The brief from the City of Naples, to create a fully-functioning subway station that is in itself a work of art, demanded a synthesis of purpose and beauty that was fundamental to our creative process.
At the surface the station will be the central element in the urban and cultural regeneration of the Traiano district that has suffered in its recent history from infrastructural isolation and neglect.
Simultaneously the network of tunnels and vaults designed and subsequently abandoned midway through a previous tube station project, describes an underworld barely tangible in the gleaming and sanitary underground spaces of contemporary subway projects. In the shadow of Vesuvius and embedded in layers of early civilisation, these dark and brutal concrete shells have been inspirational to our formal and material approach.
The complex brief and site demanded a synthesis of purpose and beauty. The result is an explicit expression of the eternal tension between form and function, and between art and architecture.
