Aspiring to a better future: Casa del Portuale (Port House) by Aldo Loris Rossi

Is there perhaps a more ductile material than concrete? Probably not. There may be equally malleable materials but nothing that allows a use as fast, solid and reliable as concrete. This does not mean that all types of concrete are the same, on the contrary, but it must also be said that the concrete structures remain, in fact, wonderful examples of the architect’s inspiration.

And what better example than the Casa del Portuale (Port House) in Naples? Bruno Zevi writes:

The shabby, degraded coastal context of Calata della Marinella, devoid of creatively significant parameters, is animated by a pioneering, spectacular, subversive object, which seems to demand an environmental redemption. It represents heterogeneous etymologies of pop bricolage, of the unfinished, of “ruinism”, of action-architecture.

@Jean-Sébastien Maur

This project by Aldo Loris Rossi has become a symbol of the current renewed appreciation for Brutalist architecture. The building has been partially abandoned, however. In the port of Naples, surrounded by cranes, shipping containers and railway lines, it is used in connection with the port’s industrial and logistic activities. Although some offices are still in use, a large part of the activity has been moved to other areas of the port.

The architecture critic Bruno Zevi described this building as “a pioneering, spectacular, subversive object, which seems to claim an environmental redemption”. Rossi’s architecture has always been difficult to fit into the official rhetoric of modern architecture. His futuristic and unclassified designs contain references to late work by Frank Lloyd Wright, German Expressionism and Italian Futurism.

The building is formed by a base, used as a car park; from there, a tall, fragmented centrifugal volume emerges at one end. Its function, apart from hosting a varied program, is to provide a high point for observing activity in the port.

@Jean-Sébastien Maur

Twelve vertical cylindrical concrete towers play a structural role and serve to distribute people and building systems. A series of volumes are fit onto them or strung together along them. Their varying shapes and curved geometries, both concave and convex, are deliberately contrasted, as occurs in the Baroque architecture that is so present in the city of Naples. At the top, the pillars recall the cylindrical concrete silos present in the landscape of the port. Concrete and glass are the only two materials used in the building, but it is the concrete, with its plastic qualities, that creates the expressive variety of forms that make Casa del Portuale famous internationally.

This building has been selected among the 100 most representative concrete buildings of the 20th century, visit the site 100fromthe20th to find out more.