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Build
it and they will blow it up.
The
"Sails" of Scampia
 I think there must be
a kind of “Field of Dreams” mentality among
architects—or, at least, among the politicans who hire
architects. Recall that in 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 inherent 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 swifty 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 are in love and
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
by the same architect has worked well elsewhere—in
Canne, France, 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 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
aparments 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.
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