v.

D.

C.

iii.

ii.

iv.

i.

2.

B.

D R A W I N G S

DRAWING(S) :

A N I M A T E

Animate Drawing(s): Tracing of animation (left); ‘Tablet’ (right).

sscale(s)]

figure(s) 44 & 45.

page

51 These drawings return to questions of ‘fixity’ and ‘fluidity’ in the development of the city and pertain to Eisenman’s “idea that the site is a reality

containing only presence.To privilege ‘the site’ as the context is to repress other possible contexts, is to become fixated on the […] ’site’, is to believe that ‘the site’ exists as a permanent, knowable whole.” 42 Rather the ‘mobility’ of the drawings underpinned an iterative process of tracing and overwriting, seeking to develop an architectural language informed by the representation of ‘ruin’, ‘labyrinth’ and ‘theatre’ in an Animate Drawing process.

They re-figured motifs of existing and emerging architectures to produce indicative moves for intervention(s) in the surveyed sites, whereby “the choice and

re-composition of qualities, determined by both the material […] (say, bricks or paint) and the meaning to be made […] becomes the substantive basis of meaning.” 43 The textures, densities and overlays of the tablet drawings were mapped continually through this process, using the offsets and interactions of the traces to oscillate between the definite and the indefinite; suggestions to the first moves towards architectures of the thesis.

Publications, 1986.

60. Whiteman, “Site Unscene,” p. 80.

animate drawing(s) / between porous practice(s)

59. Peter Eisenman, “Introduction to Box 3” in Moving Arrows, Eros and Other Errors, London: Architectural Association

’ A t h r e s h o l d t h a t h o l d s b o d i e s , s p a c e s and landscape together’.

a n i m at e d r aw i n g ( s ) Installation of the ‘Animate Drawing’ for cross-studio review series.

animate drawing(s) / installing porosity

03

O P E N I N G (S); ‘An architecture or spatial gesture that performs or constructs an availability or inherent capacity to advance.’

Opening(s) to the Santa Trinita delle Monache To conceive a gesture as holding potential or opportunity to allow passage or access is to begin to understand it as an opening within the ‘porous’ context of the thesis.

In these terms, openings are

It contributes towards the city becoming what Benjamin and Lacis describe as “a theatre of new, unforeseen constellations” and the way this can be framed in the design and practice of its architecture(s).63

performed or constructed to ‘lead on’’ towards an (un)doing whereby “movement comes to define the way in which space is both contrasted and then worked within.” 61

This movement or momentum established by openings is intrinsically Neapolitan and engenders a pace to life within the city that encourages a continual re-configuring of itself. Andrew Benjamin refers to this as a “way through” Naples. One that “has to do

with the use of porosity as a temporal concept” that “emerges as a form of undoing”.62

61. Benjamin, “Porosity at the Edge”, p. 34.

62. Ibid, p. 35 & 47.

63. Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 165.

*P

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58

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figure 48.

op

+ Labyrinth; circulation system facilitated by ‘ruined’ brickwork fragment(s)

performative construction(s) / ‘dentro le mura’

openi

Components from exhibition drawing (originally produced at 1:50)

swi ng B.

A.

F.

E.

C.

G. H.

6.

D.

7.

5.

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PA SS AG E S TOWA R D S A P O SS I B L E F U T U R E , A L R E A DY E X I ST I N G I N T H E PA ST ” . 6 5

“ T H R E S H O L D S M A R K O CCA S I O N S, O PP O RT U N I T I E S F O R C H AN G E [ . . . ]

page

59

figure(s) 49-52.

Physical models a speculative studies of performative construction.

Within the dense urban morphology of the Quarter Spagnoli, open public space is scarce beyond the surface of the street. ‘Openings’ into this morphology encourage activity and function as nodes of performativity throughout daily Neapolitan life.

The nature of many ruinous sites nestled within the quarters such as those under speculation in this collection of ‘Performative Constructions’ hold a potential to be folded into this uniquely Neapolitan streetscape. As such , they become central to the strategic measures of the thesis to ‘open’ up the quarters and the monastery into each other and explore the essence of the ‘threshold conditions’ that are created in doing so.

In this sense, we can begin to consider these sites as ‘thresholds’ that, through their ruinous characteristics (or with reference back to Gilloch, their “decay and transience” 64), “mark

occasions, opportunities for change [and] create or symbolically represent passages towards a possible future, already existing in the past.” 65

The first of these speculations or interventions occurs at a site in significant deterioration from earthquake damage, and brought into a contemporary relevance by artworks from Cyop & Kaf (refer back to p.30). Half of the residential block that features prominently on Vico Lungo Montecalvario has been reduced to ruins and major structural buttressing has been necessary to re-enforce the remaining residential units and now occupies the best part of the site.

64. Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 36.

65. Stavros Stavrides, “Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Urban Space”, p. 178.

D O O R / W A Y S t o N E W N E A P O L I T A N P R A C T I C E

performative construction(s) / ‘dentro le mura’

T H R E S H O L D S

(Un)doing

B.

g

ing

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9.

Components from exhibition drawing (originally produced at 1:50)

D. 6.

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figure 53.

V.

g

swi ng

D.

7.

ope nin g ga te sw in

nop y

H.

As previously described, the ‘bassi’ typology contributes heavily towards a porous experience of the city. The intervention offers a framing of this porosity through propositional, architectural, spatial and tectonic moves that begin to explore the depths, densities and textures of ‘threshold(s)’ that facilitates the use of the host site as an extension of the street as observed by Benjamin and Lacis.

2.

F.

ng c a

G.

6.

4.

openi swi ng

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The proposals of this first intervention are drawn into the distinctive ‘threshold’ condition of the Neapolitan ‘bassi’ and those created at a wider urban scale through the implementation of the work of Cyop & Kaf. It explores the operative configurations of Neapolitan domesticity and works with notions of ‘everyday thickness(es)’ to open new thresholds into cultivated public space.

5.

nop y

+ Labyrinth; circulation system facilitated by ‘ruined’ brickwork fragment(s)

E.

ng c a

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ing

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+ Labyrinth; circulation system facilitated by ‘ruined’ brickwork fragment(s)

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+ Labyrinth; circulation system facilitated by ‘ruined’ brickwork fragment(s)

op

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‘ E V E RY DAY T H I C K N E SS ( E S ) ’

A.

7.

5.

5.

2.

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60

opening c anop y sw ing

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4.

9.

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2.

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page

61

A.

“This is not to suggest that the everyday prescribes a method of designing, because it is clear that as soon as one starts to design the everyday it becomes extraordinary; rather, the everyday acts as a catalyst for productive thinking.” 66

ing

gate swin

g

swi ng

op en

66. Jeremy Till, ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’, Scroope (University of Cambridge), 7, June 1995, 5-12, p. 10.

F.

E.

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C. H. G.

D.

5.

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performative construction(s) / ‘dentro le mura’

C.

ng can

D O O R / W A Y S t o N E W N E A P O L I T A N P R A C T I C E

B.

A. ng c ano py

D O O R / W A Y S t o N E W N E A P O L I T A N P R A C T I C E

openi

T H R E S H O L D S

(Un)doing

T H R E S H O L D S

(Un)doing

B.

The first new ‘urban gate’ piece is hinged on a heavy ‘ruinous’ masonry tower that is of the language of the existing buttressing. This fixed piece frames space for a maître d’ to manage the new courtyard space, whilst facilitating a further ‘labyrinthine’ circulation to upper public floors of the scheme. In contrast to this, the more ‘theatrically’ orientated ‘gate’, which performs to configure or calibrates the space throughout the day by closing off the street and providing a canopy to a new elongated ‘threshold strip’ demarcated by a change in material underfoot, is assembled through the layering of various lighter weight steel and timber components and clad in charred timber. This material use of the recycled concrete shuttering echoes the events of the ‘cippo’ and hints to the vast chimney of the oven and fire pit beyond.

In Naples, “if you live in a basso, you live half your life on the street”, 67 and therefore the second phase of the intervention is designed to further contribute open space to the nearby ‘bassi’ occupants of the Quarter Spagnoli. Much like the Trinità delle Monache offers a sanctuary of green space dislocated from the clamour of everyday life on the street, the thickness of the ‘ruinous’ concrete garden wall fragment creates a space of its own; again, ‘labyrinthine’ in its spatial configuration, a void interstice is opened up between the street and a new timber lined citrus garden within.

The nature of the interventions seek to knit into the uniqueness of the Quarteri Spagnoli, to (un)do something of the thespian quality of the ‘bassi’ that gives Naples its oddness; it’s greatness; it’s stubbornness. It’s Naplesness.68

67. Rompipalle, “I bassi”, Under the Neapolitan Son (Or, Kicked in the Shin: Naples and the Italian Experience to Tear Down your Tuscan Farmhouse Fantasy) February 15, 2007, http://undertheneapolitanson.blogspot.com/2007/02/i-bassi. html.

68. Ibid.

62

LIVING OUT HALF OF ONES LIFE ON THE ST R E E T. 6 7

Transcending a duality of domesticity and performative art practice: setting up shared, open spaces to paint, make, eat and drink.

p e r f orm at i ve c on stru c t i on ( s )

Through the thickening of particular ‘intersections’ with the street, the proposals grant two points of entry two newly reinstated public spaces; a food court and a citrus garden.

page

63

O R ATO R I O D I S AN TA MARIA DELLA FEDE V I A S. G I OVAN N I M AG G I O R E P I G NAT E L L I , 8 0 1 3 4, NA P O L I .

Through these interventions, the thesis explores the way the city itself remains active only in places where the capacity to be ‘theatrically occupied’ is nurtured. These new threshold proposals respond to such capacities; becoming ‘openings’ to further the recovery and operation of the city by means of a ‘porous commoning’ through associations such as Santa Fede Liberata.

“Naples as an aporetic experience always defers or postpones its meaning(s) [...] Naples as the supreme aporetic city gives the pernacchio [...] to those who wish to finalize and objectify its openness and to bypass its difference. Naples cannot be programmed.”69 Following D’Acierno’s description of Naples as a place that cannot be programmed, the proposals avoid certain programmatic and organisational fixities by designing for communal use and flexible arrangement The building is allowed to operate as an open facility with multiple functionalities while also preserving the parts within that allow it to represent isolated moments of social initiative and identity.The porous and the aporetic are expressed in the thickening and extension of a threshold condition. Spaces remain interpenetrative as boundaries remain blurred between interior and exterior. The thresholds created here at once create both passages and blockages.The building is allowed to continue to operate as an open facility with multiple functionalities while also preserving parts within, namely the interventions of the ‘common goods dining hall’ and ‘a curatorial entrance’ that allow it to create isolated moments that reinforce social initiatives.

69. Pellegrino D’Acierno, “Introduction. Naples as Chaosmos or, The City That Makes You Repeat Its Discourse,” in Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun, ed. by Pellegrino D’Acierno and Stanislao G. Pugliese. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019, p. 15.

66

‘ T H E AT R I CA L LY P O RO U S COM MO N I N G ’

Exploring various ‘gateways’ or conditions of ‘entry’ and continues to test the extension and thickening of the experience of a ‘threshold’.

p e r f orm at i ve c on stru c t i on ( s )

The Oratorio di Santa Maria della Fede is one of the recognised Common Goods buildings [further described in the following chapter] that has been re-inhabited by the Santa Fede Liberata organisation who focus primarily on forming a self-organised and co-responsible community. Though they have now created a space that embodies their values of inclusivity and collective engagement, large parts of the building are still inaccessible and uninhabitable and therefore remain neglected.

page T H R E S H O L D S

(Un)doing D O O R / W A Y S t o N E W N E A P O L I T A N P R A C T I C E

perfomative construction(s) / ‘oratorio di santa maria della fede’

Projected composite drawing over model for exhibition.

figure 56.

3.

67

4.

‘ G E ST U R A L THRESHOLD(S)’

perfomative construction(s) / ‘a curatorial entrance’ 68

2.

1.

The Curatorial Entrance is the first of the two proposals designed for the The Oratorio di Santa Maria della Fede. The intervention explores various ‘gateways’ or conditions of ‘entry’ and continues to test the extension and thickening of the experience of a ‘threshold’.

private by breaking through the existing fabric both vertically and horizontally. Thin layers of steel invoke an overwriting of the exterior elevation and attempt to re-claim a portion of the urban landscape; creating a gestural path from the street towards the space of performance.

The proposals (illustrated above and opposite) offer two routes into the existing building, one for theatrical performances that take place in the central courtyard of the Santa Fede, and one for the people of the association facilitating the use of the building on a daily basis (i.e. the backstage). The intention of the design is to begin to blur the boundaries of what is considered external and internal and public and

The framing of a layering of ‘thinnesses’ with materials such as copper sheets and plates of perforated steel form a new, slower threshold condition; a ‘thickness’ that evokes a more conscious experience of the porous context that is inherently Neapolitan. This thickening of materials ‘curates the threshold’, creating spatial conditions where the physical (walls) as well as experiential (light)

page

69 boundaries become undefined, allowing for a flexible use of space.

These propositional elements of the ongoing thetic enquiry continue to question conceptions of porosity through Gilloch’s ‘ruin’, ‘labyrinth’ and ‘theatre’.70 Through ‘design led research’, the proposals continue to ‘(un)do’ Gilloch’s terminology of Benjamin and Lacis’ ‘porosity’ and seek to characterise such terminology as a thetic architectural and tectonic language.

In this instance, the performative elements of this construction embody an architectural language of overwriting. The doors and structures slide in and out, creating ‘theatrical’ gestures that open up spaces with a multitude of potentialities.

70. Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 36.

figure 57 & 58.

2.

Components from exhibition drawing (originally produced at 1:100) & model photograph.

2.

1.

P E R F O R M A T I V e

C O N S T R U C T I O N S [drawing field(s) of porosity: Centro Storico] A framing of propositional architectural spatial and tectonic language that explores thresholds of porosity through a series of gestural improvisations. A Curatorial entrance and a Common Goods’ Dining Hall re-appropriate Oratorio di Santa Maria della Fede into an ‘agora, a place of care and fruitful exchange’ [refer to design report p. 46].

Legend 1. Performance Route 2. Santa Fede Route 3. Dining Route 4. Thresholds

PERFORMATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS(S) : COMPOSITE PROPOSAL DRAWING (plan/section/elevation/isometric to scale)

Legend 1. Performance Route 2. Santa Fede Route 3. Dining Route 4. Thresholds

[[variousscale(s)]

[drawing field(s) of porosity: Centro Storico] A framing of propositional architectural spatial and tectonic language that explores thresholds of porosity through a series of gestural improvisations. A Curatorial entrance and a Common Goods’ Dining Hall re-appropriate Oratorio di Santa Maria della Fede into an ‘agora, a place of care and fruitful exchange’ [refer to design report p. 46].

PERFORMATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS(S) : COMPOSITE PROPOSAL DRAWING (plan/section/elevation/isometric to scale)

C O N S T R U C T I O N S

[[variousscale(s)]

P E R F O R M A T I V e

perfomative construction(s) / ‘a curatorial entrance’

1.

Longer page sub-title for this page to be entered into this text box right here.

p r i m a ry pag e t i t l e

perfomative construction(s) / ‘common goods dining hall’

The ‘Common Goods Dinning Hall’ occupies the previously

neglected terrace on the first floor and together with the previous proposal establishes the sequencing of a wider threshold that extends beyond the Santa Fede and into the Centro Storico.

In a city where the essence of daily life can be distilled through ‘dining’ and the making and sharing of food, this proposal creates new spaces for the performativity of such an act. The terrace is opened up to the courtyard using a staircase that creates a passage and entrance into the outdoor dining area.

70

The ‘labyrinthine’ quality created through the experience of the newly formed passage begins to choreograph an interplay with the ‘ruinous’ at the interface between old and new.

The developing architectural language that is present at this interchange continues to explore the way that thick ‘ruinous’ elements and lighter weight ‘theatrical’ components interact. In this case, the elements allow the proposals to create a fluid transition or entrance into the space of the dining area.

Making it a part of a larger network of interpenetrative spaces the intervention has been designed to contain spaces beyond that of the dining table. Supported on top of a voluminous concrete wall, this is achieved with the use of a steel canopy that extrapolates the field of the dining table to envelop the table’s wider threshold conditions, interrupting the balcony and entrance.

The same roof component drops down to ground, extending the vertical plane and offering seating around the back side of the table.

Combined section / elevation (originally produced at 1:100).

perfomative construction(s) / ‘common goods dining hall’

figure 59.

E X M E R CAT I N O D I S AN T ’AN NA D I PA L A Z ZO V I CO T I R ATO I O , 8 0 1 3 2 NA P O L I .

performative construction(s) / ‘theatre of a configurable market-scape’

page

“ TO T H I N K A B O U T A T E M P O R A L A N D T R AN S I TO RY A R C H I T E C T U R E I S A L S O A N I N V I TAT I O N TO R E CO N S I D E R H OW O N E M I G H T I N H A B I T U R BA N S PAC E ” . 7 1

75

figure 61.

The former market of Sant’Anna di Palazzo rests deserted and ruinous in the San Ferdinando neighbourhood, at the southern tip of the Quartieri Spagnoli. Designed by Salvatore Bisogni in the 1980s, the structure was deemed unfit for purpose and abandoned by market stall owners only months after opening in 2001. Since its desertion, the former market has deteriorated into a den of waste and illegality, despite persistent community efforts to recover and re-purpose the structure. The market is a heterotopia within the Quartieri Spagnoli—“a place where differences meet”— inhabited in “ways that deviate from what these

societies consider and impose as normal…, characteristic of a temporary period of crisis.” 72 Like many sites around Naples, the inadequacy of local government has resulted in a failure to regenerate the abandoned market. Despite persistent community efforts to regenerate the site, the process has been extremely slow.

Existing as ‘void’ in the Quartieri Spagnoli, the existing roof slab of the market looms over the empty lower market space, contrasting to its dense urban context.

The concrete slab sits lower than its neighbouring roofs, remaining empty and unoccupied–a dormant, open, flat plane in an otherwise chaotic quarter of the city. Rather than spilling out into the street in the fashion of a typical Neapolitan market, the space is covered and closes in upon itself; an internalising of public space antithetical to the theatrical reality of Neapolitan street life.

71. Iain Chambers “Naples: A Porous Modernity,” in Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008, p. 78.

72. Stavros Stavrides, “Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Urban Space,” in Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, ed. Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens. New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 178.

Projected composite drawing over model for exhibition.

performative construction(s) / ‘theatre of a configurable market-scape’

4.

py no : Ca on nti rve Inte

Inte rve nti on : Str eet Ma rke t

3.

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figure 62 & 63.

76

Components from exhibition drawing & GF plan (originally produced at 1:100).

page

77 2.

C’

3.

1.

4.

5.

73. Stavros Stavrides, “Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Urban Space”, p. 178.

74. Ibid.

e x m e r c a t i n o d s a n t ’a i nna di pa l a z z o

The stairway to the roof remains open no matter the position of the urban gate, with a small space for a ‘gatekeeper’ not to police the threshold, but to maintain its opening for the public.

f e d e

When the market is open, the gate closes off the street to traffic; a ‘slowness’ is created through this re-configured threshold, stopping traffic from passing and allowing for people to stop and engage in the market space. In its alternate position,

As an [un]doing of threshold, the new stairway clad in perforated metal creates a thickening between ground and roof; it brings these disparate planes into connection, punching through the void of the market to create a new relationship between the open market below and the new public space above.

l e

The market as heterotopia assumes what Stavrides describes as a “threshold character, being both present and absent in a different time, existing both as reality and potentiality.”74 In response to these conditions, a new configurable streetscape is proposed for the site. Holes are punctured through the solid facade of the market, opening up the space to the street and allowing the theatrics of trade to operate beyond the enclosed market footprint. A new street gate operates in duality; neither ‘open’ or ‘closed’ at any one moment, but rather orchestrating the flow and inhabitation of the street at different moments.

the gate ‘closes’ the market while ‘opening’ the street again, allowing traffic and street life to flow past the market at its usual pace.

performative construction(s) / ‘theatre of a configurable market-scape’

“Heterotopias can be taken to concretise paradigmatic experiences of otherness, defined by the porous and contested perimeter that separates normality from deviance.” 73

04

F I E L D (S); ‘The spaces and/or sites that constitute the regions bound into territories affected by, or associated with a particular threshold.’

A ‘field’ of fragment(s): in practice

in context The notion of ‘field’ is fundamentally territorial; in setting out a ‘field’ across Naples, the thesis seeks to build an understanding of the complexities and conditions of the city, in order to develop working practices through which new architectures informed by, and aware of their situation may be stitched into the existing Neapolitan urban fabric.75 Porous sites across the city, “small, self-similar parts”,76 identified through a shared embodiment of terms of the thesis are brought into play, connected and interwoven through a practice seeking to understand and reconfigure Neapolitan urban porous conditions.

Through this line of inquiry, ‘field conditions’ across Naples are connected by ‘thresholds’, drawn together in a re-figuring of the city (un)done by thetic interventions.

Through this understanding of ‘field’, the thesis seeks to form an understanding of the “intricacy” of Naples whilst maintaining a “respect” for its capacity and occupants.77 The thesis questions the existing in looking for potential futures, operating as a practice founded in an understanding of Neapolitan urbanism enabling a productive re-writing of these conditions.

75. Stan Allen, Field Conditions Revisited. Long Island City, NY: Stan Allen Architect, 2010, p. 24.

76. Stan Allen, Field Conditions Revisited, p. 21.

77. Ibid, p. 24.

Articulating an ‘anchor’ in the city and the organisation responsible for its development.

ur b ac t i n n a p o l i

figure 64.

S AN T I SS I M A T R I N I TA D E L L E MO NAC H E

Naples is a city in crisis. As De Rosa and Salvati describe, Naples is characterised by “political

80

instability, economic backwardness, consolidated social disparities, and the recession”.78 Its sense of “citizenship and collective protection” has been lost in the disfiguration of the urban cityscape, as a result of decades of sustaining disasters of both a natural and man-made nature.79

The persisting lack of provisions and planned development by governmental bodies, has led Naples to challenge the existing political structures by introducing social policies “establishing forms of

Community run football pitch at Parco Spagnoli within SS Trinita delle Monache.

One such underused site at the centre of this European programme is the Santissima Trinità delle Monache, located at the top of the Spanish Quarters.

Through public use, albeit infrequent in its availability, the significantly dilapidated building complex that sits high above the neighbourhoods of Montesanto, Olivella and Quartieri Spagnoli has also become known as ‘Parco Spagnoli’, due to the quality of open, public-space it can provide in an otherwise overly saturated area of the city.

self-government for critical social infrastructure including urban commons such as abandoned, unused or underused city assets.” 80

This includes the activity of ‘URBACT’, a European organisation that aims to reactivate such infrastructures through the

‘2nd Chance: Waking Up the Sleeping Giants’ programme, in an effort to achieve a new urban development framework for cities that have been subject to the inadequacy of local government to implement plans to improve city infrastructure.

78.

De Rosa and Salvati, “Beyond a ‘side street story’?”, p. 75.

79.

Iovino, “Bodies of Naples”, p. 111.

80. Christian Iaione, “Pooling Urban Commons: the Civic eState,” URBACT, Accessed November 30, 2019, https://urbact. eu/urban-commons-civic-estate.

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81

a n e w ur b a n d e ve lo p me n t f r a me wor k f or c i t i e s t h at h ave b e e n s u b j e c t to t h e i n a d e quac y o f lo c a l g ove r n me n t to i m p l e me n t p l a n s to i m p r ove c i t y i n f r a str u c t ur e .

‘becoming’ of the city / anchor(s) for development

Articulating an ‘anchor’ in the city and the organisation responsible for its development.

ss tr i n i ta d e l l e mon ac h e Founded as a monastery, and then converted to a military hospital, the site of the Santissima

Trinità delle Monache

today remains abandoned for the most part.

The entire complex that today includes Parco Sagnioli comprises of a series of buildings, including an abandoned church, a newly refurbished, but only partially used university facilities, a police station, and community centre run by the Municipality of Naples, that houses various activities and services, including the adjacent football pitch.

82

The importance of the site lies in its location, sitting at the highest point and overlooking the Spanish Quarters. Its potential for social engagement and general uplifting of the economy and life of the local community is vast, yet immensely overlooked.

It is for this reason that URBACT is attempting to formally re-design the site through a multitude of participatory programs and the engagement of local designers.

“The vision for the complex of SS Trinità delle Monache is to transform it into a ‘Community Hub’ where an

innovative and inclusive management model is to be experimented. One that involves the URBACT Local Group, and more generally the citizens, in the transformation, reuse and management of the site.

The vision is inspired by principles and practices of co-design, selfconstruction and self-recovery.

Through the direct involvement of users both in the design and in the realisation of the actions (material and immaterial), the aim is to strengthen social cohesion and the sense of belonging to that place.” 81

figure 65.

Upper level of the Parco Spagnoli and the abandoned SS Trinita delle Monache to the left.

81.

URBACT, 2nd Chance Waking Up the Sleeping Giants: City of Naples Integrated Action Plan. Napoli: Comune di Napoli, 2018.

‘becoming’ of the city / anchor(s) for development

However, the pace at which this is being implemented is extremely slow. Taking over three years to formulate an action plan, the prescribed nature of this particular development is somewhat in conflict with its own mission statement and continues to significantly contribute towards Giant’s’ the ‘Sleeping extended dormancy.

ss tr i n i ta d e l l e mon ac h e Articulating an ‘anchor’ in the city and the organisation responsible for its development.

‘becoming’ of the city / anchor(s) for development

‘becoming’ of the city

c ommon s i n n a p o l i

t h e hy b r i d i s at i on o f pl ac e (s) t h at blur t h e l i n e s b e t we e n pu bl i c & p r ivat e

86

page

This integrated approach aims to create new ways of development through the hybridisation of places that blur the lines between public and private and lead to new forms of civic engagement.83

Among them,The

figure 67.

Artwork in the inner, central courtyard at Oratorio di Santa Maria della Fede.

The city’s response to this misalignment of development is to spontaneously and informally re-create itself in all aspects of economic, political and social life.

Naples is the first Italian city to formulate a ‘Department of the Commons’, leading to the recognition of seven public properties as Common Goods buildings, embodying “the tangible and intangible assets of

Oratorio di Santa Maria della Fede, leads the way in the sustainable, re-appropriation of the abandoned city fabric.

82. Marta Cillero, “What Makes an Empty Building in Naples a ‘Common Good’?”

Political Critique & European Alternatives, Accessed November 30, 2019, http:// politicalcritique.org/world/2017/naples-common-good-empty-buildings/#.

83. Iaione, “Pooling Urban Commons”.

After being occupied by the

Santa Fede Liberata

organisation, as part of the URBACT implemented policy on self-governance, the building has been reopened to the public for collective use in a participatory, non-exclusive and co-responsible manner.

‘becoming’ of the city / anchor(s) for development

collective belonging that are managed in a shared, participatory process and which are committed to ensuring the collective enjoyment of common goods and their preservation for the benefit of future generations.” 82

S AN TA F E D E L I B E R ATA

87

Articulating an ‘anchor’ in the city and the organisation responsible for its development.

s a n ta fe d e l i b e r ata The overarching aim of these locally enforced policies is the

“valorisation of historical heritage” in an attempt to re-elaborate the city’s identity and create a new bond of citizenship. 84 The inhabitants of the Oratorio di Santa Maria della Fede

call for a political organisation that involves the engagement of neglected communities in an attempt to make the city liveable and inclusive, in the form of an ‘agora,’ a place of care and fruitful exchange.85 The Oratorio di Santa Maria della Fede becomes one of many disparate sites that

88

embody the need for community engagement and recognise the urgency of addressing the aforementioned social issues by activating the existing city fabric and reclaiming a sense of place and belonging.

“In places of common goods everything is experimental.

The change lies in being part of experimentation and transformation cannot be understood as a transition from precarious work to free work, as the frontier of metropolitan unease.” 86 - Santa Fede Liberata

As such, the organisation operate as property guardians, contribute towards facilitating the opening of the building on a daily basis and providing events that run throughout the week from selfproduced artisan markets to charity fund-raisers and classes that range from children’s cookery to adult dance.

This contrasts with the temporary use of places that, if stripped of the inhabitants that occupy them, also lose their intrinsic value.

A Common Good is such as a community of inhabitants, uninterruptedly, as long as it lives the collective action that animates it.87

figure 68.

Re-appropriation of the perimeter colonnade around the inner, central courtyard at Oratoriodi Santa Maria della Fede.

84.

Nicolla Masella, “Naples Urban Civic Communities,” URBACT, Accessed November 30, 2019, https://urbact.eu/naples%E2%80%99-urbancivic-communities?fbclid=IwAR31INys78pS-NuT5qG-J5GbabxoAIRB_ yA9uqr7HlNVe7RSiranVcjawoY. L’Assemblea Delle e Degli Abitanti di Santa Fede Liberata, A Partire dalla Nostra Esperienza di Bene Comune. Napoli: (Self-Published Manifesto), 2018.

85.

86.

Santa Fede Liberata, A Partire dalla Nostra Esperienza di Bene Comune.

87.

Ibid.

‘becoming’ of the city / anchor(s) for development

There is an agency at play here to help the city act as for the Common Good, to invent from time to time the ways to transform a place of isolation into a collective place, inhabited by this self-organised community.

s a n ta fe d e l i b e r ata Articulating an ‘anchor’ in the city and the organisation responsible for its development.

‘becoming’ of the city / anchor(s) for development

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The two previously described sites begin to emerge as anchor points for the thesis to establish itself within the city and engage in a wider sequence of ‘spatial porosity’ across Via Toledo.

Stan Allen reminds us that within these field conditions,

In this context, the thesis works with a slowness of threshold. By holding oneself in the thickenings and intensifications of ‘threshold’ at specified moments within the extended field of the city, what becomes a key agency in this sequencing of the city is that

“stitching new construction into the fabric of the existing city is still relevant. It [is] a matter of recognising that the city is not a stable field, but has been produced as multiple agents, working over time, and can never be controlled as a totality.” 89

These sites start to set up a a field condition that produce an emerging architectonic language while engaging in site specific intervention(s) that exercise local difference(s) whilst maintaining overall coherence in the ‘thickening’ of a wider threshold across the city.

“configurations are loosely bound aggregates characterised by porosity and local interconnectivity” they

progress as “bottom up phenomena, defined not by overarching geometrical schemas, but by intricate local connections.” 88

88. Stan Allen, Points Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, p. 92.

89. Stan Allen, Field Conditions Revisited. Long Island City, NY: Stan Allen Architect, 2010, p. 24.

‘becoming’ of the city / field condition(s)

Following the interrogation of representational strategies for the interpenetrative porous conditions in ‘ruin’, ‘labyrinth’ and ‘theatre’, a spatial field of intervention is drawn from the ‘QuartieriSpagnoli’ across to Santa Fede Liberata and the ‘Centro Storico’. Through shifting scales of the ‘Animate Drawing’ process, propositional territories are now re-drawn, overwritten in another form of ‘(un)doing’ for ‘Performative Construction’ to take place, and open new conditions of threshold across the city.

Field of Performative Construction(s); sequencing of a wider spatial porosity across Toledo.

t e rr i tor i e s, r e - d r awn & ove rwr i t t e n i n a n ‘ ( un ) d o i n g ’ f or p e r f orm at i ve c on str u c t i on to ta ke p l ac e, a n d o p e n n e w c on d i t i on s o f t h r e s h o l d ac r o ss t h e c i t y.

rio to ra O

figure 70.

fields / methodological commoning

a tr a n s f or m at ive p r ac t i c e i n c on sta n t mo t i on

‘Making-common and a Making-in-common through thetic practices.

The working methodology in developing this thesis operated as a continuous exercise of testing and challenging relations, maintaining diversity within a unified strategy; a methodological commoning facilitating a transformative practice in constant motion, continually asking questions and challenging assumptions, rather than seeking definitive answers or solutions.90 Beginning in semester one, the team of four opened a joint enquiry into the porous conditions of Naples (both through Gilloch’s three conditions of porosity, and an engagement with Benjamin’s ‘(un) doing’), leading to opening projects responding to the conditions identified in the initial investigation of the city. These four openings operated within two city fields; two within the Quartieri Spagnoli, and two within the Centro Storico. The openings emerged as an exploration of architectures of the ruin, labyrinth, and theatre, testing notions of threshold within existing Neapolitan situations. Framed as

constructive overwritings within the city, the four openings sought to engage with different conditions of porosity specific to the chosen sites; spatial, social and urban porosities were identified, explored and challenged through a shared set of material explorations and tectonic strategies–a makingcommon and a making-incommon (see ‘Openings’).

fields / methodological commoning

90. Stavrides, “Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Urban Space”, p. 174.

M E T H O D O LO G I CA L COM MO N I N G

figure 71.

fields / methodological commoning

“ a r i c h n e t wor k o f p r ac t i c e s tr a n s f or m s e ve ry ava i l a bl e s pac e i n to a p o t e n t i a l t h e atr e o f e x p r e ss i ve ac t s o f e n c o un t e r. ” 7 7 These parallel practices acted as openings towards Santissima Trinita delle Monache, setting the stage for a collective site strategy with individual moments in dialogue.

Four new proposals across the Santissima Trinita delle Monache operate in relation to each other at different moments and across different themes. As a collective strategy, four projects work in direct response to the monastery’s history, re-appropriating its former functionalities in an overwriting of the site and a reconfiguration of its existing urban conditions.

Within this collective four, the proposals have been developed as two pairs, which work together to respond at certain scales and to specific conditions across the site.

Two proposals on the north of the site (Projects 1a & 1b: ‘Into and Out of Everyday Thickness(es)) respond to the former domestic qualities of

the monastery, and two at the south of the site (Projects 2a & 2b: ‘(In) between Urban Thickness and Void’) respond at an urban and institutional level.Within these pairs, each of the four proposals retains an individual voice within the collective strategy, expanding upon the explorations of more specific porous conditions begun in semester one. The four proposals, as part of one larger project, are the product of an interpenetrative practice seeking to produce long term solutions to transform the isolated site into a place of collective life.

He notes that “defying any clear demarcation, spaces are separated and simultaneously connected by porous boundaries, through which everyday life takes form in mutually dependent public performances.”92

Much like these mutually dependant performances, through developing a collective understanding of Neapolitan urbanity and shared methods through which these conditions may be explored, the working methodology of (Un)Doing Thresholds operates as a mutually dependent practice, a ‘network’ with individual voices in dialogue, Stavrides speaks, through a reading linked by shared techniques in a of Walter Benjamin, of the “way in collective (un)doing of Neapolitan which urban space is performed” in Naples, where “a rich network of practices transforms every available space into a potential theatre of expressive acts of encounter.” 91

91. Stavrides, “Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Urban Space”, p. 175 92. Ibid.

Thetic migration of openings to the SS Trinita delle Monache.

fields / methodological commoning

figure 72.

98

MU T UA L LY D E P E N DAN T P E R F O R M AN C E ( S )

page

99

Animation of gestures created through methodological commoning of overwriting

fields / methodological commoning

figure 73 & 74.

05

R U I N ; ‘The memory, or remnants of an architecture, old or new, that facilitates the performance or agency of a given theatre. It performs the role of a fragment that is situated as part of a wider sequence of history, a threshold in time that pertains to a continuity of presence in the city: the theatre of the everyday.’

Site(s) of ‘ruin’ & anchors of transience.

A layering of the city which constitutes of ruins as nodes of memory as beginnings that are able to transcend time and are gathered in the immediacy of the city.

This raises questions of how the thesis might begin to introduce the notion of a ‘contemporary ruin’ and the way this could manifest as new architecture for the city.

In Naples we see surfacing of these ruins that have been implicated in an overwriting or what we thetically refer to as an ‘(un)doing’. Whilst these ruins may endure today as lasting echoes of the past, it is in their decay that we encounter what Jackson refers to as an “interval of neglect” 93 - a condition that evokes and encourages such (un)doing(s).

What form might the‘contemporary ruin’ take on and how might it (un) do or be (un)done by other such conditions?

This “necessity for ruins” 94 which Jackson continues to describe, provides a foundation for intervention; the transient, enzymatic quality of such architecture(s) in decay and approaching redundancy.

93. John. B Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins, and Other Topics. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980, p. 102.

94. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins, p. 102.

Porosity, as Benjamin describes is found in the inability to see ‘where building is still in progress and where dilapidation has already set in.’x96 The new and the old become intimately intertwined to the extent that they can’t always be told apart. In the blurred boundaries between interior and exterior, past and present, ruins are the boundless elements that perpetuate the porosity of the city fabric.

Within this ambiguous context, SS.Trinita delle Monache is uniquely self-contained. Echoing URBACT’s initiatives, the proposal aims to trigger a form of social overwriting in the form of opening up and rediscovering the site. By spilling into ‘Parco Spagnoli,’ the site becomes an ‘urban threshold.’ The design as a whole functions as an extended passage into the existing spaces of SS Trinitá delle Monache that remain widely underused.

As part of the redevelopment of the site, the south side of the SS.Trinita delle Monache has been partially renovated to include facilities for a nearby university. The new building, however, has not been occupied and remains largely abandoned. The existence of two schools around the site prompt the proposal of a new Library that removes most of the existing fabric to provide facilities for learning and support the educational institutions of the area.

A proposed ‘Common Goods’ Building frames the south side of the existing monastery courtyard, extending the existing arcade in a gesture that pertains to the (un)doing of borders within the context of a contemporary interpretation of the site.

95. Jansson, “This is not ruin tourism: exploring the spreadable city,” p. 2.

96. Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples,” p.166.

97. Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples,” p.171.

102

“ E AC H P R I VAT E AC T I S P E R M E AT E D BY ST R E A MS O F COM MU NA L L I F E ” 97

Transcending existing ruinous conditions through extended fields of porosity

ur b a n ru i n ( s )

Ruins are moments of open-ended interaction, glimpsing the past to view the future, making their porosity inherent as they elude the boundary of time. Jansson refers to Naples as a space of ambiguity, ‘a city reminiscent of a vast ruin, whose lure consists in the element of surprise and the possibility to discover what otherwise lies concealed. ’95

page

103

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figure 75.

Proposed ‘Parco Sganoli’ level floor plan (originally drawn at 1:200)

104

Promoting a sense of suspension in time and space embodying ruinous qualities of memory

“ a f t e r p e o p l e h ave l e f t, on ly me mor i e s a n d a p e c u l i a r k i n d o f m at e r i a l i t y r e m a i n ; a m at e r i a l i t y m a rke d by e s c a l at i n g p or o s i t y. 9 8

ur b a n vo i d ( s )

The Library’s ‘Urban Void’ promotes a sense of suspension in time and space embodying ruinous qualities of memory and temporal transcendence. As Jansson describes the site of the ruin is characterized by a ‘materiality marked by escalating porosity.’98

Although still a part of an extended ‘threshold’ condition, the ‘void’ becomes distinguishable both in the experience of the space internally and externally by punctuating the roof scape, echoing existing ruinous conditions.

Library ‘Urban Void’ fragment and interior view of balcony.

98. Jansson, “This is not ruin tourism: exploring the spreadable city,” p. 2.

ruin / 2b library; urban void(s)

Embedded in the architectural language of ‘thickening’ and ‘layering’ are certain tectonic responses that perpetuate and enhance spatial and material porosities.

‘Thickness’ is explored both for its ability to extend the experience of memory but also as a response to environmental conditions. The internal environment of the Library is controlled by the dome and skylight allowing indirect light to enter and air to flow through the building.The library is lined with timber finishes promoting ‘thickness’ through thin components while the metal poles supporting the library balconies give a sense of height and continuity by unifying multiple levels.

figure 76 & 77.

Ruinous nodes echoing existing ruin conditions

‘ ru i n o u s ’ n o d e s Porous conditions are explored spatially through the development of forms and relationships that allow, as Benjamin describes, ‘private attitudes or acts [to be] permeated by streams of communal life.’99 Ruins as ‘voids’ are used to organize the proposal spatially and programmatically. The library at the centre connects the ‘thickened threshold’ of the ground floor with the rest of the scheme, as one can catch glimpses of the multiple levels through the open core. The lines between exterior and interior are blurred

106

through this extended visual threshold. The height and depth of the cores translates from the imposing presence of nearby ruins SS.Trinita delle Monache and Chiesa, and the narrow streets of Quartieri Spagnoli echoing existing spatial conditions.

The library core thus acts as a ‘ruinous node’ anchoring the scheme within the ambiguous urban context. Around it, private study rooms are positioned over a public ‘Urban garden’ and ‘Urban market’ (il mercato), balconies are accessed through study areas and common room spaces

hinge onto the main scheme to promote spatial and functional ‘permeation.’

The Library joins with the Gallery proposal through ramped interstitial spaces perpetuating a spatial and programmatic interdependence.

Operating at an urban scale, porosity is explored through an architectural language of ‘urban voids’ forming extended visual thresholds that simultaneously hinge onto the site and promote an (un)doing of spatial fixities by bringing interiorities in relation with exteriorities.

figure 78.

99. Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples,” p. 171.

Proposed North Section (originally drawn at 1:500)

ruin / 2b library; ruinous nodes

The proposal is comprised of a Library, (Lecture) Theatre and ‘Common Goods’ Building as the main body of the scheme.

However, it also looks forward within the context of a perpetual overwriting of the city fabric by introducing the Clinic. This section hinges directly onto S.S Trinitá Monastery and suggests an extension and partial renovation to house previous monastery functions of infirmary and shelter. The Clinic operates under the wider hypothesis of the reoccupation of the monastery by Common Goods organizations and aims to provide future contemporary openings for the site.

page

109

A new Gallery is proposed for the corner of the SS Trinita site, with its programmatic layout informed by its urban situation

The partially destroyed structure of a former church rests on the corner of the SS. Trinità delle Monache site, on the junction of Vico Paradiso and Via Pasquale Scura. The church was commissioned to Francesco Grimaldi, a prominent Neapolitan architect of the time, and completed in 1626. It was largely destroyed in an earthquake in 1897, after which it was never repaired.

The new Gallery responds to the historical functionalities of the site, and the urban axes and

ruin / 2a gallery: proposal

The church now sits as a ruin on the corner of the site, holding the memory of the former public programmes of the monastery.

A new Gallery is proposed for this urban corner; a cultural institution as manifestation of a contemporary response to its situation. Taking cues from its history and location relative to the SS. Trinità monastery, the Gallery predominantly operates at an urban scale, hinging at the corner to sit in relation to the domestic interventions to the north of the site (Into and Out of Every Day Thicknesses) and the institutional to the West (Library).

gateways surrounding it, through its programmatic layout. More overtly public spaces come to the fore where the site meets the street, with private, institutional spaces situated further into the site. The site works as a collection of passages and impasses–an architectural paradox of porosity and aporia– utilising physical, though not necessarily visual, blockages to offset the porosity of the site at particular moments.

a n e w ga l l e ry i s p r o p o s e d f or t h i s ur b a n c or n e r; a c u lt ur a l i n st i t u t i on a s m a n i fe stat i on o f a c on t e m p or a ry r e s p on s e to i t s s i t uat i on

figure 79.

T H I C K N E SS O F RU I N

ruin / 2a gallery: thickness of ruin

André Jansson refers to Walter Benjamin’s writing on Naples in setting out three categories of ruin.

Jansson defines the third of these, the “openended ruin,” as being “culturally, socially and materially abandoned, suspended in time,”100 which he notes as being particularly close to Benjamin’s description of Neapolitan porosity.

The former church of the Santissima Trinità delle Monache may be approached as such an ‘open ended’ ruin. Though attached to a site of relative prominence and interest, the church itself is widely overlooked in speculations and plans for the future of the site. Having never been repaired after the destructive earthquake of 1897, the

church now stands as the most dilapidated part of the complex. Abandoned in its disrepair, the church is “suspended in time”, holding an “extended porosity” in its evidence of past destruction, with no clarity for its future.101 The proposal for the gallery largely removes the existing fabric of the church, retaining only the entrance tower, the most in-tact piece of the structure. Adorned with marble decorations by Cosimo Fanzago, and an internal domed ceiling with frescoes by Giovanni Bernardino Azzolino, the entrance is retained as a ‘ruin tower’, a fragmentary, transient monument as evidence of (un)doing.

The gallery links into the church tower through a bridge, with suspended platforms looking into the internal decoration. The church tower is layered into the fabric of the proposal, holding the memory of the former construction and rooting the gallery as a cultural institution informed by the history of its site whilst allowing for new architecture(s) to take form.

The new Gallery construction is anchored by a thick wall comprised of stone and concrete, formed in an ‘L-shape’. The heavy wall, which rises up as an ‘Urban Tower’ in one corner to skim the height of the monastery, creates thickened visual thresholds across the city through its verticality.

100. Jansson, “This is not ruin tourism: exploring the spreadable city,” p. 3.

101. Ibid.

figure(s) 80 & 81.

The ‘Urban Tower’ and retained church tower stand as exiting and contemporary ruin.

ruin / 2a gallery: thickness of ruin

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The wall traces the demolished remnants of the church; its construction follows the path of the thick outer walls of the ruined structure, using the echoing logic of the site’s previous occupation to inform a new organisation of the space. The site is treated as a palimpsest in this tracing of the past, through the layering and constructive overwriting­–(un)doing– of new architecture echoing historical forms.

The ‘Urban Tower’ rises high above the site, creating thickened visual thresholds across the city

ruin / 2a gallery: thickness of ruin

As well as holding the memory of the configuration of the former church, the heavy wall acts as anchor, organiser, structure and environmental agent for the gallery. The thick construction has high thermal mass, providing for the capture and store of thermal energy from the sun to flatten temperature fluctuations within the gallery. Small apertures over the east façade, giving an appearance of ‘missing stones’, act as filters, allowing for air flow through the narrow, deep openings.

figure(s) 82 & 83.

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ruin / 2a gallery: church of santissima trinita delle monache

ruin / 2a gallery: artworks as nodes of memory 116

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figure 85.

Jusepe de Ribera’s ‘Saint Jerome and the Angel of Judgment’ exhibited in the gallery

Much of the proposed permanent collection in the gallery is comprised of oil paintings by Jusepe de Ribera, also known as ‘Lo Spagnoletto’.

Of these works, three are of particular prominence: Trinitas Terrestris (c.

1626, 3370x2600mm), God the Father (c. 1626, 1090x1090mm), and Saint Jerome and the Angel of Judgment (1626, 2620x1640mm). These pieces were originally created for the altar of the Santissima Trinità church and are still preserved today, having been removed from the site and put into museums during the Napoleonic Suppressions of the nineteenth century.102

102. Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez and Nicola Spinosa, Jusepe di Ribera: 1591-1652 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), p. 22-23.

The prominence of the artworks is reflected in the architectural language and qualities of their setting within the gallery. Each of these key pieces is ‘framed’ by void(s) which create a separation between the artworks and viewers. To view the works, visitors stand into ‘theatre boxes’ at the edge of the voids (see Theatre chapter), which act a physical, but not visual blockages; ‘thickened’ threshold(s) across which the artworks perform.

ruin / 2a gallery: artworks as nodes of memory

These artworks, proposed to be returned to the site, act as small-scale ‘nodes of memory’; fragments that collectively connect the gallery to its history. The artworks are reconfigured as ‘contemporary ruins’, transcending time to contribute to a collective ‘performance’ within the gallery as evidence of the (un)doing of the church site.

S M A L L - S CA L E ‘ N O D E S O F M E MO RY’

117

ruin / 2a live/work; ruinous fragments

‘ RU I N O U S’ F R AGM E N T S On working with the architecture of ruin, William Mann describes it to represent “disintegration” and “distillation”; at once both “anti-architecture” and “pure architecture”. 103 He continues to note the way that “decay strips away all that is superficial or ornamental, leaving only a structure in fragile equilibrium. [That] the ruin internalises the complex order of natural forces, juxtaposing the irregular geometries of collapse with the rectilinear ones of construction.” 104 This project responds to the existing retaining wall that envelops the North East boundary of the site as ‘ruinous’; as a “geometry of collapse” that has become re-configured to facilitate access into the site and the performance of the everyday.

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In this way, the proposals that front Vico Paradiso might be conceived as an entirely ‘ruinous (un)doing’ of the existing retaining wall; a disintegration of an existing ruin to allow for life to filter into and permeate the site. However, since the thesis seeks to question how the ruin might be implemented as an interdependent porous condition of a new architectural language, the project is best understood in terms of the ruin as an ensemble of both contemporary and existing ‘ruinous fragments’, that frame and anchor other such architectures of the thesis to exist.

The Live/Work component of ‘Into and Out of Everyday Thickness(es)’ constructs such ‘ruinous’ fragments as heavy layerings and wide openings that carve out theatrical volumes for the spontaneity of daily Neapolitan life. These manifest in architectures of ruinous towers and deep voids that punctuate sequences through the site in a way that a collection of sites of decay and abandonment intersperse the wider field of the city.

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103. William Mann, “Inhabiting the Ruin: Works at Astley Castle”, first published in ASCHB Transactions Vol.35 (2012). p. 5.

104. Mann, “Inhabiting the Ruin”, p. 5.

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Bringing light and air through the proposals and reference the tall and narrow density of the Quarters.

ru i n o u s vo i d s ( r e ) gr own 120

A layering of ‘ruinous’ voids and towers are cut through and into the site from Neapolitan Tufo and carefully composed arrangements of proposed brickwork as a heavy, contemporary, ‘material overwriting’ that curates a ‘field’ of visual connections into and out of spaces of varying degrees of publicity and privacy. They re-engage the project with the immediacy of the harsh topography of the site where the deep excavations reclaim ground and bring light and air through the proposals and to shield domestic spaces from excess visual intrusion.

These external spaces often concealed within perimeters of interiority, and which are grown out across a range of scales, engender notions of “abandonment” that “blur boundaries”.105 Mann continues to refer to this as an inhabitation of the ruin as a porous threshold that opens into others.

“As a room [...] furnished with plants, and what at first sight seems a garden reveals its decorative tiled floor; thresholds become ever more porous as doorways become wide gashes.” 106

page

At a wider city scale these ‘ruinous’ gestures help to frame new spaces of urbanity that are tethered into and from the site; re-establishing and opening new visual thresholds across the city, whilst at a more domestic scale helping to draw air and moisture through the building to aid passive cooling and ventilation strategies.

121

figure 87.

Proposed Rear (West) Elevation into Funicolare Montesanto (originally drawn at 1:200)

105. Mann, “Inhabiting the Ruin”, p. 5.

106. Ibid, p. 5-7.

ruin / 2a live/work; ruinous voids (re)grown

As a threshold, itself enzymatic of change; overwriting; or an (un) doing toward theatricality.

122

T H E AT R I CA L LY S C U L P T E D VO L UM E S

ru i n ; i n to

&

o f t i me

figure 88.

There is a duality in the assemblage of these ruinous fragments as interiorities in the way that they present instances where the construction of perceived heavier thickness(es) also ‘perform’ as theatrical components by contributing towards the calibration of the conditions of the spaces they create.

In such situations, domestic and work spaces are tied into the same ‘volumetric thresholds’ as those of conventional publicity and are afforded access to natural daylight from above as consequence of generous tower extrusions. This arrangement of space begins to reference the deep and narrow conditions found within the quarters; theatrically sculpting volume and light out of seemingly heavier and static ‘ruinous’ elements.

Though ruin tends to acquire a perceived fixity of time, the thesis positions the ruin as a threshold, itself enzymatic of change; overwriting; or an (un) doing towards new theatricalities of “unforeseen constellations”.107 They may lie latent, but in doing so hold a temporal staticity necessary to move on from.

Rendered perspective view from FF internal ‘vicolo’ towards Montesanto.

The ruin takes on the role as a ‘hinge’ between the social and cultural aspirations for the Napoli of yesterday, today and into tomorrow.The way itself becomes an architecture of the thesis is a reflection on time: an assertion of both continuity and change that facilitates a theatre of the everyday within the ‘immediacy’ of the site and the city.

107. Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 165.

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123

t h e r u i n ta ke s on t h e r o l e a s a ‘ h i n g e ’ b e t we e n t h e s o c i a l a n d c u lt ur a l a s p i r at i on s f or t h e n a p o l i o f ye st e r day , to day a n d i n to tomorr ow .

ruin / 1a live/work; ruins into & of time

Performative Constructions acted as Gates - Thresholds between disparate sites within Naples. They maintained the threshold, extended the spaces between things and provided both separations from and thickenings of the spaces of the city. Their properties are now reappropriated to suit the new site: Santa Trinita delle Monarche (Parco Quartieri Spagnoli). Santa Trinita is a ruin, labyrinth and theatre - a place of performativity, memory, decay and dislocation. Echoing D’Acierno’s views on porosity, “Naples can not be programmed. The aporetic city shuns objectification, the reduction of its complexities to simple programmatic or organisational structures.” 108 Using Gilloch’s three terms as a way of determining functions and

124

spatial qualities instead of having a fixed agenda for Santa Trinita will allow room for exploration and provide flexible boundaries and uses. The new tectonic assemblages will attempt to open up the site creating four thresholds that allow better communication between the site and the city. The passages and paths will extend and thicken the city - site relationship, while testing, blurring and refiguring boundaries. Santa Trinita will therefore exist inbetween the private and public realm, accessible as well as disconnected; a sanctuary as well as a public centre for the Spanish Quarters.

Andrea Branzi states that in order for architecture to exist in a porous context, it should have qualities and principles that are

“open to interpretation.” 109 Urban refunctionalisation, i.e. fostering and reusing existing estates will tie the architecture back into its context.

“The quality of the city is made by the quality of its domestic objects, i.e. tools, facilities, products etc.” 110 Paying attention to these micro stations of a city and making architecture from them, will create “a field of potentials, shaped by weak forces and spontaneous programmatic eruptions.”

111

One could suggest that there is an urban archaeology and an urban domesticity found on site. Artefacts, objects and past functionalities tell the story of St. Trinita and suggest ways of inhabitation and reuse, those being institutional and/or domestic.The monastery served both as a home for its occupants and an institution

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125

figure 89.

Sanat Trinita della Monache: A contemporary overwriting.

108. Pellegrino D’Acierno, “Introduction. Naples as Chaosmos or, The City That Makes You Repeat Its Discourse” in Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun, p. 14.

109. Andrea Branzi, ‘For a Post-Environmentalism: Seven Suggestions for a New Athens Charter” in Ecological Urbanism, p. 141.

110 & 111. Ibid, p. 111.

ruin / 1b bathhouse; (‘il campetto’)

that cared for the needs of other Quartieri Spagnoli residents.

Domestic spaces, i.e. kitchens, dining halls, baths, laundry rooms, bedrooms and drawing rooms as well as public, institutional spaces, i.e. infirmary, library, church resonate a powerful aura of memory (ruin) and performance (theatre) that cannot be ignored.

We are to unfold that past and find new ways to refigure and reuse it, creating a more contemporary setting that however, holds onto those qualities.

r e a c t i va t i n g t h e e v e r y d a y

domestic items found within.

r e -a p p r o p r i at i n g t h e b at h t u b A contemporary overwriting of the old “functionalities� of the monastery

ruin / 1b bath house; re-appropriating the bathtub

UNFOLDING P U B L I C G E ST U R E S

ruin / 1b bath house; towers & voids

Santa Trinita della Monarche has become the ruin, the node of memory, that triggers the spatial qualities and functions of the Bathhouse. Re-appropriating the old ‘functionalities’ of the monastery, will serve as an overwriting of Santa Trinita, resulting in a reestablished urban complex.The Bathhouse reactivates the everyday domestic items found inside - an old rusty bathtub and a broken washing machine - and re-appropriates them to respond to Naples’ current setting. It holds on to the privatised ancient Roman bath rituals as well as operates as an open public pool in order to respond to the needs of the Spanish Quarters residents and the new domestic studios along vico Paradiso.

128

The Bathhouse unfolds through three public gestures, i.e. three towers, echoing the three Urban Gateways that are formed along vico paradiso (1a). The stone vaults that run along the length of Parco Spagnoli have become the ruinous fragment the three towers hinge from. The towers echo the vaults’ material qualities, i.e. heavy stonework and large openings.The vaults no longer act as a boundary, but rather become fluid space within the public pools. They thicken the threshold between the remnants of SantaTrinita and the new reestablished contemporary fields. Similarly, the three towers could be portrayed as “contemporary ruins.”

Fragments that have (un)done other ruined fragments found on site while becoming anchor points that will trigger another form of overwriting.

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129 The private baths tower holds, overlaps and overwrites the necessary functionalities for traditional Roman bathing. The Caldarium [hot bath], the Tepidarium [warm bath], the Frigilarium [cold bath] and the Laconium(s) [resting area(s)] overwrite and/or extend each other’s spatial qualities, forming a condensed and tight vertical core. The thick, concrete floors “intrude” into each pools’ vertical space, whereas the thin perforated steel skin carefully clads strategically visual openings while still allowing light to enter the space. figure 91 & 92.

Hinging from the “ruined” fragments of Il Campeto.

ruin / 1b bath house; towers & voids

130

ruin / 1b bath house; performing materiality

page

T h e d i v i n g tow e r b e c o m e s a s pat i a l a n d v i s ua l t h r e s h o l d b e t w e e n t h e st r e e t a n d t h e m o n a st e ry

131

figure 93.

The diving tower becomes an urban piece.

Contrary to the private baths, it is an uninhabited void that becomes a spatial and visual threshold between the monastery and Vico Paradiso.

Vertically, it bridges a public and visually open diving pool space with a hidden, almost interior private dive pool spectator garden [podium].

The pool tower becomes a gesture towards the urban ramp. It is a threshold that extends the street [coming from Santa Lucia a Monte] into the Bathhouse, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior thicknesses. It acts as a concealed internal urban gate.

The tectonic assemblage of the diving pool tower aims at controlling the environmental conditions present within the space. Heavy, solid walls made out of stonework control the humidity and moisture emanated by the heated pool. Large openings as well as an operable skylight, help to naturally ventilate the rising heat and supply fresh air. Perforated steel panels are carefully placed in front of specific openings in order to control the light entering the space, visually aiding the divers at the top of the diving platform.

A layering of thickness(es) becomes a gesture towards the city

06

L A B Y R I N T H ; The register of a means of connectivity between architectures and/or fields that at once disconnects someone through the journey or experience of its discovery.

Filtration though streets of ‘labyrinth’.

Walter Benjamin frequently referenced the ‘labyrinth’ in his writings on the way in which we experience cities.

As such, the thesis seeks to implement the labyrinth as both a spatial and experiential ‘wayfinding’ device.

In his ‘Arcades Project’, he describes it as the “reality to which

It brings spaces into new relationships with each other; offering (with reference to Gilloch) ‘dislocation’ from the city and otherwise unfamiliar ways through Naples, before returning to the presence of everyday Neapolitan life.

the flâneur, without knowing it, devotes himself ”.112A rich network

of connectivity which the flâneur,113 he argues, explores as a dialectic between “the interior as street, and

the street as interior’”.114

In this way, the labyrinth is presented as a way to conceive of the urban metropolis as a field of interstitial spaces that holds together sequences of threshold connections.

It carries a potential for the unknown, an emancipatory potential that becomes about finding means to access the city in new and unpredictable ways.

112.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Howard Eiland & kevin McLaughlin. Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 429 113. The ‘Flaneur’ (from the French noun flâneur), means “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, or “loafer”. It is a term that Benjamin uses and bought to prominentce to describe as a character who has a key role in understanding, participating in, and portraying the city.

114. Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 165.

D’Acierno describes Naples as the ‘supreme aporetic city.’115 He posits aporia— ‘its meaning as “impasse” connects and disconnects it to the “passage” implicit to porosity… is the most effective way of articulating the entanglements and contradictions dictated by Naples.’116 According to Jacques Derrida who framed the term in a linguistic context, aporias present a paradox in their ‘possibility as at once their condition of impossibility.’117 In interpreting these conditions through an architectural language, passages and blockages are formed using light, mobile and heavy elements that are held in contention with each other much like the porous and a-porous conditions (re)making the city.

115.

116.

117.

118.

134

D’Acierno, ‘Delirious Naples’ p.15.

Ibid.: 4-15 Derrida, ‘Aporias: dying--awaiting (one another at) the “limits of truth”,’ p.11.

D’Acierno, ‘Delirious Naples’ p.14-15.

‘Nodes of Threshold’ that promote labyrinthine dislocations

Situated on the southern edge of the SS Trinita delle Monache site, the proposal explores the formation of labyrinthine dislocations. Using multiple ‘urban gateways,’ along the sloping street an (un)doing of borders is perpetuated by allowing spaces to spill into and out of the scheme. The proposal hinges on the ‘Urban Ramp’ and attaches itself to the street in order to preserve the density of the urban fabric. The street is further articulated with the incorporation of a secondary passage along its length, creating an interstitial route which enhances the ‘thickness’ of the threshold condition.

figure 94.

labyrimth / 2b library; urban thresholds

‘ U R BAN ’ THRESHOLDS

page

135

118

labyrinth / 2b library; urban thresholds

a p or i a — ‘ i t s me a n i n g a s “ i m pa ss e ” c onn e c t s a n d d i s c onn e c t s i t to t h e “ pa ss ag e ” i m p l i c i t to p or o s i t y… i s t h e mo st e ff e c t i ve way o f a r t i c u l at i n g t h e e n ta n g l e me n t s a n d c on tr a d i c t i on s d i c tat e d by n a p l e s. ’

Q uartieri Spagnoli, Via S. Lucia a Monte, street in front of ‘Library’ site

l a byr i n t h tracing a line between internalized p r a c t i c e s a n d l a b y r i n t h i n e pa s s a g e ( s )

labyrinth /2b library; via s. lucia a monte

138

labyrinth / 2b library; performing thresholds

page

139 ‘ ( U N ) D O I N G U R BA N T H I C K N E S S A N D VO I D ’ : PERFORMING THRESHoLDS

figure 96.

The Library’s entrance gradually slopes from the exterior courtyard to the internal stair core creating and accessible ‘Urban Threshold’ that responds to the configurations of the local streetscape. The street is folded into the building leading to the open Library ‘void’, which connects the busy Quartieri Spagnoli to the interior of the library. The vertical spatial arrangement of the proposal allows spaces and functionalities to interpenetrate through the configuration of multiple internal levels.

The ‘Urban Threshold’ is extended with a bridge between the ‘Library’ and ‘Common Goods’ Building. The (un)doing of borders is perpetuated with a passage that connects the two spatially and programmatically. A ‘vicolo’ is formed as a blockage articulating each building as a way of interrogating the openended flow of movement and promoting the capacity for dislocation and discovery.

The Library core makes its way to the top floor where it opens up to two terraces. The first, smaller in scale, becomes a ‘Viewing Terrace’ back to the city. It also maintains views of the interior through a void that reveals common room spaces within.The larger terrace becomes a stage of potential theatrical occupations. Both terraces are gestures towards extended fields within which the proposal operates. Views across the Quartieri Spagnoli all the way to the Porto Napoli bring back a sense of the scale of the urban fabric and trace a line between the internalized practices and the labyrinthine passages that make the city one big extended ‘threshold’.

Performing Thresholds: Isometric Section through ‘Urban Threshold’

labyrinth / 2b library; a ‘field’ of thresholds

The proposal opens up onto the street with an ‘Urban Garden’ and ‘Urban Market’ (il mercato) that become at once part of the exteriority of the street and interiority of the proposal. Market stalls frame the raised platform of il mercato that promotes communal activity within the broader functionality of the library.

The market as an ‘urban’ gesture pertains to an extended field of collective use, coresponsibility and exchange prompted by Common Goods organizations like Santa Fede Liberata.

The garden becomes a focal point for the project by acting as a vertical core that anchors the proposal to the street and directs internal spaces towards the exterior. Its operation also extends to the introduction of accessible, communal garden spaces in an area lacking such provisions, as well as in becoming itself an opening gesture towards the reactivation of existing green spaces in SS. Trinitá delle Monache that remain widely underused.

140

figure 97 & 98.

Rendered perspective view of ‘Library’ streetscape and associated floor plan (originally drawn at 1:200)

E X T E N D E D ‘ F I E L D’ O F CO L L E C T I V E E X C H AN G E

page

141

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n’ arde an G b r ‘U

’ hreshold ‘Urban T

The ‘Urban Ramp’ runs from the corner of Via Pasquale Scura andVia S. Lucia a Monte–anchored by the ruin of the ‘church tower’–north into the site, towards ‘il campetto’ and the Bathhouse. The ramp connects the urban, open southern edge of the site with the more private, domestic functionalities to the north. Running parallel to Vico Paradiso, the ramp mirrors this urban axis, creating a new street condition within the SS.Trinità site as an echo of the labyrinthine conditions of the Quartieti Spagnoli. Situated between the high walls of the Gallery, ‘La Chiesa’ and the Library, overlooked at moments by balconies punctured through their facades, and sheltered at moments by bridges and walkways, the ramp emulates the conditions of its neighbouring streets, knitting into the urban fabric to create a new ‘Urban Threshold’ into the site.

119. Sophie Wolfrum, “Still Here while Being There–About Boundaries and Thresholds,” in Porous City: From Metaphor to Urban Agenda, ed.

Sophie Wolfrum (Basel: Birkhauser, 2018), p. 62.

142

The ‘Urban Gateway’: a reconfiguration of urban conditions

The Gallery responds to the urban qualities of the neighbouring Quarieri Spagnoli to inform its spatial configuration at different scales. At an urban scale, the reconfiguring of the streetscape around the site is ‘labyrinthine’ in its arrangement of urban experience. On the upper ground floor (-6.5m), the proposal opens up to the street through an ‘Urban Gateway’; a thickened threshold as an (un) doing of streetscape. At this entranceway, three urban gestures intersect; an ‘Urban Ramp’ leads into the site to ‘il campetto’, a ‘cloister’ space marks the entry down into the ‘Urban Theatre’, and a configurable ‘Hinged Facade’ opens through into the gallery.

figure 99.

labyrinth / 2a gallery: ‘urban gateway’

AN AWA R E N E SS O F PA SS AG E

page

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143

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“ me mory a n d t h e c i t y b o t h c on st i t u t e l a byr i n t h i n e f i g ur e s, w i t h o u t b e g i nn i n g or e n d, i n wh i c h on e m ay m a ke ‘ e n d l e ss i n t e r p o l at i on s ’ [ . . . ] move me n t i n me mory i s l i ke t h at i n a l a byr i n t h . ” 1 1 9

labyrinth / 2a gallery: ‘urban gateway’

Between leaving the street and entering the ‘Urban Theatre’, one passes through a ‘cloister-like’ space, framed by the ‘hinged’ gallery entrance on one side, and a colonnaded gap in the gallery façade on the other, looking out to Via Pasquale Scura. This entrance way operates as a ‘thickened’ threshold, a space to “control, prolong, and ritualise the act of exiting and entering” 120 by extending the field between the street and the theatre, creating a ‘slowness’ which brings awareness to this moment of passage.

The third component of these intersecting gestures, the ‘Hinged Façade’, performs as a doorway. The façade acts as a configurable fragment which ‘animates’ the urban gateway; a choreograph-able architecture with multiple configurations (see Theatre chapter for a further discussion of the ‘Hinged Façade’).

144

figure(s) 100 & 101.

The ‘Urban Gateway’ : A ‘thickened threshold’ as an (un)doing of streetscape

120. Wolfrum, “Still Here while Being There,” p. 62.

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121

labyritnh / quartieri spagnoli

Internally, the tall ‘void’ within the gallery floor plan acts as a ‘courtyard’ space, bringing a more domestic sense of the Quartieri Spagnoli into the gallery. Like the courtyards within the blocks of the Quarters, the Courtyard Void brings a sense of the outside into the building, weaving the gallery into its urban fabric.

Looking directly up through the void gives a view of the sky, interrupted only by small balcony openings. The tall void brings light into the spaces, and operable panels at its peak enable passive ventilation within the gallery floor plan.

148

Discussing Walter Benjamin’s city writings, Gilloch notes the way in which “memory and the city both constitute labyrinthine figures, without beginning or end, in which one may make ‘endless interpolations.’”122 In this linking of time and space­ –the way “movement in memory is like that in a labyrinth”123–Gilloch notes that, for Benjamin, “motion in the city and in memory is a persistent going nowhere in particular that constitutes a perpetual rediscovery.”124 As one circles through the labyrinth things are continually returned to from

different directions–a “circling around in which one revisits the same places” 125–providing for new perspectives on the past.

The Courtyard acts as a structuring of the ‘labyrinthine’ circulation within the gallery.

As a recurring feature on every floor plan, the Courtyard is “continually encountered again, returned to, through approached from different directions”126 as one explores the gallery, configuring the circulation through the spaces and directing the journey ‘upwards’ through the building.

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149

figure 103.

121. Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 67.

122 - 127. Ibid.

The ‘Courtyard Void’ responds to its urban fabric

labyrinth / 2a gallery: voids

The artworks in the gallery act similarly to the courtyard. As ‘ruin’ pieces–static nodes of ‘memory’–situated through the gallery across ‘void’ spaces, the artworks are revisited across floor levels, “repeatedly encountered”127 from new angles. These pieces act as markers in the labyrinthine gallery circulation; moments of way-finding and rediscovery, fragments of the past guiding one through the gallery and up to the top of the building.

“At the same time, the communal invades and pervades the domicile”.129 The ground floor plan of the proposals illustrates the way the project is knitted into the urban fabric of the city, and, more immediately how it re-engages the street (Vico Paradiso). Primarily domestic in its programme and with strong reference to the Neapolitan ‘Bassi’ typology, the four units A-D are bound into the labyrinth as an extension of the street by a series of key public gestures. ‘Urban Gateways’ and ‘Vertical Cores’ on one scale, hinge the scheme into the street, opening new thresholds into the site and re-figuring the primary metropolitan axis upon which the city is hung. At another ‘Domestic Openings’ between dwellings allow the street turn to continue through the proposals and open thresholds to further interstitial territories within each unit.

This labyrinthine re-configuration of intrinsically Neapolitan spatial agencies engenders a perception of the project and its distribution across the site less in terms of its architecture in a conventional sense, than in terms of the porosity of the gesture: of the experience of moving through “an elaborate system of arteries that has priority over the environment of buildings”.130 The promotion of the slowness prescribed by threshold connections held in place by the labyrinth and the communications instilled by everyday life.

U N O RT H O D OX I CA L LY P U B L I C - P R I VAT E

A spatial device derived from the urban configuration of the city as a way to negotiate it.

l a byr i n t h ; a s pat i a l ag e n c y

The unpredictable dialogue between public and private territories is a key theme in each of Benjamin’s descriptions of experience in the city.What distinguishes Naples from other cities, he writes, is that “each act is permeated by streams of communal life, […] just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth and altar, so only much more loudly,the street migrates into the living room”.128 Conceiving of the Neapolitan domestic conditions described by Benjamin as the foundation of a threshold into and out of the Monastery site, the project exercises the agency of the ‘labyrinth’ as a spatial device derived from the urban configuration of the city as a way to negotiate it.

128. Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 171.

129. Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 27.

130.

Jackson, “”The Discovery of the Street” in The

Necessity for Ruins, p. 55.

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labyrinth / 1a live/work; labyrinthine filtration

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153

Isometric section through key nodes in the ‘labyrinth’ (originally drawn at 1:50)

As the labyrinth lifts surfaces of the street towards the Bath House, the programme becomes more conventionally public; offering moments of ‘retreat’ and ‘dislocation’ from the city before returning back into the site. A series of planted terraces allow the distribution of citrus trees from the ‘Urban Lime Garden’ to enable conditions of landscape to contribute towards such dislocation. Here, where the

labyrinth breaks away from the typically Neapolitan density of the Quarters and into the expanse of the site, the extreme topographies, in some instances, also causes these spaces to introduce ‘impasse’: blockages and separations between programmatically desperate moments of the scheme.

Further sequences or ‘fields’ of more significant ‘Threshold Connections’ (which are explored further in the following ‘Theatre’ chapter) break and punctuate the encounter with the labyrinth and provide passage across carefully choreographed terraces of domestic lime gardens from one proposal to another.

Through varying public/private intensities the labyrinth calibrates a journey ‘into’ and ‘out of’ everyday thickness(es) from ‘bassi’ doorway to rooftop pavilion and from bath house to diving board edge.

131. Peter Salter, TS : Intuition & Process : [projects by Students under the Tutelage of Peter Salter]. Themes VI. London: Architectural Association, 1989, p, 26.

labyrinth / 1a live/work; labyrinthine filtration

Where the project takes a sedimentary approach to its programmatic distribution, the ‘labyrinthine spatial matrix’ provides open passage through densities of live/work accommodation, folding up through the proposal and the site and providing access to, or separations from, adjoining territories at any given time. In this way moving through the threshold of the labyrinth slows down the passage from interiority and exteriority, blurring the boundaries between the two.

Like a “filter mechanism”, it holds inhabitants within interstices, between “the room outside and the room inside”, allowing passage to be prescribed only by the liminal qualities of everyday improvisation.131

folding up through the proposal and the site and p r ov i d i n g ac c e ss to, or s e pa r at i on s f r om , a d j o i n i n g t e rr i tor i e s at a ny gi ve n t i me.

figure 105.

F R AC T U R E D INTERIORITY

labyrinth / 1a live/work; a netwrok of ‘vicolo’

To contextualise the qualities of space that these labyrinthine conditions construct, the project draws from the network of Neapolitan ‘Vicolo’ that weave through the Spanish Quarters. These ‘Vicolo’ are narrow, pedestrianised alleyways due to their width, that create back-street connections in and around the most densely populated areas of the city and those, that with the passage of the day, become inhabited by all manner of domestic operations.

154

As an agency we come to experience by moving through, the project depends in large measure upon the existence of the ‘labyrinth’ as a “means of movement”, “communication” and “orientation.” 132 To bring particular focus to one area of the scheme with reference to these ‘vicolo’ is to look to the street like conditions that are opened within the proposals that run perpendicularly from Vico Pardiso and that speculate upon the route up through the project and

back deeper into the site. Glimpses into external courtyards and spaces of domesticity are revealed on the approach to the first floor which turns back to face the street where another semi-enclosed ‘Vicoloesque’ street runs behind a theatrical timber skin (see fig. opposite).

Moments of interiority within private workspace(s) are tethered through the labyrinth back to the exteriority of Vico Paradiso. The intensity of this relationship is mediated by the mobility of more theatrical architectural components, but the labyrinthine construction of space allows interiors to perform to exteriors, for them to be “fractured” , and thresholds “opened to the gaze of neighbours and strangers”.133 132. Jackson, “The Discovery of the Street”, p. 55.

133. Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 27.

figure 106 & 107.

Internal rendered studio perspective & fragment of proposed FF plan (originally drawn at 1:200)

l a byr i n t h Santissima Trinita delle Monache; Vico Paradiso on towards Montesanto

labyrinth /1a live /work; vico paradiso

Recalibrating the labyrinthine qualities of the bathhouse

t h r e s h o l d c onn e c t i on ( s ) The Bathhouse bridges the gap between the private domestic housing units and the larger urban gestures, i.e. Gallery and Library that overwrite the setting of Santa Trinita. It is programmatically split into three parts: the private Baths, the public swimming pools and the utility core [apodeterium, laundry room, laundry terrace].

It establishes both horizontal and vertical thresholds with the domestic studios along vico paradiso and the two institutional proposals along Via Pasquale scura

158

[Gallery] and Santa Lucia a Monte [Library]; for the latter it becomes a continuation of the ‘urban ramp’ that starts from the southern edge of Santa Trinita, leading to the heart of Parco Spagnoli. It becomes an interior urban street that bridges the northern and southern edges of the site, in a sequential manner, transitioning from public fields to more private spaces.

As a re-configuration of the ‘labyrinthine’ qualities of

the ‘Vicolo’ in the Quarters, the Bathouse aims to create ‘Threshold Connections’ and ‘Spatial Relationships’ that are overwritten, promoting the uncertainty and dislocation of the labyrinth.

It holds a strong connection with the adjacent domestic studio housing units (1a). It establishes multiple threshold conditions that hold both urban gestures, i.e. *Urban Gateway, *Lime garden and other more private

figure 109.

Recalibrating the labyrinthine qualities of the bath house.

labyrinth / 1b; bath house

relationships, i.e. *Domestic Staircase [Unit A], *Domestic Bridge [Unit B]. In between those thresholds, fields are constantly (un)done and the potential to recalibrate their spatial conditions is formed. Private Courtyards and pocket gardens act as links and/or blockages [an impasse] for the two proposals. The Urban Gateways establish strong vertical urban thresholds that link Montesanto station and Mercato Pignasecca with Parco Spagnoli.

The “Urban Threshold” is an extended passage [atrium] that connects as well as dislocates the multiple spaces of the bathhouse, hinging on the ‘theatrical’ properties of the Curatorial Threshold proposed in the Oratorio di Santa Maria della Fede.

It is made up of different material and spatial layers that thicken and delay accessibility both through and across the site, succeeding however in bridging the public and private spaces throughout the Bathhouse.

Multiple thick pieces of wall break the linear path of the threshold, while other lightweight materials such as a timber skin and perforated steel plates thicken visual connections. Having porticos [doors] close off or open up the urban and domestic thresholds, creates ‘a performative space that can be calibrated in numerous unforeseen ways and allows for spontaneous programmatic eruptions with unpredicted results.’134

figure 110.

134. Branzi, ‘For a Post-Environmentalism”, p. 111-112.

The performative materiality of the threshold overwrites and extends the passage(s) within the bathhouse

labyrinth / 1b bath house; urban threshold

D E L AY I N G ACC E SS I B I L I T Y

160

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161

labyrinth / 1b bath house; urban threshold

p e r f orm at ive m at e r i a l i t y o f t h e t h r e s h o l d ove rwr i t e s a n d e x t e n d s pa ss ag e ( s ) w i t h i n t h e b at h h o u s e.

labyrinth 1b; bath house

pa ss age s a n d p or t i c o s

A series of porticos [doors] and domestic passages, curate the multiple access routes that eventually lead into the three main cores of the bathhouse. Individually crafted metal doors hinge from, close off and open up a series of atriums, setting a choreographed pace and narrative for the user to follow. They become thresholds that “make bearable the presence of borders, and, moreover, assign to them a positive connotation through architecturally defining a space that belongs to two spheres simultaneously.”135 The porticos blur the boundaries between interior and exterior space, having borrowed the “theatricality” of the timber skin facade and offer a series of interchangeable circulation paths that lead to the towers and voids of the bathhouse.

135. Sophie Wolfrum, “Still Here while Being There–About Boundaries and Thresholds,” in Porous City: From Metaphor to Urban Agenda, , p. 62.

162

figure 111 & 112.

Choreographing the pace and narrative of the urban threshold.

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T H R E S H O L D S T H AT M E D I AT E A P R E S E N C E O F ‘ I M PA SS E ’ AN D ‘ B O R D E R ’.

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T H E A T R E ; The mobility or agency of an architecture to change, choreograph or calibrate the quality of a space.

Theatrical skins; interstice(s) & passage(s) The theatrical is tasked with the multiplication of intuition: the projection of a set of possible spatial and operative configurations that animate potential architectural qualities of performativity.

Architecture(s) of theatre therefore holds a capacity in the thesis to react to the everyday in a way that promotes performativity and exercises liminal space as a ‘latent’ stage for intuition and spontaneity.

In this way, the thesis presents theatre as a liminal agency of an architecture to be calibrated in numerous unforeseen ways.

Through Gilloch’s definition of the term, the theatrical begins to offer flexible and discontinuous conditions as a catalyst for spontaneity and performance.136 Andrea Branzi presents this capacity for potential as ‘weak’ in the sense that the definitive is rejected. Rather mobility facilitates the capacity of the theatrical to open “enzymatic territories” that are “shaped by weak

forces and spontaneous programmatic eruptions”.137

136. Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 34.

137. Branzi, “The Weak Metropolis” p. 112-113.

t h e atr i c a l t h r e s h o l d ( s ) Creating performative spaces for spontaneous occupation.

page

R E S P O N S I B L E F O R S OM E T H I N G E L S E . ” 1 3 8

“ B E LO N G I N G AT O N C E TO E AC H OT H E R , O F B E I N G

167

figure 113.

In Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s four causes (causa materialis, causa formalis, causa finalis and causa efficiens) he suggests that they ‘are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else.’139 Material, form, programme and technology become ‘coresponsible.’ 140 Using an architectural language of ‘thickening’ and ‘layering’ the proposal’s functionalities operate between external and internal metal skins joined to structural concrete walls. Tectonic and spatial operations of ‘indebtedness,’ as Heiddeger describes, are explored in how thin and thick components owe their operation to the material they are comprised of, the function they perform and their ‘theatrical’ inhabitation leading to the production of ‘something else,’ a situation of (un)doing through the overwriting of existing conditions.

The proposal operates in an urban scale and creates spaces for spontaneous occupation within the broader function of a library.

Performative gestures are explored through thresholds of varied scales and functions.

Large entrances frame the street creating configurable qualities creating a set of situations whereby the ‘urban’ is brought in relation to the scale of the body.This scale reappears across the scheme with doorways of a public nature such as the terrace gate, a ‘Theatrical threshold’ creating different spatial relationships between interior and exterior spaces.

138. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays’, p. 7.

139 & 140. Ibid.

Material ‘indebtedness’ forming urban thresholds

theatre/ 2b library; urban thickness(es)

U R BAN T H I C K N E SS ( E S ) Benjamin, according to D’Acierno, “described Naples’s porosity to imply… a psychogeography that lacks boundaries,but that is nonetheless bound together; as an urban space in which the soft or imaginary city and the hard or real city perpetually collide’”.141

141. D’Acierno, ‘Delirious Naples’, p. 12.

168

figure 114.

Perforated metal screens frame the proposal on either side promoting the formation of one extended threshold condition. Internal ‘theatrical skins’ operate in a similar way by allowing glimpses between spaces through perforated metal panels. Performative gestures are promoted with internal doorways such as the one bridging the Library and ‘Common Goods’ Building that animates the ‘theatrical threshold’ in an (un)doing of the spatial and functional border between the two schemes.

Typical ‘library’ floor plan (originally drawn at 1:200)

The proposal’s functions operate between configurable ‘thicknesses’ that promote spontaneous performativity to collide with spatial and formal components within an urban scheme. Reading pods and balconies spill into the space of the ‘theatrical skin’ creating an interplay between spaces of the ‘institution’ and the spontaneous activities of the everyday theatre in Quartieri Spagnoli.

page

169

’ ness hick T l a atric ‘The

s’ knes Thic l a c i atr ‘The

theatre / 2b library; urban thickness(es)

“ a p sych o ge o g r a p hy t h at l ac k s b o un da r i e s, bu t t h at i s n on e t h e1 4l1 e ss b o un d to g e t h e r; a s a n ur b a n s pac e ”

142

“ B U I L D I N G AN D AC T I O N I N T E R P E N E T R AT E ”

theatre / 2b library; inhabiting thickness(es)

‘Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen constellations.’142 Following Benjamin’s thinking, the proposal explores porosity by articulating thresholds and fields in an architectural language of ‘thickness’ and ‘void.’

These qualities allow spatial and material systems to communicate and interpenetrate at an urban scale creating openings for spontaneous interactions. The building performs through perforated screens that allow glimpses of public activity to be viewed from private reading rooms. Open-ended thresholds merge with interior circulation creating opportunities for theatres of ‘new, unforseen constellations.’

170

Performance, as the productive activity of theatre occupies the spatial and material components set up by ruin and labyrinth and promotes an (un)doing of borders through the act of inhabitation. All the conditions of porosity set out by Gilloch through ruin, labyrinth and theatre operate interdependently to create the complex spatial relationships and performative practices that animate the urban fabric of the city and blur the lines between public and private.

142. Benjamin, W and Lacis, ‘Naples,’ p. 165-66.

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171

‘Theatrical skins’ promote moments of spontaneous interactions

theatre / 2b library; inhabiting thickness(es)

figure 115 & 116.

theatre / 2a gallery: performing thresholds

“the moment of passage enters our experience as a

situation. thresholds control, prolong, and ritualize 143 the acts of exiting and entering.”

‘Configurable components’ operate at urban and internal scales through the gallery, acting as animate architectural fragments with the potential for creating multiple spatial configurations. The ‘Hinged Façade’ is the largest of such pieces, operating as the gallery entrance in the ‘Urban Gateway’.

This urban piece operates in dialogue with smaller ‘theatrical threshold’ moments within the gallery; doorways which regulate the opening and closing of the exhibition spaces.

The ‘hinged façade’ is a theatrical component; this doorway configures and maintains the threshold between building and street, swinging round to shut the cloister and theatre from the streetscape at required moments.

In this potential for multiple spatial configurations, the ‘Urban Gateway’ becomes a space in which “building

and action interpenetrate,”144 a performative space for improvisation and unforeseen arrangements.

Traces of the motion of the door are made evident, with a sweeping track carved into the floor, and indents in the door edge to allow it to seamlessly meet the edges of the colonnaded cloister wall; ‘ruin’ details facilitating the performance of this theatre.

Above the threshold, a void space creates a separation of paintings by Jusepe de Ribera­–Trinitas Terrestris and God the Father–from viewers.The ‘thickened void’ between viewer and artwork creates a physical impasse, an aporia bringing a sense of prominence and performance to the act of viewing these works.

The void is visible to look up into from the gateway, interweaving these moments and providing a glimpse of what the gallery holds from the outside. The ‘Urban

Gateway’ is animated through the performative qualities of the thickened threshold(s) and void(s), layered up within this densely choreographed space.

Discussing ‘undoing’, Andrew Benjamin notes that “if there is a way through Naples it has to do with the use of porosity as a temporal concept rather than a purely spatial one.”145 At this moment where Gilloch’s three conditions of porosity– ruin, labyrinth, theatre–intersect through architectural and urban configurations, the urban gateway is an (un)doing of threshold emerging from the arrangement of porosity as both temporal and spatial.

Through this (un)doing, the ‘Urban Gateway’ reconfigures the specific urban conditions of its situation, performing as a threshold animated by the layering of interpenetrating urban gestures.

143. Wolfrum, “Still Here while Being There,” p. 62.

144. Benjamin. W and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 165-66.

145. Benjamin. A, “Porosity at the Edge”, p. 109.

172

figure 117.

‘Performing Thresholds’: Gallery Urban Gateway

174

theatre / 2a gallery: stages and boxes

page

175

figure 118.

A series of balconies and platforms act as ‘theatre boxes’, animating spaces and framing views.

Walter Benjamin notes that in Naples, “buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes.”146 The gallery proposal responds to the notion of theatre in Naples, both relatively literally through the formalisation of an ‘Urban Theatre’, and through smaller motifs of ‘theatre boxes’ used at various moments.

A series of balconies and platforms through the gallery act as ‘theatre boxes’, animating spaces and framing views across the proposal. The motif of the ‘box’ appears at the Urban Gateway and along the east façade of the Urban Tower, with platforms and balconies looking down into the theatre space. These balconies are likewise employed along the west façade, overlooking the Urban Ramp in response to the balconies of the Quartieri Spagnoli that form part of the urban Neapolitan theatre of the everyday.

146. Benjamin. W and Lacis, “Naples”, p. 166-67.

147. Ibid.

theatre / 2a gallery: stages and boxes

The ‘void’ spaces across the artworks perform in a similar manner, framing the viewing subject and animating the act of spectacle in the gallery. These ‘boxes’ extend the field between things, creating visual thresholds across “simultaneously animated theatres.” 147

t h e atr e Santissima Trinita delle Monache; Via S. Lucia a Monte views to Vesuvius

theatre /2a gallery ; theatrical landscapes

Perforated metal screens around the theatre wrap the corner of the street, acting as ‘theatrical skins’ along this urban streetscape. The screens allow glimpses through into the theatre whilst simultaneously acting as a ‘blockage’ between theatre and street, both embracing and challenging the notion of “public spectacle”148 in Naples. These skins are repeated at various moments across the proposal: along the projection room façade, looking down to the theatre; on the north elevation of the art school dance studios; and across the bridge leading from the gallery to the church.

These perforated screens are an experiential and tectonic tool. They animate the building by allowing glimpses of movement and activity, creating visual fields between the gallery, its streetscape, and across the Santissima Trinità site, enabling the building to perform from the inside out. Along with operable timber louvres through the gallery, the screens perform as solar shading across the proposal, and create shifting light conditions within the spaces.

148. Gilloch, Myth & Metropolis, p. 30.

149. Ibid.

178

Rendered perespective virew of he ‘Urban Theatre’

Screens and skins are utilised across the project, responding to shared material techniques across all four proposals.

figure 120.

theatre / 2a gallery: skins and screens

T H E AT R I CA L M AT E R I A L I T Y

theatre / 2a gallery: skins and screens

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181

figure 121.

Components of ‘Skins & Passages’ exhibition drawing (originally drawn at 1:200)

An operative tectonic language of performativity and mobility, transcends scale and allows a layering of theatrical architecture(s) to construct new threshold conditions that extend, enclose and ‘perform’ interstitial territories across the site.

The mobile condition of these theatrical architecture(s) as a “popular stage” 150 offers access to the way the proposals perform as an ‘Urban Gateway’; hinging into the stone streetscape of Vico Paradiso with fine steel meshes and a heavy concrete platforms to give access up generous external stair cases to the lower (‘il campetto’) terrace of the main site and the new collection of public and private pools.

The transition from the streetscape is mediated by a ‘thickening’ of this ‘threshold’ with a new ‘Theatrical Skin’ that choreographs glimpses of, and access into a series of ‘bassi’ and workshops below and beyond. “Each component of the layered skin is used to reinforce a component of the space or circumstance: each layer is a commitment to the generosity of the space.The weight of the elaboration is determined by the strategy and scale.” 151 At an urban scale the principle ‘Urban Gateway’ at the centre of Vico Pardiso frames a sequence of spaces for the city that are created by an excavation back into the site at street level.

The operative nature of the ‘theatrical skin’ enable these spaces, (which open thresholds to, and construct new relationships with the public pools), to perform as an extension of the street, or to be isolated locally for specific programmed events. One of these spaces, a Pool House pavilion courtyard provides space for retreat and dislocation from the city, where unorthodox spatial relationships with the the dive pool come into focus as a result of intense topographical conditions.

150. Benjamin & Lacis, “Naples”, p. 167.

151. Salter, Intuition & Process, p, 26.

As well as providing key constructional logic for the Live / Work portion of the scheme, the section opposite sets about describing the vertical distribution of programme across the proposals. The thickening of the ‘Theatrical Skin’ and further layering of more solidly articulated components responds to this distribution in a way that it performs to calibrate various conditions of these spaces.

The lightweight, more mobile components enable it to react in certain localities to focus, or provide shade from direct natural daylight, within more domestically oriented interiorities.

The roof canopy of the pavilion(s), that intentionally avoid sealing the structure, allow air to move freely up through the proposals as part of a passive ventilation strategy employed across the scheme.

152. Salter, Intuition & Process, p, 26.

153. Andrea Branzi, “For a Post-Environmentalism”, p. 110.

182

Proposed constructional cross section FF/ GG. (originally drawn at 1:50)

“Responding to that symbiotic relationship between the room and its external circumstance places an almost intolerable weight on the appropriateness of the skin. […] It must respond with the accuracy of instinct to diurnal and annual changes of circumstance. Only by layering can it attempt so much.” 152

figure 122.

theatre / 1a live/work; layering & calibration

DY NA M I C L AY E R I N G ( S )

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183

theatre / 1a live/work; layering & calibration

t h e p e r f orm a n c e o f t h e c i t y i s c h or e o g r a p h e d by t h e l aye r i n g o f i t s d ome st i c fac i l i t i e s & t h e i n t e r st i c e s o f da i ly l i f e. 1 5 3

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185

Performative potentialities animated through phases of daily calibrations which are projected back to the city.

p e r f orm i n g t h e e ve ry day As simultaneously “animated theatres” never entirely exposed or concealed from view, the spaces behind these skins, as Benjamin would describe, “erupt fragmentarily from the buildings, make an angular turn, and disappear, only to burst out again”.154 The performative potentiality of these components is animated through phases of daily calibrations which are projected back across the city as 186

“programmatic eruptions” 155 that spill into and out of everyday thickness(es) animated by project.

“Like a gallery […] either side of this narrow alley, all that has come together in the city lies insolently, crudely, seductively displayed. Only in fairy tales are lanes so long that one must pass through without looking to left or right.” 156

Through a theatrical reconfiguration of the labyrinthine qualities of the ‘Vicolo’ in the Quarters, the proposals create ‘Threshold Connections’ and ‘Spatial Relationships’ that are open to exploration. ‘Theatrical Skins and Screens’ of timber, hung stone, and perforated metal sheets become performative nodes that control, extend or block passages within and across the two

proposals. Folding spaces into and out of each other, conditions of ‘ruin’, ‘labyrinth’ and ‘theatre’ converge and thresholds are ‘(un)done’. “Building and action interpenetrate” x to promote the uncertainty and dislocation of the labyrinth, while the theatrical skins perform, choreographed by the ambiguity of improvisation within the field in which the ‘bassi’ and workshops operate.

figure 124.

Rendered external perspective view looking down Vico Paradiso towards Montesanto.

154. Benjamin & Lacis, “Naples”, p. 167.

155. Ibid, p. 170.

156. Ibid, p. 165.

theatre1b; bath house

c h or e o gr a p h i n g ga rd e n s & c o ur t ya rd s

‘Theatrical Skins and Screens’ of timber,

hung stone and perforated metal sheets become ‘performative nodes’ that control, extend or block passages. They fold spaces ‘into’ and ‘out’ of each other, choreographing diverse spatial conditions and ambiguities within fields, blockages and thresholds. Open courtyards, gardens as well as utility spaces, i.e. the apodeterium [changing room(s)], laundry room and laundry terrace, become “‘enzymatic territories’ that are shaped through spontaneous programmatic eruptions.’157

They remain ‘untreated’, formed in-between labyrinthine instances, acting as blockages - impasses that are continually ‘(un) done’, revealing a range of potentialities and intuitive definitions. Echoing the architectural and spatial qualities of Quartieri Spagnoli, ‘theatrical’ spaces blur the boundaries between public and private, creating a web of functionalities always in working dialogue.

188

figure 125 & 126.

“Untreated” fields become “theatrical” spaces full of potentialities and intuitive definitions.

157. Andrea Branzi, “The Weak Metropolis” in Ecological Urbanism, pp 111-112

t h e atr e Santissima Trinita delle Monache; Vico Paradiso on towards Montesanto

theatre /1b bath house ; ‘il campetto’

theatre / 1b bath house; performative skins

p e r f orm i n g t h r o u g h s c r e e n s, sk i n s a n d cl a d d i n g The Bathhouse facade holds an element of material performativity. It alternates between heavy, solid structures and more lightweight cladding, (un)doing the more solidified gestures proposed through the spatial organisation drawn in plan. The domestic courtyards and gardens are framed through Vico Paradiso’s theatrical timber skin whereas the more public, exposed fields borrow concrete stonework and perforated steel mesh to either rigidify or eradicate boundaries in-between public spaces.

Screens, skins and cladding operate through performative gestures that offer controlled lighting conditions in both public and private spaces as well as spaces of transience, mobility and circulation. Light becomes an additional theatrical element that extends, recalibrates and shifts conditions, atmospheres and configurable parts.

“As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen constellations.The stamp of the definitive is avoided.” 158

- Walter Benjamin & Asja Lacis

158. Benjamin & Lacis, “Naples”, p. 166.

192

figure 128.

Proposed East section (originally drawn at1:200)

It is a reflection of the wider Neapolitan urbanity and architecture, where thin layers and materialities act, suggest and control broader fields of porosity.

159. Stavros Stavrides, “Heterotopias and the Experience of Porous Urban Space,” in Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, p. 175 160.

194

Ibid. p. 175

Blurring the boundaries of performative urban fields to choreograph new porous, operative conditions

The public pool becomes a field of performance, “a potential theatre of expressive acts of encounter.” 159 It is an extension of the ‘Urban Ramps’as well as part of an internal street within ‘Il Campeto’. Its western wall is a definitive, material structure i.e. the vault colonnade, whereas its eastern facade is a series of folding glass doors that extend the pool’s performative field. “Everyday gestures take form in mutually dependent public performances” 160, where spectators are merged with swimmers and divers, blurring the two conditions and suggesting a wide spectrum of possible operations and relationships.

figure 129.

theatre / 1b bath house; public pool

PUBLIC P E R F O R M AN C E I N E V E RY DAY G E ST U R E

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195

theatre / 1b bath house; public pool

blurr i n g t h e b o un da r i e s o f p e r f or m at i ve ur b a n f i e l d s to ch or e o gr a p h n e w o p e r at i ve & p or o u s c on d i t i on s.

196

08

R E F L E C T I O N ; Door / Ways to New Neapolitan Practice(s) The thesis was founded on an introduction to Naples as being intrinsically porous; a city in economic and political stasis, characterised by qualities of temporal and spatial porosity in dialogue with urban decline.

Within an ambiguous context of clashing historical, political and social practices, Naples is seeking to reclaim its identity and heritage through small acts of community engagement, and local efforts reappropriating the decaying city.

As one of the first cities with a Department of the Commons, and associations such as URBACT and Santa Fede Liberata looking to activate sites left at the mercy of slow legislative and bureaucratic operations, Naples is calling for a re-organization of social structures that place communities at the centre. The working methods of (Un)doing Thresholds sets out to explore the spatial and temporal gestures of ruin, labyrinth and theatre in Naples, as described by Benjamin, in an attempt to recover the porous conditions that underpin the prosperity of the city.

‘Animate’ becomes an essential mode of description; for the thesis, Napoli and the architecture presented within.

With an enquiry tasked with defining and re-configuring Gillochs’ three terms, the project explored porous situations and conditions found in the city of Naples. Recording our bodies within the Neapolitan setting and allowing for a loose gestural representation of ruinous, labyrinthine, and theatrical fragments found in the city, revealed a dense network of relationships and operations present in Napoli’s porous setting.

In an attempt to de-construct the city’s urban fabric, one searches for fragmented conditions, those being social, spatial, material and more.

However, the intertwined nature of the city itself, proof being its thick historical layering, does not allow for any form of separation.

Each fragment adopts certain qualities and operates within its own field, while at the same time holding, extending and choreographing an infinite number of other relationships. Ruins become labyrinths and theatres become ruins; fields are overwritten and transformed into nodes of memory that hinge on to other more “contemporary” operations.

Rather than seeking definitive solutions or answers in our investigation of the city – as D’Acierno reminds us,“Naples cannot be programmed” 161 - a methodological ‘commoning’ is developed that explores an (un)packing of the city’s territories creating fields as openings for the re-interpretation of thresholds which are found at the forefront in the relationship between people and place.

Layers of colour come to represent temporal and spatial conditions of ruin, labyrinth and theatre. The brown paper becomes a surface were their relationships are worked and reworked, overwriting their suggestive qualities in a constant act of (un)doing borders and (re) making spatial relationships.

198

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199

(Un)Doing Thresholds employs an active, gestural and inquisitive working methodology, continually questioning and challenging existing conditions of Neapolitan urbanity through a productive (un)doing at different scales. Tectonic operations continue to elude temporal and spatial fixities by way of a wide range of architectural explorations between projects. These too remain open-ended, working under an ongoing hypothesis of the constant overwriting of the city.

Through the working methodology of the thesis, four projects operate within one collective strategy; sharing and connecting material, spatial and tectonic languages, whilst allowing room for individual moments of exploration and interpretation of these techniques.

Through this way of working – a common making and a making in common–domestic and urban gestures in each project operate within a larger field, setting out a practice in which moments of memory, dislocation and performance, hold a large impact, connecting and operating collectively at a scale which responds to both local and city-wide Neapolitan conditions.

This is a notion that is established as a result of the ‘pace’ of Naples as a city and its ability to overwrite itself through its collective porosity. Whilst the thesis presents interventions across the city that led to a series of complex design proposals for the Santissima Trinita della Monache, it also identified a sequence of ‘porous’ sites that open a wider field of threshold conditions through the city.

These sites, whilst occupying latent ground in the thesis, hold the potentiality to be ‘(un)done’ by future porous interventions as door / ways to New Neapolitan Practice(s).

The thesis, and as such, the proposals articulate porous architecture(s) founded in the immediacy of the city.

They pose methodologies through porous conditions of the ‘ruin’, ‘labyrinth’ and ‘theatre’ and a way of thinking about the development of the city that is concerned with its perpetual (un)doing.

161. D’Acierno, “Introduction. Naples as Chaosmos,”p. 15.

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image

references

Sources for all imagery used within design report.

i m ag e c r e d i t s

cover image - Drawing by Author(s) figure 1 - Chris French & Maria Mitsoula ft Villa Malaparte by Adalbaro Libera (1938) [photographs by Gabriele Basilico (1988), City Fragments: Neapolitan Porosities - Studio Brief, September 2019.

(Image modified by author) figure(s) 2 to 3 - Drawing(s) by Author(s) figure(s) 4 to 5 - Photograph by Author(s) figure(s) 6 to 12 - Drawing(s) by Author(s) figure(s) 13 & 14 - Stefano Santucci, ‘Naples on Film’, #FilmIsNotDead, November 2015, (Available: https:// www.stefanosantucci.it/naples-on-film/ [Last accessed 24th November, 2019.]) figure 15 - Original Source Unknown.

Sourced from Sergio Delli Carri,‘Due Citta’, Ancore sulla Sirena Partenope Napoli, Roma un po’ di tutto di me e della mia vita Blog, February 2015, (Available: https://digilander.libero.it/fiorelli02/ DUE%20CITTA.jpg [Last accessed 24th November, 2019.])

208

figure 16 - Anton Dee,‘Naples,’ in Naples, Italy, July 29, 2017, (Available: https:// antondee.com/naples-italy [Last accessed 13th May, 2020.]) figure 17 - Orlando Imperatore, ‘Vico Scassacocchi’ in StreetLife in Colors - Flickr, 6th October 2017, (Available: https://www. flickr.com/photos/138450832@ N07/36819372964/ [Last accessed 29th November, 2019.]) figure 18 - Orlando Imperatore,‘Reina, Hyusaj, Albiol, Koulibaly, Ghoulam, Allan, Jorginho, Hamsik, Callejon, Mertens, Insigne’ in StreetLife in Colors - Flickr, 25th September 2017, (Available: https:// www.flickr.com/photos/138450832@ N07/37289749130/ [Last accessed 29th November, 2019.]) figure 19 - Orlando Imperatore,‘Lifes’ in StreetLife in Colors - Flickr, 5th October 2017, (Available: https:// www.flickr.com/photos/138450832@ N07/37254339150/in/ album-72157661702621020/ [Last accessed 29th November, 2019.])

page

209

figure 20 - Fieldwork Photograph by Author(s)

en/qs-map/[Last accessed 1st December, 2019.])

figure 34 - Fieldwork Photograph by Author(s)

figure 21 - Photograph by Author(s)

figure 29 - Foooootooooos,‘Naples, Quartieri Spagnoli, 2015’ in Italy - Flickr, 4th May 2015 (Available: https://www. flickr.com/photos/88309070@N04/ albums/72157669996974775 [Last accessed 13th May, 2020.])

figure 35 - Photograph by Author(s)

figure(s) 30 to 31 - Fieldwork Photograph(s) by Author(s)

figure(s) 44 to 45 - Drawing(s) by Author(s)

figure 32 - Leonardo Immobiliare,‘Alla scoperta dei “vasci” di Napoli, Primo Piano, 30th November 2017 (Available: https://blog.leonardoimmobiliare.info/ affitto-casa/alla-scoperta-dei-vasci-dinapoli/ [Last accessed 13th May, 2020.])

figure 46 - Photograph by Author(s)

figure 33 - Corriere del Mezzogiorno, ‘Vico Seminario dei Nobili,’ I bassi guardati da Sergio Siano (Available: https://corrieredelmezzogiorno.corriere. it/fotogallery/campania/2012/10/ bassi_napoli/fenomenologiabassi--2112215974494.shtml [Last accessed 13th May, 2020.])

figure(s) 49 to 52 - Photograph(s) by Author(s)

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figure 36 - Drawing by Author(s) figure(s) 37 to 43 - Photograph(s) by Author(s)

figure 47 - Fieldwork Photograph overlaid with Drawing by Author(s) figure 48 - Drawing by Author(s)

figure(s) 53 to 54 - Drawing(s) by Author(s) figure 55 - Fieldwork Photograph overlaid with Drawing by Author(s)

Sources for all imagery used within design report.

i m ag e c r e d i t s

figure(s) 56 to 59 - Drawing(s) by Author(s) figure 60 - Fieldwork Photograph overlaid with Drawing by Author(s) figure 61 - Photograph by Author(s) figure(s) 62 to 63 - Drawing(s) by Author(s) figure(s) 64 to 68 - Fieldwork Photograph(s) by Author(s) figure 69 - Facebook,‘OblaFest,’ Santa Fede Liberata Officiale , 8th May 2018 (Avalilable: https://www.facebook.com/ SantaFedeLiberataUfficiale/ [Last accessed 13th May 2020.]) (Image modified by author) figure 70 - Drawing by Author(s) figure 71 - Photograph by Author(s) figure(s) 72 to 83 - Drawing(s) by Author(s)

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figure 84 - Google Maps,‘Via S. Lucia a Monte, Naples’ (Available: https:// www.google.co.uk/maps/@40.84519 46,14.2447858,3a,66.4y,90.62h,98.3 4t,0r/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sTHxQ_

Reading Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of cities, Graeme Gilloch notes Benjamin’s recurrent use of the terms ruin, theatre and labyrinth. If Benjamin’s Berlin, Gilloch suggest, is the labyrinth, his Naples is “the perpetual ruin, the home of the nothing-new” where “the cultural merges into the natural landscape, becoming indistinguishable.”

They bring disparate sites into relation (programmatically, materially and spatially). Together, they look from the city toward Santissima Trinita delle Monache, the abandoned monastery on the hill above Montesanto. * Ex

Mer cato di

S. A nna

CITY FRAGMENTS: NEAPOLITAN POROSITIES

+ Vico Lungo Monteca lvario

e Trento

[ 2020 ]

Making space for figures not to guard thresholds, (this would be anathema to Benjamin’s description of the threshold), but to inhabit them; they are not policemen responsible for borders (real or perceptual). Rather they maintain the threshold, extend the spaces between things, providing both separations from and thickenings of the spaces of the city.

* Piazza Trieste

cito l Plebis

*chris french *maria mitsoula

Exploring architectures of the ruin, labyrinth and theatre, be they programmatically labyrinthine or theatrical, or materially or spatially so, the thesis considers their interpenetration: each space becomes a threshold to another space. It promotes an expression of presence in the city, gathered in collectivity, that takes possession of space as a protagonist in constructing an experience of Naples that goes beyond the control of fixed political and historical representations of the city. a de * Piazz

But this, as Gilloch subsequently notes, is to simplify Naples.

In this merging of culture and nature—what Benjamin might describe as an interpenetration, a ‘porosity’—the city becomes labyrinthine. Boundaries blur and territories bleed, definitions lose their definition, terms are redetermined. These processes, as Benjamin and Lacis observe, are performed in the city, “buildings are used as a popular stage.” The theatrical, the ruinous and the labyrinthine themselves, coexistent, porous conditions of Naples.

(Un)Doing Thresholds explores the temporalities and architectonic specificities of these conditions where (un) doing is presented through Andrew Benjamin as a productive conception of urbanity; one in which porous architectures are (un)done, drawn through one another, in a constructive overwriting founded in the immediacy of the city.

Primary Directi onal Axis