Over-Modern Inhabiting, different scales of densifications in the Casanova building, Naples

In Naples, in March 1943, an air raid hit the Incurabili complex, causing the building overlooking Pi-azza Cavour to collapse. In order to meet the need to find a location and take care of the fragile pop-ulation groups, which the war and its effects had helped to increase, it was decided to build a new isolated block of nine storeys above ground level: the Casanova building, designed by the Neapoli-tan engineer Camillo Guerra (1889-1960). The building has a structure of reinforced concrete beams and pillars that regulates the scansion of the openings in the façade and the planimetric develop-ment, set on the triple body; the interior is connected to the exterior by means of two access devices with an urban character; a system of vertical connections connects all floors up to the roof. "Architecture lasts over time, almost accompanies it, and when it materialises, it begins to ask ques-tions". questions concerning the role that the existing building can play in its contemporary urban context. The contribution aims, through the analysis of the selected case study, to define a system of design tools and references necessary to update the residential buildings of the Modern: in Europe, a new paradigm has emerged in the last decades in the design of collective residences, based on criteria that tend to privilege a kind of distributive situationism over typological purity. Usually custom-designed for the inhabitants, collective residences are often designed with extensive use of intersti-tial spaces, non regular sequences of rooms, with great attention to collective spaces and almost never resorting to repetitive aggregations. A challenge to typological convictions thus seems to emerge. The activities that take place on the ground floors and the different forms of living developed within the buildings are not generic, or laissez-faire, but are discussed in the context of participation. In the design of the spaces, the distinctions inherited from the Existenzminimum disappear in favour of freer and more articulated aggregations. The question arises as to how such a condition can be replicated in an existing building: The work conducted by the French duo Lacaton&Vassal may pro-vide an answer. Densifying the existing building, not only through the addition of volume, but also by increasing the complex of situations in which the inhabitant may find himself, admitting that the de-sign of the modern can be continued and adapted to the needs of the contemporary. "From inside out" is the motto of the French architect duo, who have set themselves the goal of revolutionising modern residential construction, which is nevertheless characterised by a certain degree of quality; a potential of the existing which the contemporary designer must be able to reinterpret to produce more significant space.