Between research and teaching: projects for Rione Luzzatti in Naples

The talk describes the contents of an activity conducted in the Faculty of Architecture of Naples, between research and teaching. As part of a research of the Department of Urban Design and Planning on the restoration of the residential quarters of the XX century, particularly in the Naples metropolitan area but looking at the most advanced experiences in Europe, the programme involves researchers belonging to different scientific areas: Urban Planning and Law, Technology, Architectural Design, History and so on. The contribution of researchers and teachers in Architectural and Urban Composition focuses on the idea that the present and legitimate issues related to restoration, functional adjustment, energy saving should be included in a general reasoning on the sustainability of architectural and urban shape, recalling the opening words of L’architettura della Città by Aldo Rossi: in describing the city, we are mainly interested in its shape. Thus our contribution aims at understanding - on some carefully selected case-studies - the admissible operations on the individual residential building for its adaptation to the demands of the contemporary life or also for the restorations of its original design when compromised. But even more our contribution aims at understanding how to design interventions of replacement and/or addition, at the urban scale. Following this idea the program of the Laboratory of Architectural and Urban Composition II was built selecting as project theme Rione Luzzatti in Naples. Rione Luzzatti is a residential district built by IACP (Institute for Council Houses) in 1914-29; in this district a block was re-built by Luigi Cosenza in 1946-47 after the air raids of the Last World War. Rione Luzzatti, built on the edge of the eastern suburbs of Naples but today ‘forced’ between the Central Station’s area and the Business District, shows a straight urban structure based on the repetition of a squared block and a central block intended for a school facilities to serve the neighborhood. Between the neighborhood and the expansion of the Business District to the north, a thin and long area, without buildings and free from urbanistic rules, is the place that suggests a project of addition. Moreover this project allows to hypothesize the demolition of the buildings built inside the courtyards as asphyctic densification of the original project. Some planimetric hypotheses were developed, working in concert with teachers of the Laboratory of Construction, looking at three criteria: the urban analysis, the typological issues and the energy sustainability considered in terms of orientation and shape of the buildings more than in terms of application of new technologies. The result is more than one project hypothesis founded on the ancient wisdom of the Architecture of the City to joint: urban issues related to the general structure of the city in the area, morpho-typological issues related to the ways of living and issues related to energy saving. The different solutions decline different methodological options: continuity of the urban plan rule, admissible variation of the rule and construction of a morphological boundary as measure of the whole neighborhood.