Sacred Landscape

In Naples, the sacred and the violent are interconnected through the cities geology. The Bagnoli Works, an ex-steelworks site just outside Naples, is a place poisoned by anthropogenic industry. This new type of violence of the Anthropocene – that of Humans on the Earth - requires a new way of thinking and designing in order to imagine a future for land which cannot simply be ‘cleaned’. Using The Bagnoli Works as a test site, how can Naples inform an architecture through its relationship with the violent, and the sacred?

This project – Sacred Landscape - proposes the reuse of the polluted Bagnoli Works site. It proposes three buildings; a Bathhouse, Remedial Building, and intervention to the existing steelworks building on the site. These proposals sit within a wider proposed forest of remedial planting – and each reignite a landscape within the site. The bathhouse building awakens a leisure landscape on the coastline based on the lost past leisure landscape of Bagnoli, and the projections for Bagnoli to become a new Venice by Lamont Young. The Remedial Building works in conjunction with the remedial planting on the site. It provides a tree nursery, irrigation system, earth laboratories, workers’ accommodations and storehouses. Intervention to the existing steelworks building or ‘Red Cattedrale’ provide a new cultural landscape for Bagnoli. This cultural landscape exists within the large existing structures interior, providing educational and meeting spaces. These proposals unite in the creation of a new ‘sacred landscape’ for a site held sacred by the people of Bagnoli. The architectural qualities and programme of these buildings are informed by another sacred site in Naples – the Capella Sansevero, a small deconsecrated chapel. Narratives of the alchemical, the transgressive nature of the baroque and the intense perspective of the chapel inform the projects architecture both spatially and programmatically. The resulting ‘Sacred Landscape’ is a sum of its parts, a set of buildings encoded with the sacred. Each interacting with and catalysing a future for the ground they sit on.