Prophetic Diffractions

Within Western society, contemporary approaches to architecture and design are structured by patriarchal power and Naples encapsulates this provocation. Below the surface of this ancient landscape lies a rich tapestry of forgotten feminist histories. This project draws on the ability of the mythology of a landscape to challenge creative cooperation, bringing these rich histories to the forefront. Responding to the multiple feminist narratives and artistic output held by this particular area of Naples, this project challenges to delineate the parameters of a “feminist” architecture.

Within a landscape associated with key feminine figures – including Shelley, the Cumaean Sibyl, and Neapolitan Feminist collective Le Nemesiache - that incorporates Baia, Lucrino, and Lake Avernus (an entrance to the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid), it proposes ideologies and methods that establish new Feminist approaches to architecture. Involving ‘diffraction’ as design method - a term used in Feminist Theory and Le Nemesiache – which Giulia Damiani maintains “accounts for the intricate relationship between past and present, alongside the complex desires of different generations of feminists that are triggered in a researcher’s consideration of an archive,” the project evolved using media from theatre, painting, and film. As a design research study, it proposes these same processes on the project site in a reciprocal way. What evolves is an exchange between site, process, and building – an intersectionality where users and landscape have a shared existence. In these ways it facilitates healing of a volatile and turbulent volcanic landscape – conjuring and figuring new environmental, material, and collective social futures. This project proposes an architectural feminist collective, a series of three interventions along a volcanic ridge which connects Lake Avernus to the sea, to programmatically influence an alternate feminist conception of the Phlegraean Fields. The Port[al] at Punta Epitaffio acts as a site of remembrance. The Vapour Rooms at Lucrino act as a site of healing and learning and the Golden Bough at Lake Avernus embodies a landscape of regeneration and renewal. These buildings interrupt the chronological passing of time, holding these histories simultaneously for the user to experience the intensities of the past whilst reimagining an alternative future.