Comparing Qualities of Social and Upper-Class Housing in Stefania Filo Speziale’s Work

The outstanding orographic complexity that characterizes the urban reality of Naples has always represented an unrepeatable opportunity to confront, through architectural design, the dimension of living, among whose most interesting outcomes, Stefania Filo Speziale's work is exemplar a perfect example. She considers «the home a topic of vital and general interest», to be constantly questioned in order to «glimpse the duty of all architects to contribute (...) -in every sense- to the human habitat» . Filo Speziale's production of social and bourgeois housing reveals a constant research both in typology and in the use of modern technologies and materials. In the text published in 1953, she describes «the house as a single organism» , and the composition as «intimately linked to the environment» . This is particularly significant in Neapolitan Palazzo Della Morte (1957): the system of walkways, the vegetal courtyard, the living units oriented according to the panorama and the bioclimatic conditions, define a design style that is up-to-date on an international level . From 1954 onwards, with the arrival of Carlo Chiurazzi and Giorgio di Simone, avowedly Wrightian, the architect's building activity will see an improvement a transformation process. This is the case of the residential buildings in Via Nevio, where «the ground connection will be dematerialised» ; the house in Naples, via Petrarca no.141, «with an almost serpentine shape» and no. 40 where «four buildings are arranged on different heights» . Lastly, the buildings in via Petrarca no. 64, where the diversified floor plans of the flats and the varied width of the balconies on each floor, define an organic design of the elevations . Thus, Filo Speziale's rationalism favoured «the diffusion of a revised existenzminimum within a quality threshold of social architecture» . Filo Speziale's interest in social architecture is the product of an authentic research into modern living that distances itself from the abstractness of rationalism and the model of the siedlung, as in the Bagnoli social housing. Specifically, there is a mutual interaction between architecture and "context values", in which «the size of the dwellings influences (...) the setting of the entire neighbourhood» . The complex of Agnano (Naples), built in 1953, prefigures, on the other hand, an attempt to create a self-sufficient neighbourhood : alongside the lower slats, the passing buildings and the vibrant façade , evoke analogies with the design of the “palazzine posillipine”. The case of the Agnano settlement perfectly demonstrates that, even before associating itself with its young students, Filo Speziale does not conform to an orthodox rationalist matrix, but follows its own autonomous formal line, already tinged with organic accents, as it is clear in her contemporary upper-class residential projects. All in all, that of Stefania Filo Speziale represents a figure of a sensitive designer, whose attention, in both bourgeois and social building production, has never aspired to «become paradigmatic» demonstrating, rather, a singular ability to adapt to different design typologies without ever showing hints of what Reyner Banham called "infantile regression”