Original name
Casa del Portuale e Servizi Sociali Culp [Port House and Culp Social Servicies]
Original use
Transportation and infrastructure/control tower and Administrative purposes/office spaces
Current use
Partially abandoned / Administrative purposes/office spaces / partially unused
Architects
Aldo Loris Rossi
Concrete by reinforcement
Concrete is a relatively brittle material that is strong in compression but less so in tension.
To increase its overall strength, steel rods, wires, mesh or cables may be embedded in concrete before it sets. This reinforcement, often known as rebar, resists tensile forces. By forming a strong bond, the two materials are able to resist a variety of applied forces, effectively acting as a single structural element .
Construction method
In this case, the concrete can be made by mixing the components directly on site, or it may be transported from a production plant in concrete-mixer trucks.
This method has the disadvantage of leaving the concrete exposed to the elements while it is setting. Whereas, with other methods, the environmental conditions can be controlled during setting, providing greater control over the outcome, with cast-in-place concrete a series of tests and protocols are necessary to verify its final strength.
Architectural concrete
- textured walls
- wooden formwork finish
- stamped concrete
- exposed aggregate concrete, colored concrete, etc.
Structural types
Beams are the horizontal load-bearing elements of the frame. Columns are the vertical elements of the frame and act as the building’s primary load-bearing element. They transmit the beam loads down to the foundations.
This element is characteristic of many industrial buildings from 1900 to 1950 in which large, flared support structures extend into disc-like capitals.
State of Conservation
Description
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 unclassifiable 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.
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.
Italy
Interno Porto
Campania 80133 Naples
Commission
1968
Completion
1980