From disused production buildings to working machines in the historic city

In the historical city some great machine-buildings, represent the permanence of a set of industrial and commercial functions and urban services, that in a very long period of time have characterized articulated urban events: in some cases, such as Naples, it is a system that went into crisis, leaving parts of the city unfinished, abandoned and underused, often affected by never realized urban projects. Also these machine-buildings continue to represent, at least in a transient situation, the fundamental elements for the identification of the city because in the past had led its developments and today mark in part, the urban morphological structure, as possessing a position value linked to the history and the topography of the places and at the same time a figurative value, related to their shape, to their articulation and to the materials with which they were built. But they do not necessarily represent an element of stability, indeed their peculiarity is in the developmental ability of their configuration, the result of a complex architectural history, which can be continued, rethought and redefined, grafting a strong dialectic between the existing and the new elements. In this process they can be "upgraded" from a technological, functional and environmental sustainability standpoint. The research aims to work on these machine-buildings through different levels and scales of “reading design” and to re-interpret them as urban connections, introducing a new interpretation and intervention for the redefinition of the spaces in the historical city, which does not pretend to make a forced global urban unity, but at least to discover relationships and unexpressed potentialities, extremely significant in terms of conservation and tourism promotion. In this work, the first study is on the object itself, the great lonely and abandoned mass, still recognizable in the complexity of the contemporary city. Next step is to work on the threshold inside-outside and to think about the open spaces and the landscape around the building. Keeping together various scales, you can insert a new system of relationships between different kinds of spaces, through the redefinition of the relationship with the ground, with the site, with the urban context and at the same time by checking the possibility of introducing new functions and new technologies. But these big objects, often localized in urban points left undone, allow to open a more complex system of relationships between different urban parts, in which they take on a new role and a new attractiveness.