Neapolis

All too often, thinking in different scales keeps us from imagining the city and the house as an organismic connection. The spatiality of the city does not end at the façade, and the spatiality of the house does not begin beyond the wall; rather, the spatiality of the wall with its refined openings connects the two in graduated spatial sequences. A truly spatial notion of architecture ultimately abolishes the dualistic notion of city and house: The spatial spheres of the urban and the domestic interpenetrate, sometimes more sometimes less shifting boundaries between inside and outside. The design of these spatial situations with reciprocally superimposed dedications, such as openings, transitions, passages, interstices, etc., is the task of urban architecture. In no other city is this “porosity” in housing more filled than in Naples, the city to which this book is dedicated.
Against the background of the question of an urban architecture, the Italian and German contributions of the participating authors bring together topological, typological, cartographical, historical and theoretical aspects of places and horizons to form a spatial sketch of the city of Naples.