In the Cathedral of Naples an inscription announces a building campaign initiated by Valentinian III (419-455CE) to strengthen the city walls and construct towers to protect against the Vandals. Leaving the Cathedral and turning east, along Via dei Tribunali, the Castel Capuano and Porta Capuana gate mark the line of the ancient Aragonese City Walls (c.16th). The Walls were an access point to the city, a place of exchange between peoples, and a control point for animal and commodity migration, protected from incursions by swamps to the east. Their urban figure recalls the slow expansion of the city from its original Greco-Roman footprint to its pre-modern size. While most of the city’s walls and gates were torn down during the Risanamento, a few vestigial gates remain. Working Walls: Negotiating (Im)Material Gates and Grounds explores the intersection of these gates, towers, adjacent Piazzas and the city as charged sites of material negotiation.
At Porta Capuana a (re)construction of the Piazza Enrico de Nicola establishes a Craftsman’s Guild, market square, ecology of materially focused workshops, and accommodation for material fields within the setting of the Porta Capuana gate; propagating a new epoch of material negotiation and evoking past narratives. Lost wetlands and gardens which once encased the gates are reseeded, conceived as a (Im)material Ground, creating a micro-climate break in the Porta Capuana city transect, shifting the environment of the city by generating cool air, space for non-human species, and to smooth the peaks and troughs of drought and intense rainfall.
Clay and Timber architectures are calibrated for this landscape, as resilient, sustainable typologies responding to dynamic environmental changes. A series of new gatehouses populate the wetland - set in relation to Craftsman’s Guild – and offer a rearticulation of the historic walls and gates, demarcating the permeable threshold between the wetlands, the city and its landscape.
The programme values and strives to conserve the rich history of craft and craftsmanship intrinsic to the city’s culture, whilst environmental strategies and architectures of Clay and Timber negotiate the beguiling relationship between the ancient city and modernity. The creation of a circular economy where materials are transformed, and ecological relationships (human and non-human) play out across the vertical threshold, reactivates this prominent site, and presents a model for tenable urbanism in an otherwise devolving global climate.
The thesis works to reinstate a dialogue between Naples, its walls, and the Campanian Landscape, through a built inventory of material transactions. As an initial urban intervention, the new (Im)Material Ground tests the possibilities of an ecological transect for Naples, the first in a series of similar transects, that constellate around the vestigial gates, and position architecture and landscape as mediators in a city of climatic extremes.
