Dis-Identity. The Centro Direzionale designed by Kenzō Tange in Naples,

The paper describes the “Centro Direzionale”, an imposing office and residential district in Naples, built on a formerly disused and abandoned industrial area. It was designed by Kenzō Tange and approved by the Municipality of Naples in 1982, after a long and contrasting bureaucratic procedure, started in the 1970s. The project should have ambitiously set up the new business district, like Wall Street in New York or London’s City and Canary Wharf, redeveloping about 110 hectares of terrain vaque. So, it would have thereby restored a new identity to these places, which had become a wide, rundown and underworld suburb. Here we could detect an aspiration towards the Koolhaas’ Bigness theory in the scale of details that becomes gigantic, when it is just extrapolated from the façade of several buildings. We are in the presence of an "extreme" architecture, profoundly independent from the urban mesh's definition as to occasionally compete with it and belong to an amoral "sphere", beyond good and evil, Koolhaas would say. Each place is a "suspended" places. At the same time it is in an a such mutual attraction with the others, to allow the definition or description of their "dislocations". However, there is a feeling of immutability, which is acutely strident with the perception of environmental and social degradation. This condition is inexorably devouring the modernity of those places and it lets them quickly fall into the solitude of abandonment. On the other side, when we are in the Centro Direzionale, our attention is attracted precisely by those "suspended" places, which lead us back to the concept of " Non-lieux" theorized by Marc Augè in 1992. So that, despite everything, manages to bridge the new Modernity, indeed, as Augè would say, to "Surmodernity"