The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Writing in 1924, Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis noted that Naples consists
in a “porous architecture,” for its principal building material is the
yellow tufo: volcanic matter emerging out of the maritime depths and solidifying
on contact with seawater. Transformed into habitation, this porous
rock returns buildings to the dampness of their origins. In this dramatic encounter
with the archaic elements (earth, air, fire, and water) there already
lies the incalculable extremes that coordinate the Neapolitan quotidian.
The crumbling tufo, child of the violent marriage between volcano and sea,
is symptomatic of the unstable edifice that is the city. Further the use of tufo
reveals a naked imbroglio in the very building of the city. Forbidden by the
Spanish authorities (who were seeking to control urban development) to import
building stone, Neapolitans excavated the volcanic stone literally from
under their feet: casting the material once again skyward. The ground beneath
the city is hollow, honeycombed with the subsequent caverns. Not
only is the present-day city constructed with volatile and physically unreliable
materials, its origins are also legally suspect. To borrow from the
book—Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (1928)—that Benjamin wrote on
the German baroque theater of mourning while he was on Capri and regularly
visiting Naples, the city is an allegory of the precarious forces of
modernity, a perpetual negation of the assumed inevitability of “progress,”
a continual interrogation of its foundations. Lived as a “crisis” environment,
rather than a planned one, Naples remains a baroque city. Its innumerable
seventeenth-century buildings are silent witnesses to the continuing disruption
of linear development as urban and architectural design dissolves
into sounds, streets, and bodies that do not readily bend to the modern will.
The city offers the heterotopic space of many, sedimented pasts, of multiple
presents . . . and diverse futures.
Walking in the city, I follow narrow alleys that turn inward toward
the piazza, a church, or bring me to monuments to mortality and disaster—
the decorated columns that commemorate volcanic eruptions, earthquakes,
and plagues; only rarely do streets direct me toward the opening of the sea.
It is as though the sea draws its energies from the darkness, the shadows,
sucking the light out of things in an irrepressible self-reflection that serves
to illuminate its egocentricity. The sea remains an accessory, an appendage
from which fish once arrived and to which urban effluent is now dispatched.
Naples is also a vertical city. Social classes commence with oneroom
dwellings on the streets—i bassi—to arrive at the attics and terraces
of the professional classes and splinters of aristocracy still clinging to the
heights. The sea and sky are caught in snatches, the lateral (democratic?)
view is rarely permitted; the gaze is either bounded by narrow streets or else