Urban Project, a Matter of Morphology

Abstract

This research faces the theme of the actuality of the Urban Morphology discipline. Starting with the reconstruction of the history of urban studies in the schools of architecture in Italy in the last century, a personal approach to the theme is proposed as a result of an intense activity of academic cooperation of the authors (from the University of Naples Federico II) with the research group of Uwe Schröder (RWTH Aachen University in Germany). The main innovation, if referred to the Italian tradition, is that the city is now observed not only from the point of view of the ‘form’ but also considering the ‘space’: thus, the different qualities of the spaces that build every city and its wealth. The ‘results’ of this research are in the projects that the authors develop on different academic occasions; in fact, in Architecture, theory and practice are strictly connected. This is the reason why two projects are described at the end of the study in order to demonstrate that only a disciplinary knowledge of the city can produce its responsible modification, while more general ‘Conclusions’ define the innovation that the study proposes to the debate on Urban Morphology.

1. Introduction

During the 1960s, in Italy, the city became the main subject of an important theoretical elaboration that has been defined by an intense internal debate and with the contribution of more than one Italian school of architecture. For the first time, the city has been intended as an artefact built over time, as an accumulation in real space, synthetically and synchronically, of the history and, thus, as heritage and a deposit of forms available for the design of the new. Moreover, the debate was finalized to define an autonomous statute for the discipline and, in this field, a relevant role, also propulsive of future development, was assumed by typo-morphological studies.

Unfortunately, today, we can observe that, very often, cities and territories are modified without the necessary preliminary knowledge of the context, referring to an idea of Architecture as artistic creation. Moreover, Architecture seems to have lost its feature of collective and civic art, able to represent collective and social values, and it has become a market product. This condition has been well defined by Vittorio Gregotti when he talked of objects of enlarged design that today, in the global market, inhabit our cities [1].

The same thing happens in the academic context where urban analysis, the typology of buildings, and urban morphology preserve only residual spaces in the didactic path or, in the better cases, their collocation seems to say that they belong to the field of descriptive techniques or of historical studies. Recently, Franco Purini proposed an ‘appeal’ for urban studies talking, on one hand, of a tradition in crisis and, on the other hand, of a primary duty that the Italian schools of architecture should assume to revive it [2].

Against this idea, a line of research is here proposed that, in continuity with the Italian tradition but updating it, proposes the study of the city at the centre of reasoning and assumes a precise design vocation in the belief that, never as today, the project needs to be able to read the complex order systems of our stratified contexts and to modify them, establishing new ones.

2. Urban Studies: The Italian Tradition

The Italian tradition of Urban Morphology Studies is related to the idea that it is possible to describe the city, considering its tangible reality, in terms of form and investigate it according to rational and transmissible methods. In fact, the term morphology, from the Greek “μορφή” and “λόγος”, invented by Goethe (German: Morphologie) in 1785 to indicate comparative anatomy, means exactly the study of forms: with the adjective urban, morphology studies the forms of the city.

The origins of Urban Studies are in the heritage of research on the urban space characteristics of urban spaces around the monuments that characterized the cultural debate in Italy from the end of the nineteenth century to the reform of university studies that Gustavo Giovannoni inspired in the 1920s. These are the years in which the need to recognize an “environmental value” for the so-called ‘minor architecture’ began to emerge in the field of conservation, no longer in a minor role compared to architectural monuments. In the same way and in the same period, urban planning research asserted the idea that the project, at the scale of the city, is preceded and then directed by an historical and urban analysis, anticipating the creation of a link between analysis and project that had to await a more mature stage of systematization of the disciplinary principles in order to be applied at the architectural-urban scale. In the idea expressed in the text by Saverio Muratori Studi per una operante storia urbana di Venezia [3], the analysis of rules of composition detectable in the historic urban fabric is understood clearly, for the first time, as an instrument applicable as a reference to urban expansion projects. In the following decades, the reflection on urban analysis has moved along different lines and even the results have diverged. The interpretation, referred to Muratori’s positions, essentially identified the urban analysis with an historical analysis applied at the urban scale. Particularly, the studies by Gianfranco Caniggia [4,5] and his pupils defined a procedural reading of the context, starting from type and matrix concepts, of diachronic transformation and synchronic variation, assuming a kind of gradation of the typological project in relationship to a different historical authenticity of the context. The books L’architettura della città [6,7] by Aldo Rossi and La città di Padova. Saggio di analisi urbana [8], reporting on the course of Caratteri distributivi degli edifici held by Carlo Aymonino with, among others, Aldo Rossi and Gianni Fabbri at IUAV Institute of Venice, inaugurated a different line of research (Figure 1).

In these studies, a very strong link is contained between the interpretation of the urban facts and the formal tools of the project, and urban analysis is proposed as a structural and formal analysis, different from historical analysis, and applicable to the city as an artefact and a collective work. The urban analysis does not aim to define the chronology of urban facts but contains a structuralist approach and, therefore, aims to identify the characteristics—in fact structural—of forms; at the urban scale, this means to read textures, urban fabrics, building types and their combinations in order to transform these elements into tools and formal repertoires for designing within the city, understood as the statistical place of forms and then as a human thing par excellence, as Aldo Rossi, quoting Lévi-Strauss, defined it.

These two research and theoretical lines regarding the reading and the project of urban form have been carried out, from then to now, continuously within some Italian schools—principally Rome for the first, Milan and Naples, among others, for the second—developing apparent similarities and significant differences.

All the studies that, albeit with originality, can be referred to Muratori or Caniggia’s ideas look at typological form as a transitory moment in a continuous process of development of which the form in itself retains and manifests traces. These studies are placed on a line of continuity that has its antecedents, besides those already mentioned by Giovannoni [9], in the work of Giuseppe Pagano [10] that, even if heavily influenced by an ideological position against the Fascist rhetoric, comes to assert a sort of primacy of spontaneous architecture as a product of the inhabiting culture inherited from one generation to another within a continuous process. The urban studies related to this approach have focused, in this sense, on the study of edilizia di base—buildings for housing—rather than of edilizia specialistica consisting of everything that has no residential function. Therefore, the resulting typological classification investigates in detail the housing types—considered following the aggregation characteristics of the elements in horizontal and vertical structures—and their aggregations to form more complex organisms—from urban fabrics to the city.

The idea of ‘type’ of the Aldo Rossi school of thought is quite different; in this case, ‘type’, with the adjective ‘architectural’ more than ‘housing’ or ‘building’, is related to the idea of the Enlightenment that is in the definition by Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy [11,12]. The well-known definition by Quatremère is based on the difference between the concepts of ‘model’ and ‘type’, even in partial contradiction to the meaning that can be given to them due to the Greek etymology referring to the idea of imprint, matrix and model. The author of the Dictionnaire wrote «The word type presents not so much the image of a thing to be copied or perfectly imitated, but rather the idea of something that must serve as a rule for the model» and, later, «the model, designed according to the practical execution of the art, is an object that to repeat as equal as it is; the type is, on the contrary, an object according to which each one can conceive works, which do not resemble each other. Everything is precise and given in the model; everything is more or less vague in the type». Therefore, the type is an essence, a structure, a set of rules that can be recognized in works and become an instrument for the production of works. Giulio Carlo Argan returned to the definition of type in art a century later, talking about typology that «[…] considers objects of production in their aspects of series, due to a common function or to a mutual imitation, in contrast to their individual aspects» [13]. Noting a certain implicit contradiction between type and artistic invention, Argan, as a logical consequence, stated that «[…] the concept of type is usually reported, preferably, to architecture […]». Obviously, the historian Argan mainly emphasizes the value of the type as an instrument of knowledge, aiming at the classification of artistic facts and at their arrangement by categories or classes noting, however, that the typological research is defined regardless of time, place and evaluation and connoting its definition as an inductive procedure, from the exempla to the typological abstraction. However, Argan identified—specifically in architecture—the “typological moment” as the essential element in every architectural design; in the definition by Argan, which developed that by Quatremère, the type is a scheme or a form design, a premise «[…] result of cultural survey prior to the cultural work […]» [13]. Again, the definition of the type left by Carlos Martí Arís is in continuity with these elaborations, especially referred to the architectural field. The architectural type is the «[…] ordering principle, according to which a number of elements, governed by precise relationships, acquires a certain structure» [14]. What Martí Arís significantly added, from the point of view of design theory, is that the type is not only the ideal scheme that is derived inductively from the particular to the general but also allows, in a deductive process, the development of a project starting from rules that identify the type because «[…] in the idea of type, the expression of something general and permanent but also capable of inspiring every architectural event, the hopes seem to be concentrated of a re-composition of the discipline, allowing for a condensation of the historical experience without schematizing and for a codification of knowledge without denying its development. […] Therefore, logic and analogical thought are together in the notion of type» [14]. Finally, if it is true that some early writings by Aldo Rossi [15] seem in some ways closer to the definition of the relationship between building type and urban morphology expressed by Muratori and Caniggia, it is easy to say that, following the Enlightenment roots of the definition of type by Quatremère to Martí Arís and rereading, as a whole, L’architettura della città, from this book onwards, a new and original line of urban studies is inaugurated attentive to the city as a unique artifact, having its own form, and to an urban structure within which the aree-residenza «[…] are not enough to characterize the form and the evolution of the city» because there are—and they play a decisive role—«[…] urban elements of a pre-eminent nature […] as they participate in the evolution of the city over time, permanently identifying with the constituents that made the city» [6,7]: these are the primary elements.

It is not the specific subject of this study to analyse the debate that, in some cases, saw the two ‘schools’ on different, apparently not reconcilable, sides. Conversely, with the right critical distance, it is possible to recognize the differences but consider them, outside of ideological approaches, a richness. The outcomes of the theory—the urban design—are certainly the best way to explain this concept, talking both of differences and analogies, and, for this goal, a parallel between the competition projects “Barene di San Giuliano” by Saverio Muratori et al. and the “Monza San Rocco” by Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi will be developed: the two projects, chronologically near to the main books of the two authors [3,7], can be considered as an experimental verification of their theories.

It is well known that, in 1959, Saverio Muratori applied to the competition for a new huge settlement facing the lagoon in Venice with three different proposals—Estuario I, Estuario II and Estuario III—and won it with the third. However, it is incorrect that they are three equivalent alternatives: each of them corresponds to a precise phase of the urban development of Venice and, in this way and from a theoretical point of view, as a whole, they represent a “unique strong civil project”. Three urban typologies of different phases of the development of the urban fabrics of the city become urban units that, in their different relationships with the place, define the new settlement. The type with a quadrangular square is the unit of Estuario I, the type with a comb-shaped plan is the unit of Estuario II, and the type with foundations flanked by canals is the unit of Estuario III (Figure 2): the first project evokes the ancient city organized by islands-parishes, the second the Gothic city, and the third the city of Renaissance and Modern age [16].

In this way, it is possible to affirm that the history of the city proves capable of realizing a new idea of city in continuity of past and future. This is true especially in the case of Estuario I (Figure 3) where the morphological unit recalls also the spatial organization of the Venetian campiello but brought, via abstraction, to the pure square shape. Moreover, the units are not welded in a dense and compact city but become islands jointed by strips of land or bridges in a flooded area representing a modern idea of city-nature.

A different idea of city, if compared to the compact city of history, is also the goal of the Monza San Rocco competition project by Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi of 1966 (Figure 4). In a typical peripheral condition and in the absence of urban references, the project uses the grid as one of the possibilities offered by the long history of the city to find an order where the urbanization seems not to have a design and the infrastructures—railway, motorway and other roads—cross the city without the capability of connecting. Two different units are based on the two sides of the main road, not exactly symmetric and alluding to the possibility of a design to be completed. The drawings presented for the competition are few and the project did not win—anonymous palazzine were then realized—but a clear typological intentionality is expressed: Rossi and Grassi invert the structure of the ‘ancient’ grids and place the buildings ‘above the streets’—that disappear—in this way enlarging the courtyards that are inhabited by nature where the water of the near Lambro river re-appears on the surface. The two units end with two larger square figures, primary elements in the general composition, in turn surrounded by nature. The road is twice denied because one of the two larger squares straddles it while the other is backlogged and rotated in order to avoid the ‘curtain’ effect. Opposite to the scattered city sprawl, the architects define a ‘morphologically complete part’ referring to which, some years later, Rossi stated «The design was already finished when I realised that there was a disturbing element to the order, involving a sense of something that had been lost, which made a truly rational design impossible. I looked than at the central axis: I broke it […]» [17].

It is beyond doubt that approaches and results are different but it is equally clear how much Muratori and Rossi—their ideas of city and their way of doing architecture—are far from the current condition of our discipline that Vittorio Gregotti denounced in a lesson in 2006—titled La crisi della specificità disciplinare—observing that «[…] the connection between artistic practice and political thought as doctrine of social dialogue seems to have dissolved in uncertainty. The goal of collective liberation could not take into account the personal one, with serious damage to the latter, now personal liberation has almost always become a competition (if not a battle) against the collective one» [18]. The current state of our discipline, in the same way, makes clear that we need to go back to thinking of morphology and the city as a collective artefact, a place of recognition of civil values, in order to avoid the dissolution of the theoretical and material heritage that cities represent.

3. Urban Morphology Today: Form and Space of the City

Using different but comparable approaches, in many Italian schools of Architecture, research teams continue to work on the tradition of Urban Studies, in some cases with relevant—and significant from the point of view of results—connections with foreign schools. In Naples, the research group coordinated by the authors is developing its theoretical and applicative research activity in cooperation with the Department of Spatial Design of the RWTH Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule of Aachen in Germany directed by professor Uwe Schröder.

The main innovation introduced is the idea that city is not only a “form” but is also made of spaces with different qualities.

Schröder’s reflection focuses on a concept of space as a foundational value of architecture and maker of the form that defines it. The figure of the city—built through history—is fixed on its background—the geographical form—in the Schwarzplan (Figure 5), also showing the historical evolution of the settlement in its most representative moments that express urban ideas attributable to a specific culture of inhabiting.

But the knowledge of the city cannot end in this reconstruction of the ‘figure on its background’ because the city is certainly a formal construction, a product of a collective reason, but it is also made up of spaces in which bodies move and live. For this reason, Schröder proposed a new analytical tool to accompany those derived from a more consolidated, over time, tradition. The Rotblauplan (Figure 6) is the map that identifies and classifies the spaces of the city, distinguishing them between ‘warm’ and ‘cold’: warm spaces are represented in red, cold spaces are represented in blue. The warm spaces have characteristics of interior space and are not only those of the architectural interior but also the spaces between the buildings or inside them when they can be interpreted as collective places. The cold spaces have characteristics of exterior space and are those of nature or wide-openness inside the city without architectural boundaries. This very powerful analytical tool is able to cross different scales of representation, but it does so in a more interesting way than the Schwarzplan; for example, it can be used in the passage from the 1:25,000 to the 1:5000 scale. If, with the scales of the figure-background plan, there is a sort of improvement of the magnifying glass, the red-blue plan is able to define a sort of augmented reality in its capability of adding information and focusing on the typological structure of the urban fabric.

In fact, at the detail scale, two different degrees of red appear: a dark red and a light red. The dark red is used to identify spaces that we can define as ‘interior-interior’: they are the spaces inside the buildings surrounded by walls and covered by a roof. The light red is used to identify spaces that we can define as ‘exterior-interior’—alternatively urban exterior spaces—that are architectonically delimited and with a section-ratio where the height of the borders are at least twice the width: even without a roof—or having the sky as a roof—this kind of space can be perceived as having a special interior feature. Not only are streets and squares often, in the cities that can be defined as ‘compact’, light red spaces, but, in the Rotblauplan, also porticos, entrances, and loggias appear as well as courtyards that make many of our compact cities ‘porous’ due to the building typology and its link with the general urban morphology (Figure 7).

Talking about typology—in its indissoluble relationship with urban morphology—certainly refers to the tradition of Italian urban studies, of a procedural matrix, of the theories elaborated by Caniggia and, first, by Muratori. However, the better reference of the work on spatiality at the typological scale is rather the ‘Enlightenment’ and precisely the Pianta di Roma of 1748 by Giovan Battista Nolli and the Mappa topografica della città di Napoli e de’ suoi contorni by Giovanni Carafa, duke of Noja of 1775 (Figure 8). In these extraordinary representations of the form of the city, the pochè technique identifies closed spaces while the hatching technique identifies the architectural elements with a certain degree of openness and a mediating role between the inside and the outside, such as arcades, porticos or entrance halls, that underline the typological order of the relevant buildings in the overall structure of the city. Starting with a deep study of Aachen [19,20], Schröder elaborated a theory of the phenomenological reading of urban space that found significant systematization, both theoretical [21] and operative [22].

Figure 7. Rotblauplan at different scales. Source: F. Visconti, [23].

Figure 7. Rotblauplan at different scales. Source: F. Visconti, [23].

Studying and knowing the city, therefore, in view of its adequate modification, does not mean merely observing it to find data—more or less big—flows, exchanges as in some efficiency hypotheses à-la Space syntax unable to say anything about the nature of forms and spaces of the city of man. Studying and knowing the city, but also every space, means recognizing that buildings and spaces are never isolated artefacts; instead, they act in a context where there are already other architectures, other forms, and they must, therefore, take charge of participating in a system of relationships that results, from each new planning action, in interpretation and perhaps renewal. In this sense, analysis and design are never two separate but rather concurrent moments in the construction of the spaces of the city.

This approach testifies to a substantial and essential relationship between the analytical moment and the ideational moment. It identifies the requests for modification, reads the quality of the spaces ‘potentially’ and re-establishes, via design action, their more adequate and responsive vocation. Where virtually cold spaces have been randomly ‘occupied’ by buildings, these can be freed and become warm spaces in relation to natural systems. Where warm spaces appear rather as waste or extraneous to the nature of the places, they can be the places in which, via architecture, the continuity of the urban is re-established. Moreover, the book with which Uwe Schröder inaugurated this research has been titled Pardié [19]: a collision between the city of Parma and Saint-Dié and its reconstruction project by Le Corbusier (Figure 9). In the book, there are the figure-background plans of the two cities as in Collage city by Colin Rowe: the first a representative of the compact city of history, and the second a proposal of an open Modern city. The two cities are represented also using the technique of the Rotblauplan, in this way reiterating and clarifying the idea of city that they express. But a collage—between Parma and Saint-Dié, thus Pardiè—is the most important drawing because it expresses an idea for the city of our time and of the future that needs different spatialities and, in the new dimension of the city and considering its complexity, cannot be more brought back to a unique and peremptory forma Urbis.

4. Results: Two Urban Projects

It is now clear that urban analysis—the study of the city using the specific tools of Architecture as a discipline—is not interesting if its goal is not the modification of reality.

The term analysis derives from the Greek ἀνάλυσις, from the verb ἀναλύω, which means to decompose, resolve into its elements. Therefore, following its etymology, analysis is the breakdown of a whole into its constituent parts, as the vocabulary reminds us, for the purposes of study, knowledge and comprehension. Of some interest is the clarification that the term assumes in the philosophical field where the term analysis alludes to the description—but also to the interpretation—of a complex concept via the examination of the simple elements that compose it. This is why the study of the city—perhaps never more than today a ‘complex element’—can usefully take place via the ‘decomposed’ study of its constituent elements, without, however, forgetting or cancelling the systems of relationships that exist in urban systems between the different elements and between the different scales of the city itself. This is the way that allows us to identify the structural characteristics of the city. In this sense, the city is not only our field of action but also an ideal field from which to extract, in the etymological sense of ex-trahĕre, the materials for the project of the new. The city is, at the same time, a manual of design solutions to which to refer and a treatise in which to study ‘how to do it’. Beyond this logical-analogical transposition from the reality of history to the invention of the project, it is every single city that often asks us for modification in its unresolved parts or which have become so over time. Thus, the project is called to define this modification but, again, only the knowledge of the city—in a theoretical sense—and the capability of reading the specific city—and place—where the design has to be developed can ensure a modification able to interpret the existing values and to add new value.

For this reason, two projects are presented as part of the Results of this study. The declaration of a point of view and the description of projects are, respectively, premise and demonstration of a reasoning that aims to define, specifically referring to methods and techniques within a theory of architectural design, an “orientated point of view” that can be defined as Urban Project or, better, Architecture of the city. The projects are both elaborated on occasion of the Frühjahrsakademie della Technische Universität Dortmund, on invitation of the coordinators prof. Olaf Schmidt and Michael Schwarz, in the edition of 2022 and 2023. In the latter, the theme was the urban regeneration of the river harbour of the city, in the past related to the industrial activities of the Ruhr region. Thus, the experimentation is on the construction of an urban part, formally defined, able to recall the complexity, morphological and functional, of the city of history but with a renewed relationship with nature. In the previous edition, due to the anniversary—tenth edition—of the summer school, every involved team interpreted the theme City gates in its city. The urban project for Naples defines a new primary element at the entrance to the east of the city. The scales of the projects are different but, in both cases, they aspire to clearly propose an idea of city.

4.1. Urban Fabric vs. Urban Part

Living the city nature. A new settlement for city harbour is the title of the project, a collaboration of Ermelinda Di Chiara, Maria Virginia Theilig and Marilù Vaccaro.

The urban analysis describes a place where different urban fabrics are present but where they are not completely welded. Even if the presence of the infrastructural system is evident—motorways, railway, etc.—around the harbour, relevant voids are also present and, in addition, the huge industrial artefacts can represent another opportunity due to the fact that some of them are abandoned following a process of reconversion that interests the entire Ruhr area (Figure 10).

The methodological approach is that of working through references able to measure the intervention area and declare the morpho-typological intention. While many German teams, following their current idea of city construction/re-construction via densification, occupied all the area with urban closed blocks, our project tried to define an autonomous ‘part of city’ that was also able to establish relationships with the surroundings. The Analogical Table describes this goal (Figure 11). On the west part of the central canal, urban blocks ‘complete’ the standing urban fabric, replacing the dimension of the existing blocks. However, the block is never closed but opens toward the harbour (residential blocks on the river in Borgo Ticino by Giorgio Grassi) or assumes the morphology a redan (Scalo Farini project by Carlo Moccia). On the other side of the canal, a primary element (school complex in Piedicastello by Antonio Monestiroli) is necessary: not only a building but a public space able to also host some industrially compatible activities. Another primary element—a kind of ensemble (Westmount square in Montreal by Mies van der Rohe)—closes the perspective of the canal.

The development of the project precises some choices. In the west, the residential urban fabric is completed, amplifying the dimension of the existing blocks, while the canal becomes one of the axes of a kind of cross that is the foundational act of the new urban part. Along the main axis to the west, an alternance of hall-buildings and towers define the riverfront and, at their back, a park is the filter for the dense existing city but also, observed at the wider scale, part of an ecological corridor able to join the forest to the north to the city of Dortmund. The smaller arm of the cross is of water to the east and a public space to the west defined by porticos on which office and productive buildings face. Two towers on a plinth define the head of the main canal in the larger park (Figure 12).

This project defines an urban part (Figure 13, Figure 14 and Figure 15) that interprets a renewed relationship with openness, necessary to the contemporary city, and that is not theoretically infinitely replicable as the urban blocks, enlarging the city like wildfire. However, with its character of finiteness, the ‘elementary part’ could be repeated not in continuity but with interposed natural gaps: this is the idea of city that this project expresses.

4.2. A New Primary Element

City Entrances. Naples East Gate is the title of the project, elaborated with the cooperation of Ermelinda Di Chiara and Nicola Campanile.

The urban analysis reveals that, in the east periphery of Naples, the urban fabric is less clear than in the historical city, with a significant enlargement of the grid meshes related to the industrial nature of this area (Figure 16). The project area is strictly related to the presence of the harbour and, in this place, an important building by Ferdinando Fuga was built in 1779. It was a building 560 m long for grain storage, demolished for its bad conditions after the Second World War (Figure 17 and Figure 18). The interest in this disappeared building is related to its urban meaning. In fact, Carlo III the Bourbon asked of Fuga two buildings—the Granili and the Albergo dei Poveri—that, as in the definition of primary elements by Aldo Rossi, assumed their value not for function—the first was a warehouse, the second a hostel/prison for the poor—but for their form and, above all, their ‘position’. In this case, in the enlarged dimension of the Bourbon reign, Granili and Albergo dei Poveri, with their huge monumentality, announce to foreigners, arriving from the east and north-east, that they have arrived in the capital city. This is the reason why the Granili has been the inspiration for the project of the east-gate of the city.

A long building is based exactly on the site of the Granili (Figure 18), of which the maximum height and average thickness are assumed, becoming an abstract volume that rises from the ground for 15 m to allow complete traversability to the dynamic and fast gaze of those arriving in Naples from the east (Figure 19 and Figure 20). To make this remarkable technical undertaking possible, the entire building is conceived as an enormous reticular beam which finds punctual supports in the theory of the powerful central pillars which mark and characterize, like large columns, the relationship with the ground, also allowing it to absorb, in the entire longitudinal development, an existing Port Authority building. The building hosts a museum of the sea and, as it rises towards the sky, becomes more and more diaphanous, offering large pergola-like and transparent spaces on the roof.

The peremptoriness of the linear element is counterpointed, in the overlooking lot, by a plinth (a podium) which, in assuming the maximum longitudinal extension of the block, composes, as in a still life, three different bodies placed in sequence: a high blade intended as a hotel, a civic hall in correspondence with the site of the ancient church, and a further block for offices which absorbs the irregularity of the plot and closes the sequence. The analogy with the trace of the Granili and the Church of San Raimondo Nonnato is evident even if not in language. The project could be defined as a kind of translatio, the betraying and transfiguring translation of the previous structure to succeed in the 21st century, in a new and at the same time ancient way to create a necessary gate which, as in the Enlightenment, announces the city and puts it in relation to its wider territory and its coastal landscape (Figure 21).

With only one—and a few more—building, the entire urban history of the city is evoked and some lost values restored: coming from the east, framed by the new buildings, in a confused urbanization typical of the contemporary age, the city of Naples is recognizable in the profile of the Sant’Elmo Hill with the castle and the charterhouse while, leaving the city, the Vesuvio profile gives the direction.

5. Conclusions

From a very general point of view, the conclusion of our research activity is that, today, the condition in which architectural and urban design operates is very different from a recent past. It could be said that, today, architecture is always an operation of Building in the built. However, building in the built is an expression that has become today a kind of slogan that, in a really generic way, is referred to a condition of our totally anthropized territories and cities to which recovering the existing heritage—extensively understood—is asked for, limiting the consumption of soil: in this way, the expression tends to include any act of architectural work. On the contrary, the expression is much more full of meaning and appears, probably for the first time, in a collection of short essays by the Neapolitan historian of architecture Renato De Fusco [24], making it a possible category for intervention in the historical centres, referring explicitly to the definition of architecture as modification by Vittorio Gregotti [25]. Today, it is acquired that not only the historical centres are part of our built heritage but it is possible to recognize values to be preserved also in some peripheral conditions or in the landscapes. Thus, working on heritage—in this extended meaning—is an operation that requires going back to reasoning about the relationship between knowledge and design, as two moments of the architectural action that cannot be intended as different from each other. Architectural design is the instrument, in our discipline, of knowledge of the world, the tool via which a critical judgment on reality can be expressed, in view of its modification. In other words, the danger evoked by Ortega y Gasset at the 1951 Darmstadt conference—with words that seem to describe the current condition—has to be avoided: «a city built by brilliant architects who, however, foresee each one on their own with a different personal style [where] the buildings can also be magnificent individually, but the whole will be bizarre and intolerable [because in their] lines we would seem to see the impertinent profile of a gentleman who “felt like” doing it like this» [26]. This danger can be avoided only if the architectural design is based on a deep knowledge of the city that does not mean that the idea of the city of history is the only that can be proposed. In a city that has sometimes become suffocating and has partially lost its form, producing inadequate living conditions for its inhabitants, it would be necessary, via the project of the new, to reflect on the possibility of introducing ways and forms capable of reinterpreting the reassuring continuity of the historical city, on one hand, but also to work, on the other hand, on unprecedented possible relationships ‘between the things’ capable of associating places of an interior spatiality that we well know, and places characterized by an exterior spatiality, capable of dialoguing with the open dimension of nature.