ErN
104, entry
Feb. 2009
Build it and they will blow it up.
The Sails of Scampia
I think there must be a Field
of Dreams mentality among architects or, at least,
among politicians who hire. Inn the 1989 fantasy film of
that name, the hero does some magical time traveling,
then builds an enchanted baseball field where ball
players from the afterlife and nostalgic fans can join
together to enjoy life the way it used to be —life the
way it was meant to be.
Build it and They Will Come!
Thus, take an area
infested by poverty, unemployment, drugs and crime;
then, build a nice place for everyone to live and “they
will come.” They will no longer be poor, they will not
be involved in drugs or gangs, and they will all
magically have jobs. Life will be good because the
goodness of architectural intent will trickle down and
seep into the people who live there. In the words of Le
Corbusier, "It is a question of building which is at the
root of the social unrest of today... ." What can I say?
Welcome to Earth, alien architects! The best (worst)
example of such thinking I know of is the Pruitt-Igo
urban housing project in St. Louis, Missouri. It was
designed by Minoru Yamasaki (architect of the World
Trade Center complex in New York) and completed in 1955.
It degraded so swiftly that between 1972 and 1974 all 55
buildings had to be destroyed by implosion. It was the
worst failure of public housing policy in the history of
the United States.
The
Neapolitan version, on a lesser scale, is the so-called
“Vele di
Secondigliano”—the Sails of Secondigliano,
(also known as The Sails of Scampia, that part of
Secondigliano, a northern suburb of Naples, where the
housing project was built). The Vele consisted of
seven pyramid-like buildings (really, ziggurat-like —the
ancient stepped pyramids of Babylonia) that reminded
people of sails. The buildings were named by color —the
blue sail, the red sail, etc. The Vele were put up
between 1962 and 1975. The architect was Franz di Salvo,
one of the most prominent modernist architects of
post-war Italy. So the buildings went up and everyone
waited. It reminds me of the time I tried to use a small
portable air-pump to force some more air into one of
those already super-inflated small-rim emergency spare
tires. The tire had more pressure than the pump, so the
air went the wrong way, from my tire into the pump!
That's what happened with the vele: no goodness and light flowed
from the vele
into Scampia; the area, one of the poorest and most
run-down in Naples, flowed into the "sails" and filled
them with grime and squalor. Three of the original seven
buildings were blown up between 1997 and 2003. The rest
are still standing, condemned, and partially occupied
illegally by squatters.
The construction
stems from various post-war laws meant to encourage
public-works urbanization in Italy, such as the Ina [National
Insurance Institute] plan for home construction of 1949
and Law 167 of 1962. The goal of post-war urban building
was to give homes (1) to people who had lost theirs in
the war, (2) to those who had never had a decent place
to live in the first place, and (3) to cover the massive
influx of new workers moving from rural areas into the
cities for all the jobs that drove the Italian economic
miracle of the 1950s and 60s.
I
am not making a case for or against “modern” architecture.
I don’t know that the way your house looks from the
outside has all that much to do with how happy you are.
For all I know, people who live in Le Corbusier-inspired
people-hives can be very happy if they have good jobs,
good schools, and love and are loved. But even the
detractors of modern architecture (Tom Wolfe, in From Bauhaus to Our House,
asked, "Why would someone who works in a factory want to
live in one?" in reference to the unadorned stacks, slabs
and pipes of modernism). Even they would admit that you
should give the building a chance, that some social
support should be in place before you start moving people
in.
Some critics
say that the sails were “an architectural horror.” They
are missing the point; the “vele” design has
worked well elsewhere, in Villeneuve-Loubet
on the French
riviera,
(architect,
André
Minangoy), for
example, so there must be a reason why
the housing project failed here. Perhaps it has to do with
the fact that Secondigliano is a laundry list of social
problems: unemployment, drugs, school drop-out rate, and
organized crime. When the buildings went up, the area had
about 80,000 inhabitants, 40,000 of whom were said to live
in the Vele. That number is way too low. The buildings
were populated in 1976 and 1977, but when the 1980
earthquake struck, squatters moved in from elsewhere to
Naples and found room wherever they could, including the Vele. A more
realistic number for the Vele in that period would be about
60-70,000. AND —plans to finish the supporting structures
and services were put on hold: there was no market, no
nursery, no gym, and not even a police station (!) for 20
years. (There is now a Carabinieri
[State Police] station. I walked up to it yesterday, and
it is sealed off like Ft. Apache. There was one gigantic German Shepherd
watch-dog sitting on
top (!) of the compound, looking down for
intruders. He spotted me and went nuts. Nice doggie. Here,
want a camera?) What were supposed to be parks and gardens
simply lay fallow and degraded, becoming such rubbish
heaps of left-over cement blocks and discarded syringes
that the area figures prominently in the recent book Gomorra and the film
of the same name (a pun on the Biblical city and the name
camorra—the
Neapolitan version of the mafia). The decayed buildings themselves
became a symbol —ziggurats of evil.
In 2006, the mayor of
Naples said she would like to shoot the architect of the vele, blow up the
rest of the buildings and put up more “human”
architecture. The widow di Salvo remarked that it was too
late for the shooting, but she wondered —as do I— at the
bizarre thinking that blamed an architect for the social
ills of the city. The vele
were not “human” or “inhuman”. They were just buildings,
put up in a particularly inhuman part of the city. Me, I
would leave the architect alone and shoot
blame the mayor.
As they now stand,
there are four or five of the vele still up and likely to stay up.
Yes, they are in a horribly degraded condition. Some of
the bottom floors have been cleared, such that only the
supporting pillars are visible; that’s where they place
the charges (just in case) for the ultimate “furling of
the sails” by implosion. Yet there are many apartments
still occupied by squatters, and the city is reluctant to
replay the scene of a few years ago when squatters fought
cops tooth and nail in order to hang on to the only homes
they had, no matter how squalid. Thus, a plan now calls
for the squatters to be moved gradually into other
quarters and for the remaining buildings to be recertified
as sound and then be given over to civic use, most likely
as premises for the University of Naples.
That
may work. The degraded vele are now surrounded by smaller
blocks of six-and- seven-story apartments that look
clean and maintained. Also, the area is now
well-connected by the new metropolitana train line (about 20
minutes' ride) to the downtown area, whereas when the
buildings were new, they were really in the outback,
what locals called the "Neapolitan hinterland (using
that nice German expression). Maybe it's not exactly
what Franz di Salvo envisioned, but at this point he'll
take what he can get.
See Scampia Storytelling;
related item from June
2015; Brutalist architecture
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