La diversità come valore della architettura della città

This text defines the Business Centre of Naples as a place that undoubtely requires new transformation, a ‘periphery’, not in a topological meaning but certainly of sense, a place ‘on the margins’. The “Plan for the reconstruction of Porto, Mercato and Pendino districts” of 1946 by Luigi Cosenza and the project elaborated for the “Competition for the new Courthouse of Naples” by Salvatore Bisogni, Luigi Pisciotti, Agostino Renna and Uberto Siola are presented as two lost opportunities of solving, in a different way related to the mono-functionality that characterizes the Business Centre, the request for tertiary buildings and facilities in Naples. The work of the Laboratory directed by Giovanni Multari faces some issues already posed by these ‘excellent’ projects, sharing with them especially the choice of introducing a mix of functions as necessary condition to build a liveable city. The presence of many different functions is able to guarantee also a morphological articulation of urban spaces and buildings here placed and will made this part of the city experienced by people with different needs in different times of the day: those that move here for working, those that live here, those that will find a reason to spend here their leisure time. The project of the open public space is central in this kind of project and aims to ‘give measure’ – proportions – to the huge open spaces of the Business Centre. It is really interesting that, to do this, the project evokes, in an analogical reference, the places of the historical city of Naples: the decumanus and the cardines, a square that looks like a forum. Those are the reasons why the text is titled Diversity as a value for the architecture of the city a diversity – functional, morphological, related to different ways of living these places – that the projects of the Lab directed by Giovanni Multari aimed, as a whole, to realize in the Business Centre of Naples.