La scuola napoletana di studi urbani. La legacy “aperta” di Salvatore Bisogni e Agostino Renna | The Neapolitan School of Urban Studies. The ‘open’ legacy of Salvatore Bisogni and Agostino Renna

The essay describes the contribution of the Neapolitan school of architecture to the season of urban studies in the context of the movement known as “Tendenza”. A movement that will have its epicentres in the schools of Milan (Rogers) and Venice (Samonà) and in part in Rome (Quaroni) summed up by the “Aldo Rossi case” and that will also have in the Neapolitan school a significant and remarkably hegemonic representation in a Gramscian sense in continuity with the figure of Marcello Canino and Stefania Filo but always in relation to the ‘modern’ and critical lesson of Luigi Cosenza. In particular, the paradigmatic figures of Salvatore Bisogni and Agostino Renna will be examined, who, since their 1963 degree thesis on urban design, have made a fundamental contribution of national and international importance to the debate on the architecture of the city, which would later be synthesised by Aldo Rossi and Carlo Aymonino. The legacy of these two masters on the inescapable interpretation of the form of the natural substratum as structuring the modes of settlement and its development remains seminal and fertile today, still ‘open’ especially in the possibility of defining on a morphological basis the limits and figures of metropolitan cities that to date have only been built on an administrative and not formal basis. Downstream of the thesis, some of their projects – think of Bisogni’s research on Montecalvario and on the northern outskirts of Naples, or the reconstruction plan for Teora or the new settlement of Monteruscello by Renna – represent a living and active lesson for the modus hodiernus of construction/modification of the forma urbis.