Francisco Frankenberg Garcia

The Bay of Naples has been shaped by volcanic activity, tidal movements, eruptions, earthquakes, changing sea levels, human interventions, and economic pressures. The coast is in a state of continuous transformation, hardening, sinking, deteriorating, moving. Marking Temporal and Tidal Grounds: Architectures for a Changing Coast explores how architecture serves as a temporal marker in this complex, changing environment. It seeks to dissolve the line of the coast and re-establish the charged relationship that once existed between the sea and the city.

Four projects are located around the edge of the Bay, in sites which have been (and continue to be) significantly impacted by coastal dynamics: the Port of Naples, re-shaped over time to suit commercial pressures; the rising and falling ground of the ancient town of Pozzuoli; the sinking island of Ischia; and the gateway island of Procida. These projects explore issues of overfishing, marine pollution, acidification and carbonisation, and rising sea levels, and position programmes that seek to engage with the challenges posed either by these volatile environments themselves, or by the external factors which re-shape them. The projects also serve as tools and measures for those who dwell within this coastal landscape, allowing them to read and navigate a shifting coastal terrain. Organised around a series of laboratories (for studying coral growth and assessing acidity and toxicity) and associated maritime functions (net repair, marine plastic recycling, water treatment) and pursuits (diving, sailing), each of the projects develops found architectural typologies as novel responses to climate pressures: piers provide landing stages, but fold in diving pools, algae farms and different scales of drop-off centres for plastic caught at sea; vertical cores recalling the defensive coastal towers of the Amalfi coast provide access to different site levels, establish gravity-fed water filtration systems, and act as a network of connected ‘alarms’, observing the coast; environmentally sealed vessels provide shelter for labs and residences, reinterpreting the tuff stone substrate as a combination of mass and hollow pockets.