Vitruvius’ description of the construction of a wall folds together material, physical, and environmental concerns. Far from being external to that wall’s construction, these concerns are posed as a set of porous interdependent constituents of the wall. “Since the stones used are soft and porous,” he writes, “they are apt to suck the moisture out of the mortar [...] But when there is abundance of lime and sand, the wall, containing more moisture, will not soon lose its strength, for they will hold it together.” The wall becomes a site of synthesis, where material and environmental co-constituents are brought together.
This wall offers us another way of entering the various descriptions of porosity which seem to condense around Naples. As Andrew Benjamin offers, porosity “provides a way of making space and time work together to define the urban condition and the body’s place within it.” That is to say that porosity, used to describe the way in which an urbanity is defined and functions, is both spatial and temporal; without the temporal dimension, Benjamin argues, porosity as a concept loses its depth, simply becoming a form of seepage. Or, in Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis’ seminal Neapolitan text, porosity refers to the absence of fixed boundaries as spatial or social structuring devices. Re-reading Vitruvius’ notional wall as a site of both porosity (where edges are unclear and change in time) and seepage (where things co-exist) recognises not only physical or spatial conditions, but also agitations, things which contest or undermine claims toward solidity or fixity. In Naples, these agitations are significant: bradyseism and subsidence, former quarries filled with waste, sinkholes caused by weak and ill-advised structural remediations, landfills, illegal dumping and burning of waste, convoluted water networks, and atmospheric pollutants. Understood as co-constituents of the Neapolitan urban field, these many agitators blur the line between surface, landscape and building, wall and ground, in space and time. The ‘physical’ constituents (tufo, lime and sand) belong to broader, and often problematic, conditions and ecologies, and these materials ‘surface’ the city (ground surfaces, paving, the render that coats the walls), supporting the organisation of programmes, spaces, and events. Approaching Naples as a site of contemporary porosity means engaging with these problematic ecologies.
[Consolidating] Surface Effects explores how the city, as a complex landscape of (detrimentally) reciprocal exchanges and transactions, generates material incompatibilities and faults, in both a geological and socio-cultural sense. Through an un-doing (again, invoking Benjamin and Lācis) of Thomas Jones’ depiction of a wall in Naples (1782) alongside a reading of Vitruvius, and a re-doing of the Neapolitan wall informed by Robin Dripps’ classifications of the components of ‘ground’, the thesis introduces a series of hydro-geological urban punctures which create aporia (gaps, or impasses). Three opening architectural projects stimulate incidental urban environmental and educational activity, and social connectivity. A gallery and workshop for creating pre-cast tufo panels (echoing the making of Venetian plaster) are suspended beneath a water butt, gathering rainwater and condensation for use in the local park, Parco Ventaglieri. A new metro station gives access to Vallone San Rocco, a valley and rare green space in the city developed as an arboretum and site to produce timber building products. A vertical street, connecting the low-lying Chiaia with Vomero above, gathers a water house for aquatherapy with repair shops and growhouses. These three initial hydro-geological interventions act as satellites to a shared architectural-landscape set into the reclaimed land at La Villa Communale, on the coast at Chiaia. This developed landscape of water projects creates a new synthetic ground that acts as a hinge between city and sea. Infrastructures for water filtration, de-salination and algae production sit alongside seasonal gardens, spaces to meet in the shade, stalls for flower sellers. The timber produced in Vallone San Rocco reappears as fine louvres and heavy structure; the tufo as pre-formed panels of compressed dust and solid surfaces carrying services; the plants nurtured in the water house as gardens, ventilators, shades. Material, physical and climatic conditions are made co-present again, a new ground-as-wall generating new, porous, surface effects.
