When one thinks of great Italian architecture, Naples is not necessarily the first destination that springs to mind. Even before the 1861 defeat of Francis II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, when Naples fell from being the capital of an independent country to a mere port in a united Italy, its buildings had generally been rather derivative, often designed and built by men either born or trained elsewhere. This isn’t to say that the city’s architecture is bad or unworthy of consideration (far from it), merely that great originality of design was never Naples’s forte. With the title Napoli Super Modern, this book—edited by Paris-based architects LAN, whose principals are Frenchman Benoît Jallon and the Naples-trained Umberto Napolitano—might lead you to think that you’d missed something where the architecture of the past century is concerned. Your expectations will soon be tempered, but the book, like the city’s 20th-century buildings, is still worth a little detour.
Napoli Super Modern focuses on 18 buildings constructed between 1930 and 1960. The choice is unexplained—Napolitano’s personal preferences, one suspects, after reading his introduction. Nor are we told why the arbitrary timeline was chosen, 1960 being a cutoff date that excludes, for example, Franz di Salvo’s notorious Vele di Scampia housing project (begun in 1962, currently being demolished). Just as curious is the omission of the celebrated Casa Malaparte, on the island of Capri off the coast of Naples (Curzio Malaparte and Adalberto Libera, 1943), which, though it falls into the period covered, is barely alluded to. Too obvious and well-known to bother with, perhaps? Presumably the same was thought true of Luigi Cosenza’s luminous Olivetti factory (1954) in Pozzuoli, a suburb of Naples, also tantalizingly alluded to but not shown.
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