AFTER-SHOCK
I thought I had seen everything and then I saw photos of Casa Portuale, a facility for Naples dockworkers designed by Aldo Rossi between 1968 and 1980. The immense poured concrete structure is ungainly, even by Brutalist standards, without a governing center, image, or profile. More surprisingly, it lacks the pictorial and narrative charm one associates with Rossi's iconic postmodern work. Even its drawings seem muddled.
Nonetheless it possesses an incrededible, animalistic charisma. Abandoned for decades, left open to air and rain, it's in bad shape today. Photos of the interior show bare concrete ceiling slabs, crumbling linoleum floor tile, dulled aluminum frame ribbon windows, distressed vertical blinds, toppled schoolroom chairs, and carefully framed views of the sea that hold it at a distance. But the building's appeal is something different from ruin porn -- the romance of nature overtaking the man-made. There are in Casa's massing, structure and planning complexities that approach absurdities, and this gives it a kind of battered anti-modern heroism.
The Casa fills a slender lot parallel to the water, between a low warehouse and train tracks. The entire ground floor is given over to parking. Above it hovers, on massive pilotis, a flat one-storey slab. Through this rises, from one end, a giant saucer enclosing a grand events room. Growing from it is a fifteen-story block from which smaller rooms burst through. The building reminds one of a parking garage, a spaceship, and a cruise ship, all lit up with a touch of the kooky expressionism Frank Lloyd Wright exercised in the 1950's. What other building looks like this?
At a moment when high-profile architecture projects are mostly taken over by branding, value-engineering and parametrics, Casa Portuale provokes. This gorgeous old beast asserts itself; it has the kind of authority that ancient buildings possess.
Photograph by Roberto Conte.
Other photographs here: Domus, NSS, Purple.
