Emplèkton Bagnoli : fondazioni architettoniche con materiali urbani incoerenti

Emplèkton Bagnoli
Architectural foundations with incoherent urban materials

In 1998, the MoMA in New York devoted a great retrospective to Jackson Pollock.
On display, also a fragment of his last studio’s floor: 20sqm drenched in colors, counter-form of dozens of paintings. In architectural terms, the fragment is a metaphor of the relationship between an artistic action and its effects on a walkable horizontal plan, like the foundation surface of an architectural space.
The interpretation of the urban soil/tekton as a counter-form of overlapping layers of drawings, varied by size, texture, position and color, has a specific analogy with our case study: a fragment of the Bagnoli area in Naples, consisting of shreds of many buildings scattered on the ground of the neighbourhood, imposing ruins of off-scale objects - the Fiera d'Oltremare, the former Ciano College and the structural frame of the former Hotel School - surrounded by spread fragments. The layers of the remains within Bagnoli’s incoherent landscape can in fact be interpreted through design sections establishing a new relationship between the horizontality of the traces and the variable orographic verticality.
The project is therefore based on materials deposited the city’s spatial memory, whose roles are reinvented in a new foundation.
The former Hotel School area is renovated in a hub for welcome and integration of immigrants, with spaces for assistance, education and production.
The settlement principle emerges tectonically from the ground along the infrastructural axes that cordon the area, shaping an inhabited double wall that encloses a sequence of open spaces, volumes and paths.
The Welcome Center is an emplékton wall, an architectural conglomerate of concrete and fragments of Naples' urban history, made porous by openings and cavities, ensuring at the same time a mediation between interior and exterior, and the lighting of the depth of the building.
Emplèkton-Bagnoli is, in the end, a projectual method for combining ethical goals and symbolic values within a new "great social architecture" for the Neapolitan periphery.