Supermodern Naples by | Double zero
Naples is a layered city, dense and difficult to decipher. Giulio De Luca once defined it, referring to its urban development, impenetrable.
An orientation, at least as far as architecture is concerned, is given by a beautiful exhibition now concerns the S AM (Swiss Museum of Architecture) in Basel, which comes two years after the release of the great publishing success of the same name Naples Supermodernin Italy published by Quodlibet and in the English version by Zurich’s Park Books.
The exhibition and the book are the result of the research work of the Parisian studio LAN, Umberto Napolitano and Benoit Jallon, who make use of the accurate photographic work of Cyrille Weiner.
In the beautiful setting of the S AM the first room, removed from the sequence of the following ones, takes on the role of a real introduction. It is here that the curators offer a glimpse of that chronotopic atlas that Gianluigi Freda in the book had suggested as a possible ideal form for a Neapolitan exploration; and that’s always where they show off Hands on the city by Francesco Rosi, a pivotal film on the events of post-war Neapolitan urban planning, cited several times in the essays that enrich the book.
The film is from 1963, the year that, with the construction of Raffaello Salvatori’s building in via Ponte di Tappia, closes the thirty years (1930-1960) which is the background of the 18 buildings that make up the story of Naples Supermodern and marks the end of an ambitious series of interventions on the consolidated city, opening the season of the leap of scale towards the great metropolitan conurbation.
In the images that run under the opening titles – a cubital and capital letter HANDS ON THE CITY – the new high-rises of the post-war reconstruction parade. They are long on urban congestion taken from the helicopter of the minister who has just endorsed the speculative hypothesis presented in the two speeches that introduces the film: that of Edoardo Nottola – the unscrupulous entrepreneur who needs politics to expand the city over the areas farms owned by him – and that of the Mayor, who validates and formalizes Nottola’s plan, in a wicked alliance that will soon nail the city to a reckless urban expansion.
The same shots in flight over the Naples in close the film and transformation, together with the final overlay “the characters and facts narrated here are imaginary, but the social and environmental reality that produce them is authentic, “ they seem to drag the fate of the city into an asphyxiated whirlpool, the reference of which is the Neapolitan political season that has just ended. Isn’t Achille Lauro the entrepreneur who managed to weave a solid and ramified network of consensus in war-torn Naples, crossing the business desires of entrepreneurs, of houses of the new white-collar bourgeoisie, of work for the indigent population, and the most maneuverable and profitable investment sector?
It is always from above that Rosi decides to frame Naples when Nottola looks at it from the windows of his office on top of the skyscraper of Stefania Filo Speziale’s Cattolica Assicurazioni Society, reluctantly pinning the career of the talented Neapolitan architect to the post. The skyscraper, which was to represent the big turning point in the profession of Filo Speziale, actually ends up burying its future, due to the uproar that arose accidentally due to the film.
And it is starting from her that we try to travel the modern Neapolitan, as we have to describe Naples Supermodern.
Stefania Filo Speziale was the first architect of the city, graduated in 1931 from the newly created Superior School of Architecture. Very strong personality, cultured and profound connoisseur of the modern beyond the Alps, he designed the most symbolic buildings of the post-war period: his are the Metropolitan cinema theater, an underground building housed in a large quarry under the Cellammare palace in via Chiaia, which with its 3000 seats, when it inaugurated in 1948, it was the largest cinema in Italy, and the aforementioned skyscraper of the Catholic Society (1956-58), the tallest building in Naples for fifty years.
In the 18 works analyzed in Naples Supermodern, of the Filo Speziale are analyzed the skyscraper and the Palazzo Della Morte (1954-1960), which takes its name from the family that commissioned it, and still partially lives in the beautiful residence. Other 16 buildings follow, all emblematic, from Luigi Cosenza’s Fish Market, considered by many to be the first modern Neapolitan architecture, to Cesare Bazzani’s Maritime Station, built within the fascist rethinking of the port area, from the famous Palazzo delle Poste by Giuseppe Vaccaro, the culmination of the conversion of the Carità district from a residential district to a business center, to the works of Marcello Canino, from some of the most representative buildings of the Mostra d’Oltremare, such as the Golden Cube or the Albanian Pavilion to some minor architectures of extraordinary beauty, such as the Fuorigrotta Station of the Cumana Railway and Villa Oro by Luigi Cosenza and Bernard Rudofsky. It is impossible to find a red thread between these works, because the context is very different from time to time, and the architectures adhere to it.
It is the very thesis of Naples Supermodernbut declined in Andreaglio’s essay on a conciliatory modernity: the modern n. cavity of the soil, giving rise to a spurious language, mediated from time to time by the sensitivity of the authors.
Is it this absence of ideals and architectural models that marginalized the Neapolitan architecture of those years as it is hypothesized in the book? It’s hard to believe. It is interesting to note how certain tensions between modern language and the link with the context were also expressed elsewhere in Italy in the post-war period, tensions which instead of marginalizing gave rise to heated controversies about the results of modern Italian.
Think of the debate that is taking place on the casabella directed by Rogers and which polarized the exponents of Italian architecture in the 1950s. Dilemma? How to translate the principles introduced by the Modern Movement in Italy after the war. The reference is the very Milanese Velasca tower of the BBPR (Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti, Rogers), taken as a symbol of Rogersian continuity.
interesting to deepen the correspondences between the ruthless welcome reserved for the skyscraper of the Cattolica Assicurazioni Society of Stefania Filo Speziale, which cost her her career and the controversy over the Velasca tower, which even crossed the national borders at the CIAM of Otterlo in 1959, when Jaap Bakema and Peter Smithson accused the architecture of the Milanese tower of opposing modernity, also understood as a moral model. Yet Rogers came out unscathed.
Question of popular imagery? Torre Velasca arrives at the cinema with The widower by Dino Risi, as a completely modern alter-ego of the villa in the countryside. But the film, with the prodigious Franca Valeri and Alberto Sordi, is a comedy and the tower is not frightening. Beyond architectural merits and demerits, the Filo Speziale skyscraper is unjustly made to coincide with the building speculation that Rosi denounces.
But how can we not notice that the skyscraper stands out in the Neapolitan landscape as an element of discontinuity, while the tower of the BBPR, in the same intentions of its authors, pursues an ideal of continuity. Continuity is an insistent concept in Umberto Napolitano’s essay.
“Making a city” requires entering into a continuum of Venetian forms that follow the specificity of a place. Or later, The works built in Naples between 193 and 160 and analyzed in this book0 writes the desire to be in continuity with a place. It’s hard not to think of Rogers when he later writes, To the question: “What is the city of tomorrow?”, We want to answer that it is above all the city of yesterday.
There remains a certain degree of ambiguity in these lines, an ambiguity on which the beautiful title of the book also plays, only falsely muscular. That super that accompanies modern Neapolitan in the title, does not want to reinforce, but to express an idea of excellence (qualitative), of extraordinary (contextual) and overall plurality. A modern that surpasses his own canons in the urban tension of which Gianluigi Freda tells us in the essay Why Modern. Neapolitan modernity he was able to decipher this tension, and, drawing on a formal repertoire that assimilated the lesson of the modern, he reinterpreted it in the light of the complexity of the territory.
Naples stands out in yellow with a Hellenic character (courses and resorts) on the splendid blue cover of the book. Naples Supermodernalso in the Swiss exhibition, it has the merit of putting this extraordinary city back at the center of the scene.