In conversation with Umberto Napolitano

From Non-Specific Spaces to Specific Cities

AJ (Andrew Jiao): In the Napoli Super Modern exhibition at the Swiss Architecture Museum in summer of 2022, you stated “the corpus of this study consists of a set of architecture selected according to two logics,” where the “historical” between the 1930s and 1960s confronts the critical reflection of the contemporary to curate a “more ecological, more egalitarian and more inclusive city.” I am curious about your interest in this particular period of Naples and what’s the relevance for us today?

UN (Umberto Napolitano): The modern movement was a very specific time in history where architecture started to connect to people and progress in a very simple way. We thought about the middle class in terms of their minimum needs to exist, which led us to define the needs of the people in a very dogmatic way. We were searching for contradictions with a dogmatic approach during the modernist period.

Since I am from Naples and know the context well, we looked at the very complex reality of Naples in the 1930s during the fascist regime. The reductionist lifestyle of the public faced resistance and had to compromise with powerful forces of the leader. In this exhibition, I was interested in understanding if compromise is still an instrument we can use today. For that reason, we selected a number of examples where the conception of a modern building was neither function nor generic modernity. Instead, we sought contextual examples of compromises between forces, including the geography and complex economic reality in Naples.

AJ: It is fascinating to hear you talk about working with different complex political structures inherited from the past and how these complexities collide with Napoli modernism.

UN: In the history of Naples, the idea of compromise goes back further than the modernist period. In addition to this strange landscape, there were influences from all around the world as the city has been conquered by the Arabs, the Spanish, the French, Italians, and others. Every new conqueror generates specific approaches to the typology of the city, but never a radical one, as they must compromise with influences from preceding cultures. This means that Baroque is not the perfect Baroque, Modern is not the perfect Modern, and Renaissance is not the perfect Renaissance. There is a specific hybrid condition of architecture from this layering and stratification of information alongside climate and geography. The very richness of the city is the fact that it's hybrid. The word hybrid applies to everything, from the use of public space to the style of architecture, the form of the city, and beyond. Everything has been this process of hybridization since cities began to emerge.

IZ (Ignis Zhang): Looking at the city today, how has your reading of Naples changed as an architect now versus when you were a child? In your experience, does this shift emerge from time, place, or people?

UN: I don't know if the city itself has changed. It might be that I'm getting older. In The Architecture of the City, Aldo Rossi defines the city as both an artifact and a man-made object — something that we both inherit and modify. We identify ourselves within the city we live in or where we have lived. This cultural fact manifests itself through the architectural traces of the city — when you understand certain building forms that translate the collective memory of the people in this city, the built act merges with the cultural act. To a certain extent, the city is an organic being that transforms over time but, at the same time, remains recognizable over generations. We have to face this paradox that we build to create permanence in a fluid context. Separate from the way they are used, our buildings have been part of a history as objects in this collective memory. We build buildings to give people all the possibilities to be permanent, persistent, and part of this very large handmade object of the city. But at the same time, to achieve this permanent movement, the building has to be able to change with the changing of the city.

IZ: I find this paradox to be quite generative in articulating the relationship between a building and its larger urban environment. How does a building that is both permanent and changing manifest in the way we design today?

UN: This paradox is even more complex with climate change today. We know the temperature in the city will increase between five and ten degrees over the next fifty years. And in the last five years, the pandemic has also made us conscious of the fragility of our system. I often ask my students: “if you do not define a space through function, how would you define it?” One can define it by adjectives like whether it's cold or hot, through touch or smell, by the structure, or even by the materials of a space. What is interesting to me is that we have to equip ourselves with new tools that facilitate the thinking of architecture as a space in which you do not know what will happen. This is more complex than a flexible space: we have to acknowledge the uncertainties and reconcile with how the urban fabric will evolve and how our relationship to urbanity will transform in the next forty years. I like when spaces become determinate and indeterminate. Between this pair of oxymoron, you can refine the same paradox between permanence and change.

AJ: Through Cyrille Weiner’s images, you describe the case studies of modernist works in Naples as “a specificity that cannot be described as stylistic, linguistic or typological and even less as identity or symbolism.” In your opinion, should a city always conform to its geographical specificities?

UN: Cities are specific because there is always a strong link between a city and its geography. Cities mostly emerge because there is a river, a sea, or a mountain that protects people from the harsh climates, such as the Venturi effect that pushes wind moving through a valley, or how an ocean wind collides with continental drift.

Then at a certain point, cities start to grow and become increasingly technical objects that stray away from their geographical roots. Further, cities are transformed by the car, the bus, the airplane, the air conditioner, and things that make their locations irrelevant. Ecological lingo, such as “the local,” “do not consume resources,” and “recycling materials,” etc., help us re-establish the link between cities and geography. This is what I’m interested in — how do you translate this link into architecture using available resources? What are the opportunities of each city in terms of geography and technical capabilities? How have these opportunities been foregrounded to become something that people can relate to in their daily lives? For example, it's very simple to understand when you think about a river that was once a place used for navigation and importing resources, became a place where people start to identify as a citizen. When you sit by the river and breathe in fresh air, these sensorial feelings become essential for understanding a specific city.

AJ: How does this connection between cities and geography translate into architecture in your practice?

UN:  In every geography, natural climatic conditions and construction generate a specific behavior of that location. When you translate that into architecture, you can then challenge the idea of designing spaces independent from factors such as temperature and climate. In many of our projects, we are searching for spaces in-between the controlled and the open.

For example, if it's minus three degrees celsius outside a greenhouse, and the interior generates is consistently twenty degrees celsius, the in-between space can be around ten degrees celsius from mixing. Obviously, it cannot be ten degrees year round, but at least it can be comfortable during specific times of the year. I'm interested in how people live in a city because how spatial comfort relates to people’s behavior rather than function. During the summers of Naples, some residents seek the shade and close their doors to create a microclimate, while others are ready to migrate to a space that is cooler. In this sense, spaces can accommodate people moving in a nomadic way inside a specific building instead of accomplishing all functions throughout the year. That's one of the lessons from knowing a city and could be translated into architecture.

IZ: From Naples to Paris, the most “banal” aspects of the city are also apparent in your research on urbanism for the book Paris Haussmann. In your research, how does  Paris’ urban form differ from Naples? How would you describe the typological differences between the two city fabrics?

UN: Both projects analyze a specific context that can help us raise questions and find answers about how to build cities. We chose Paris because it's one of the densest cities in Europe. This density is not generated by verticality, but by sprawl within a generic fabric composed of intelligent buildings and small voids. It's one of the few cities where you can summarize the entire history in one urban form and one building typology. Through this analysis, we discovered that one piece of the city carries the same density as a different piece, which means that the ratio between void and infill is constant for the entire urban fabric.

It's contemporary that voids allow natural resources to relate to the infill. These voids are large enough for residents to see sunset and protect buildings from the wind, at the same time ventilate the infill. As a generic rule in the city, the voids’ characteristics allow the filled parts to be built. When creating spaces with a set of rules, the same geometrical system becomes prevalent throughout the entire city. We were searching for one question that can be ordinary, which is how to deal with density and generate a fabric which has proven itself to be successful in generating density.

IZ: You stated that diversity is an essential factor in a city's coherence in Paris Haussmann, and that diversity enables peaceful coexistence of many essential heterogeneous functions of the city. With regards to polycentrism, what are your thoughts on designing for diversity without being generic? How do you deploy a system of urban strategies foregrounding diversity?

UN: In Paris, everything is fractal. Diversity exists within the infill filtered through Hausmannian buildings, where the façade was designed before the plan. Owners’ only engagement to the built form was given by the notary office to align their windows to their neighborhood when designing a façade. This creates a very generic façade grid within which you can position a living room based on three windows or a bedroom with one window. This genericness generates a form that can do anything. The Haussmannian buildings can produce variations of interior heights and volumetric spaces. One can use the roof as a chambre de bonne for services. It's also adaptable for students, who may need less space.

In the same building, we can find many different variations – a small top floor, a large second floor with a balcony, and a ground floor with a commercial program. Each floor’s non-standardization and coexistence in the same building attracts different people who are looking for different things. The mixture of use with different demographics results in many possibilities contained within the same form. When building housing projects in Paris, everything abides to a modular system with the same height from slab to slab and with the same distance from window to window. It's even more tedious when building a high-rise office, since everything has to be extremely flexible and repeated.

This modulation idea is contradictory to our research, which values the richness of circumstances and various demographics that live in the same place. What is interesting in Paris is the fact that every building has different configurations of small flats, large flats, and even office commerce mixed throughout. There could be five different typologies occupying the same historical building. In a generic way, this mixture produces typologies such as hôtel particulier as the salient form in the past, where every family built spaces for themselves.

IZ: The idea that somehow Haussmanian buildings are generic and specific at the same time is really interesting. What can we learn from Haussmanian buildings for the broader architecture discipline?

UN: One major challenge in architecture is to face contradictions. Although, paradox is an instrument that presents itself between formal movement and permanence, specificity and the genericness, and between the local and the global. Architecture is a consequence of solving one or many paradoxes, where our own culture emerges from the times we live in. You can think of doubt and paradox as an entry through which you can enter. To be ecological means we have to stop building, which equates to no more architecture. But at the same time, architecture is the instrument to solve certain questions related to what we have built before. So we have to rebuild or change what we have done in previous centuries.

AJ: Thinking about the domestic activities housed within the dogmatic Hausmannian facades, paradox almost disappears into the ordinary. Between the paradoxical and the ordinary, would you consider these two seemingly contrasting ideas to be synonymous in a way?

UN: Ordinary is difficult to understand without a subject pronoun. Ordinary means to relate to order, which relates to culture or techniques. Every project is a piece of a very large puzzle that stratifies history, culture, and geography. Architects have the choice to either continue its story or oppose its context, its certain conditions. There is a level of consciousness now where we have to decide how to continue the city, rebuild the city, and generate architecture that links the past and and the future. So the ordinary relates to how we link together different moments of the city—what are the questions that we have to ask ourselves and what questions do we have to raise?

At a certain point, you will face many paradoxes. That's the interesting part that brings architecture back to art. As architects, it’s important that we relate to eternal questions, such as understanding paradoxes. And there is no right answer. Each architect may have an answer for solving paradoxes. It's extremely personal. What has changed from the modern to today is the fact that there is no certitude. Everything has become so ephemeral, so complex to understand. That's why architects have to return to a very humble approach to things, where we accept mistakes and we accept paradoxes.









Umberto Napolitano studied architecture at the Università Federico II in Naples and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette. As a founder of LAN (Local Architecture Network) with Benoit Jallon in 2002, he also conducts a theoretical work through research projects, exhibitions and conferences all around the world. Umberto was a professor at the Columbia University GSAPP of New York, the Architecture Association School of Architecture in London, and at Technische Universität Vienna. He is a member of the French Academy of Architecture since 2016 and was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2018.

Click for more images of Napoli Super Modern and Paris Haussman by Cyrille Weiner.