Snails & Hawkwings
Ballabio, Fabrizio
This lecture is about his fascination with Ferdinando Sanfelice, the Napolitan nobleman and architect of crazy, absolutely beautiful, staircases. It was given at the EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), at the ''Project Room'', on the 19th of October 2015 and is part of the Fall Semester program of FORM, '' Paris-Tokyo: Metropolis''.
 Allow me to introduce a bishop Balabi who let's say I know from time back at the time I was actually together with Andrea Fitching in Mauricio and I happen to be in your jury. Yeah, my diploma. One of the only positive voices. Trying to salvage him from Pallirio Giacti's attempt to totally destroy it. Today Fabricio is a unit master professor at AA school and that of course that is a box which contains many things because there's many voices at the AA school. So they think increasingly his project, if I could call it like that, concentrates on architecture history. I had luck actually to be guided around by Fabricio in Napoli to see these very buildings he's going to talk about, about San Felice. I think it's part of his increasing fascination for Italian Baroque, then even more specifically Napolitan Baroque of which I would like to add Fuga is also an integrity party, although some people might consider him not entirely a Baroque architect. But today there is San Felice's, I would have to say staircase's, but of course much more than that. San Felice is this Baroque architect which I guess never anybody heard of until Fabricio decided to write an article about him. We in our studio we like very much because as a third incarnation in this series of lectures which we see, we feel related to metropolitan architecture, we felt there's a possible interpretation of course there to be tested by Fabricio where these big shared compounds with a high I would say level of individuality seem to find their kind of common language in this particularity of this circulation devices there. Now I give the word to you, but thanks a lot for coming. Thank you. This is about the microphone. Should I talk in the microphone? Maybe. Can you hear me? I would rather not. That's okay. Yeah? Can you hear me? Okay. So I'm going to present the work I've been doing the last couple of years now. I've already moved on a bit, but on San Felice in Naples. And this is a work which came out probably as a scare storm was hinting through a fascination. There are these staircases which she has designed are relatively let's say famous in Naples, not at all renowned let's say in academic circles abroad. And therefore I had very personally let's say started to go visit them and become interested in them and started to do proper research to understand how they had come into being. So to a certain extent I think also in relation to the brief you're doing this year, I'll try with this presentation to address a very let's say peculiar in particular architectural problem which has to do with let's say how to deal with staircases typologically with enabling and in terms of their expression at the moment in time in which architecture still but almost still let's say expresses itself through a language. And then I will try to let's say address how they fit within a broader context which has to do with the open stair as a typology if you want which flourishes in 18th century in Naples, so in the 1700s. So the basic problem in designing a staircase which is visible on the facade of a building is that if the flights run parallel to the facade, the windows or the arches by which they are lit form a diagonal line which cuts across the horizontal of the floors. Or if the staircase is on a square plan with the flights running alternately parallel with the facade and at right angles to it, the openings on the landings will come at levels halfway between the floors. So this is a quote from Anthony Blunt which I'm not sure you're all familiar with but he's an architectural historian which is obviously dead by now but he used to be the head of the Courtauld Institute in London, the personal advisor of the Queen's collection of paintings and a communist spy at the same time. And he wrote a beautiful book called Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo Architecture. Within the chapter on St. Elisha he talks about this very peculiar problem which has to do with let's say the challenge architects have been faced with since Renaissance I would say to deal with let's say a misfit. So on the one hand a language which has a certain series of rules which let's say in years they try to figure out how to transform into a proper architectural language. On the other hand they necessitate to apply these rules to buildings and typologies which they were not meant for. So I'll try to give you three cases in which these problems occur. The first one when the staircase runs perpendicular to the facade we can see Palazzo da Celleria here where let's say the architect has tried to integrate them within the caveatio so that somehow even though in fact it is a misfit because to light the stair you have to drop down the windows there is an attempt to somehow amalgamate it in the composition of the whole. So it's and you will see the time and time again it's always a matter of trying to hide this element which in fact is endemic to classical architecture it does not belong to it. So that staircase is this one here. Another example which where we have the staircase running parallel to the wall is in Palazzo Farnese which is let's say hidden altogether. So here the stairs lead from the top and the windows are in fact walled out. And possibly the third example is when we have the arcade staircase which goes up, right, on more than one level. And here we see this very peculiar problem of which Santelish is a master at solving which is this. So this awkward triangle which occurs between the diagonal line of the stair and the base in the capitals of the column which is to a certain extent a bestemia. I don't know how to say this but it's a very, how do you say bestemia in English? It's like a cur, it's an architectural curse somehow. It's something very wrong and it's actually an object of a very fierce debate between Guarini and another architectural story, well architectural theorist I will mention later which is called Juan Caramuel. They talk, let's say there is an exchange of letter precisely on this detail. How to deal with let's say this combination of you know classical orders which have a rule and this diagonal line introduced by the staircases. So this is the staircase Santelish designs for his own palazzo in Naples. In fact it's one of the, let's say the last projects which belongs to a series in his own work. So it's not one of his last projects because eventually he will live until the end of the 1740s but this is the moment in which he is most busy let's say in working for the local mobility. And that has to do with a series of historical questions which maybe I'll explain later but in 1735 there is a change in the regime of Naples which had until then been a vice royalty under the Aragonese, the Austrian Habsburg and so forth and in 1735 suddenly the Bourbons come to Naples and bring with them a new series of architects and a new series of let's say concerns in matter of how they were to exert their power architecturally speaking. So Santelish is basically out of the picture. So he will live another 10 years but he's not very influential. So this is kind of the height of his career. As I said before this, the discussion on his staircase in his palazzo is actually more interesting to see in correlation with something which develops almost as a Neapolitan type which is that of the open stair. And let's say there are a number of ways in which we can interpret this type, how it came into being. On the one hand historians have followed the traditional path of starting with the masterpiece and in a sense, how do you say, referring all the later pieces to that. On the other hand instead we can see it as a very let's say matter of fact architectural problem which arises due to a series of very peculiar conditions the city of Naples has had in its development between the 1500s and the 1700s. I'm going to explain that later. We should probably briefly introduce Santelish because I guess nobody has ever heard of him in here. And this is a portrait he had made of himself in 1735. There are a few things which already make this portrait quite eloquent in terms of for example the architecture which is framing him. We see references to treatises in France such as Philippe de Lormes, the Tombe sort of bit of tour. And the inscription at the base of this arch is very interesting. It's called the Patricius Nebolitamus. So it's basically the word architect doesn't even appear in this particular inscription. In fact he's quite keen on clarifying or stating his state of birth. He's a nobleman belonging to the Sege de Montagna which is a very important area of which at the time at least owned a very big part of the northern eastern part of the Newstovall town in Naples. He's holding books which obviously mean that it's an expression of let's say a certain cultural finesse and awareness of what is going around in Europe as I said which is further corroborated by let's say the particular elements which characterize this picture. So he is an amateur in actual fact, not a trained architect in an academy because Naples didn't even have an academy comparable to that of Saint-Lucas for example in Rome. And his education was in fact entirely crafted out of self-interest on books and working for a very famous painter actually called Francesco Salimena which is one of the highest representative of late Baroque painting in Naples. So in fact it's interesting he was, being a nobleman could have been a very, how do you say, could have put him in a position of extreme let's say advantage because obviously he would get much more commissions but in his particular case it was actually a deterrent because his father had destined him for law studies and it is only when the father dies around 1693 if I'm not mistaken that he is actually able to embark in a career within the arts. So his brother which was the Archbishop of Nardofdoll which is a very small town in Puglia where Saint-Lucas eventually does his first projects, talks, shows some drawings of his to this painter Francesco Salimena which was let's say the absolute superstar of the entire art scene in Naples at the time. And a particular painter let's say very much in tune with other Baroque painters around Italy but famously let's say a sort of anachronistic painter almost to an extent who is able to for example put I don't know the exuberance of Barocci and the let's say composition of Raphael within the same painting. But from the one hand we have let's say you know all the theatricality which is you know which we usually assign to Baroque painting with diagonal compositions and the figures let's say come out of concentrating at the center this is the the exposure of Elidorus from the temple. We also have a let's say a very composed set in which this occur which of course you know refers to the school of Athens this very famous painting by Raphael which dates to 150-200 years back. So yes this for us is important because we start to understand how San Felici actually arrives at the building site as a decorator much more than as an architect. So someone who works within a condition which is given and then develops let's say a language in correlation to that somehow. And so his first let's say works on his own in fact consists of what were called at the time Machina da Festa so celebratory machines in fact which were ephemeral architectures for the celebration of important events within the city for example the incarnation of the king or the birth of a king's son or daughter or the how do you say the end of a plague for instance and in fact even though they were ephemeral and obviously not much remains but the drawings and the paintings of this structure they were an incredibly important part in the let's say in the governmental dynamics of the city. So in fact these were architectural machines as much as machines for consensus with which let's say the power that be would impress and please the population and let's say gain consensus by you know getting these very pompous and exuberant manifestations of power. This is one of the first actually designed by San Felicia and you know we can already notice somehow a very exuberant language which has to do of course with the fact that these are temporary structures where architects would probably experiment much more than if it were a permanent building but here it's carried forth to an extent where we have references which go actually beyond even European references. This has to do with a situation in which Napoli is at that time so at the end of 1600s Naples is in fact one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe. It is third in size after London Paris so bigger than Rome in terms of population at least and it is let's say even though it is a vice royalty at the end of the 1600s and even at the beginning of the 1700s so it's not the capital of a reign until the Bourbons arrive in 1734 even though it is a vice royalty it still let's say attracts a big wealth of artists, architects and writers for example which spend a very long time there and develop important works and let's say contribute to a very large exchange of ideas which occurs there. One of them for example is Gaspar van Witten which is a Dutch painter famously the father of Luigi van Vitelli which then would be the architect of the Royal Palace in Casetta in Naples even though van Vitelli is actually brought up in Rome. Another for example interesting example is Fischer von Erlach which spends five to ten years in Naples when Naples is under the dominion of the Austrian Habsburgs and in fact this is one of the last projects St. Felicia does which is a machina de festas on a celebratory machine to be built here and it was built and there are paintings of it and everything which quite curiously refers to or has a lot of analogies with the famous drawing of the pagoda in the porcelain pagoda in Nanjing and we are sure that let's say St. Felicia has the chance to see the entwurf not only because we know that Fischer van Erlach was in Naples for an extended period in fact he builds one of the biggest celebratory machines Fischer van Erlach ever to be seen which was called Maestoso Teatro del mare the majestic theater of the sea so it was a huge construction of a circle of I don't know how many meters in diameter but there were basically in the middle of the bay a gigantic platform with two pyramids and a triumphal arch in the middle and they would have bullfights around and then a whole project of illumination with torches on the ocean which illuminated the entire gulf basically so it was a gigantic project realized we unfortunately have no trace of it visually or I have not found it but it's in the chronicles for example of the city different writers write about it and surely St. Felicia was about ten maybe when he saw this but surely let's say the entire city of Naples was exposed to the spectacle and surely this would have given a strong impression to him so that's anyways a side chapter even though we'll see that motif of this stair coming back toward the end of the presentation we should focus probably on what St. Felicia is most famous for which is in fact these very famous well Naples at least stairwells for palaces and here again you know the Austrian influence comes back also with other people for example Jakob Brandtauer which was one of the most famous architects at the end of the 1600s also has a residency in Naples for some ten years he held the brand together with him comes to Naples in fact so in fact there is a very curious amalgamation of interests and architectural styles which comes to Naples and obviously the architects they are very receptive to this. The staircases of St. Felicia are a very curious phenomenon which let's say develops along two parallel lines these parallel lines in fact give the title to the presentation we have snails and we have hawk wings and this is the description actually the biographer of the lives of painters, sculptors and the Neapolitan architects gives of these stairs so this is if you want Naples' Vasari to a certain extent even though it's actually not a very good book and it's even quite inaccurate in most of the descriptions but anyways he gives this curious Zomorfic analogy to describe these two types of staircases which St. Felicia does one type is the snails so these are the stairs which develops like a spiral somehow and which let's say historians mostly associate with the Austrian model of the staircase in the hall and then instead there are the hawk wings which are let's say I would say an invention of St. Felicia himself and the hawk wings are called hawk wings because they are they look like a hawk with its wings open and so these are the two types in probably two of St. Felicia's most let's say or is best let's say projects one is the stair of Palazzo Bartolone di Maio which is an enclosed stair case in a large well with windows obviously in the courtyard the other one is the one of his own so the hawk wing refers to this kind of geometry. Yeah I'll give you a few examples so one recurrent motif is that these stairs are always working in close proximity to a courtyard so you would access them through the main court of the building and usually you would some finish would make you cross the entire of the courtyard to explain why later but anyways this is a famous case in Palazzo Serra di Cassano it's a bit of a unique type so it's something that St. Felicia never develops again this and it is a stairwell which develops within a large hall so it's in fact two snails which start together here then go up and then meet together at the top again and this has to do very much with how the users of the building would access it you know with a carriage from here crossing the courtyard the carriage would sit here one guest or one person would go on one side one on the other side and then they would meet upstairs again and it's quite beautiful actually the way in which the hall is dealt with which is entirely unadorned it is a white a huge white vaulted space fairly abstract and then you have the use of this very typical Neapolitan stone which is Piperno it's like a volcanic stone very porous and darkish gray but here we can already see that something let's say interesting is going on in relation to the staircase with Palazzo Barberini so the Bernini one where the balustrades are distorted to follow the geometry of the rail yeah and they're not straight with a little triangular that's a stone inserted in between so let's say the most famous one is the one I showed before so Palazzo Barberini mayo this is it may look quite normal nowadays in fact it's an exceptional stair entirely done with cantilevering vaults which was a very difficult thing to do at that time and with a very weird geometry in plan it is somehow it develops with concave you know this concave side is jut into the space which give it a very weird weird weird presence when you're in there almost seems like it's falling on to you again here the reference is very clear and it's the plan of Alessan Carlino and you know this is like it's no mystery but Romino was probably the most famous and copied architect of the time and mostly enables even more so so this is an association which in fact makes very much sense the Hawkeings on the other hand are more difficult to place within the history of architecture this as I said is the one he built for his own Palazzo which he does towards the end of his career and they are usually placed at the end or they always place at the end of the courtyard so they make this huge mise en scene at the end of the courtyard and leading to a garden in the back and somehow let's say within very tight streets of Naples they are a bit the true facade of these buildings these buildings you're never really able to appreciate them frontally as you would appreciate the Palazzo for example on square in other Italian cities you're always in very small roads and I'm going to talk about that very briefly later so in a sense in this staircases through the portals gives you if you want the grandeur which the facades were not really able to express or which you could not really read in the facades so here obviously historians have gone all over the place in trying to understand where this motive came from there are let's say there's a very large bunch which associated with a drawing from Paladio but in fact that's a staring section so it's never really shown in innovation even though the drawing was very famous and we know again that some Felicia through a friendship was not an expert but had for sure read the books another case which is discussed often is the Stagos stairwells to the churches this is a quite also peculiar phenomenon to Naples because it has to do with the fact that these churches were inserted within the urban fabric and somehow you have to on the one hand elevate them from the ground and on the other hand some you wanted to align them to the buildings on the street because you didn't want to create a recess so that the church would not kind of manifest itself on the street and streetscape so you would have these actually stairs in rooms yeah which so this is a facade which actually gives on a stairwell not on the church itself and this is the stair that goes up and here we can already start seeing this diagonal motif but I don't think it's particularly relevant the most bizarre of all is in fact is there in St. Jaipur in Austria and here a historian has made a whole investigation based on dates and let's say on the possible kinships the two architects had so this is the front tower in fact which has been had been in Naples but the dates here and suggest that somehow they were not that was not aware of it and they're not particularly really doesn't really matter it's probably much more interesting in fact to discuss the stairs in relation to a few of the peculiar characteristics of Naples is morphology so this is a map of Naples at the end of the 1500s and in fact it doesn't really change much for a hundred years or so so I said before already in Naples between the 1500 and the 7th and mid 1700 is a vice-realtive which basically means that the ruling powers never really invested on urban transformation there with very large project which for example we can see in other cities in fact the these the city of Naples always develops punctually with new buildings which are very big and grand but which let's say only in the very long time span have an influence on the immediate surrounding in this case what is interesting is that somehow what we get is that the urban tissue of the city remains pretty much a medieval tissue so the plots are very very small and and fairly irregular in shape and that's it the possibility to expand them is very difficult somehow so architects are always faced especially in the 1700s when let's say noblemen start to inhabit the city to come back because the 1600 was a very bad period there was a plague Naples was a very was famously very dangerous city to live in somehow so during nobility preferred to live outside of the city in villas but let's say what's probably even more influenced to let's say the situation San Felicia finds when he goes to work let's say on these palazos is a series of laws called paramatic sanzioni which child six of Habsburg puts in place one after the other which forbids the construction within the city walls and in the immediate outside so what would occur basically was that the only way you could not expand buildings at all at that time and this was a measure to control the population which was famously insubordinate and let's say that's also with the countryside which were becoming less and less operative agriculturally a lot of people wanted to move the city so these laws are put in place to somehow maintain a balance between the population of the two but in fact they have the effect the city still grows but only vertically and on the existing tissue so what we get somehow is these buildings these blocks which are six to seven or eight floors in height which is very unique but which retain a very small footprint and that's for whoever has tried to design a pala let's say a palazzo with a courtyard in such a situation is a very difficult design challenge so this is let's say an average if you want block taken from the Partil Espagnoli which is one of the most in fact regular parts of the city and in black there are the staircases and here you can see this idea the staircase at the back of the courtyard is in fact as much a vernacular if you want response to a series of climatic and let's say if you want urban conditions then it is let's say an artistic if you want decision so in the work of San Felicia probably the first case in which we can find a very interesting response to this condition is in fact palazzo Laudiana which you visited right yeah so this is a palazzo which San Felicia builds for his cousin who had just married and wealthy of his wife's dory so the money you get when you marry a woman decides to renovate let's say a property he has in the old town in Naples so the building is this one here and it's actually in a quite interesting place because it's this you see that it's all quite a mess but generally let's say on a grid and suddenly here you have a circle and that's because that whole block that whole chunk used to be a Roman was built on the foundations of a Roman and Roman theater therefore let's say you can still find the peers actually of the theater in the city around so it's here and here we have a few interesting architectural maneuvers which San Felicia does and which let's say are interesting in relation to series of tendency we have to do with nobility how nobility would live at that time so this is how a typical for example palazzo staircase would work you try to put them as close as possible to the entrance so that when you arrive you go up to the stair in this case we have this peculiar thing that the stairs move actually very far back this is interesting for two reasons the first one is like a very strong relationship which you kind of arrive at establishing between the street escape between the street view and the stair at the back the second one has to do with the increasing let's say popularity reception used to have in the 1700s in Naples so the idea of receiving guests and placing the stair at the back would have guests go through all the display rooms before you would arrive to the main living room so in fact you would experience as a guest a larger extent of the palazzo and therefore be impressed if you want by all the features on display in these rooms such as books, paintings and so forth so let's say this building here is not the first case in fact in which we see a rhomboidal stair it's shaped like a diamond this is a motif which San Felicia develops in a few other staircases before so it's turned in fact 45 degrees from this type of staircase and that has to do with the fact that in that way you would arrive in the center of the rooms rather than on the side which is a very undesirable place to enter a room of course that also creates another series of consequences which let's say are very interesting for example in relation to how you see the stair developing in at the end of the court so when you experience it frontally you see it developing like that rather than parallel to the wall so that's we go back to that problem we described at the beginning so you touch it with the minimum point which is the landing somehow and on the other hand let's say the vaulting becomes incredibly interesting question to you now with the palazzo I showed you a picture of before what's even more interesting is that the staircase is doubled so you enter from one part and you can go up in either direction so it's not just like this one where you go like this and then you're forced to enter here and for example to access these rooms you have to go through the entire palazzo at one point here the staircase is doubled so that at every landing you can enter on both sides and this makes it possible that you don't need a loggia in front of the stair so if here for example you would have a loggia here which would distribute on one side and the other let's say the people depending on where they want you to go in the palazzo or in the case of 2% of palazzo's all around the courtyard in the stair San Felice proposes in Palazzo Laureano in fact we have let's say a symmetrical stair which let's say reads itself of the loggia and therefore if you want results in more let's say cohesive and unitarian if you want scheme on the other hand it's also like a very monumental gesture which of course has a whole series of expressive consequences the other thing which is interesting is that here the stair let's say invades the courtyard so it's not relegated behind walls anymore and these historians have let's say justified by the fact that these windows were existing already before so in fact this was a way to somehow not touch the windows which would light existing rooms yeah and therefore the palace already existed before the staircase is the insertion if you want and this is the typical situation in the time architects would very rarely get a commission to design the whole palazzo or to rebuild the whole palazzo but at any rate let's say here you know by means of this invasion we are exposed to that very tricky moment which what Blunt was describing before again which here is let's say very eloquently solved but we'll talk about it more in his own thoughts so where it's even more refined I'll just show you a few pictures of let's say how this presents itself when you arrive there so there are these two staircases going up and then you have the situation where doors repeat themselves at four floors so it's always the same always as you go up sometimes you have stairs which allow you to mitigate between levels because obviously not all if you if you have a staircase which is so let's say repetitive you don't always get at the same let's say level in the floors so quite interesting series of measures if you want to repeat themselves one for the other then the other thing which is quite impressive is the way in fact the windows are developed which are from here look fairly normal but in fact are very carefully designed detail which is quite unique in history of architecture entirely so this is a scheme which let's say shows us this window in plan it's quite impressive because let's say first of all San Felicia aligns the edges of the window to let's say the view you would have of the palazzo right so that somehow you would never experience the thickness of the wall in its entirety but on the other hand he kind of undoes this measure by developing this weird detail which has a double effect of sorts so you in fact have a sense of depth but it's a thick depth so in fact it looks very slim even though it's a monstrously big window and and this let's say is you know you actually understand when you're on the other side of the window of this opening and it's kind of significant of the importance for example that this architect in particular was giving to the gaze of this window from the moment in which you enter yeah was a very theatrical sort of moment which which is something actually typical of Baroque palaces which start to achieve a directionality in relation for example to Schimploschente palazzo which where the courtyard usually was something harmonious on all sides and which usually tried to establish the tail a core in Baroque palaces I'll show you later there's a drawing of Batswacht Day in Rome which which Wolfman for example deals as a like a contemporary reference we always have let's say a certain axial relation to the space which then and in particular let's well actually so we'll move to his own palazzo which in fact may be the last thing I'll talk about by him it's a project which lasted five to six years to construct it it's located in a very let's say at the moment popularistic area of the city so you can buy for example a flat inside it nice big flat for like a hundred and fifty thousand euros and it's quite grimy it's more or less falling apart somehow but anyways it was built in a a borgo or a very small settlement just outside the city walls in fact it was an illegal settlement and this is important because we have to understand that the geometry in fact of of the palazzo and this weird let's say situation which arises from it is is contingent to the fact that here some fiddles have to work with existing foundations and these foundations were most probably the foundation of an informal construction so in fact it's a very tricky case to work with if we look at the plan of the palazzo this is kind of the extent of this plot with the garden at the back some finish it uses it divides it in two courtyards each courtyard has a stair and each courtyard is dealt with let's say differently somehow and so when you would see for example this building from the street it has two portals these are all photographs by Anthony Blount by the way it has two which goes there in the 60s to document it has two portals one let's say gives you a direct view onto a snail and the other one gives you a direct view onto a hawk wing now these two courtyards are interesting in relation to one another because some finish here does something which it becomes increasingly a tendency at the time which is he builds a palazzo for himself of course but actually rents an entire floor of it so in that case he would use the courtyard with the hawk wing and let's say the tenant of the first floor which I'll show you in a minute instead would use the other staircase that doesn't mean that they would live in separate courtyards both of the apartments actually developed along the two courtyards so on one entire floor but they just had a different means of access and also actually a very different experience of access so this you can see it in the quite let's say peculiar relation between floors so the piano nobile is actually the last floor which is San Felicia's and the slightly lower piano nobile is the one that he would rent out and then on the bottom obviously servants and so forth. Yeah here's a plan I'm gonna quickly show you the stairs now how they work let's say in relation to the access of entrance but effectively let's say this this was the means of access for the the tenant this was the means of access for San Felicia himself and the two courtyards are let's say develop let's say in relation to the stairs but also develop with their very different motives on that so here we can see that the edges of the courtyard are like trimmed off and that you know is an expressive trope which again is actually typical of Baroque architecture but it's more interesting to see how the stair develops so it's two snails which touch each other after one round which they go up and this gives it quite let's say interesting theatrical effect when you arrive so it starts as one stair which then let's say splits in two and then the stairs goes around goes around these very thick nozzles yeah so yeah here you can see developing this is a deep tip which shows you more or less the experience you'd have when you arrive there with these two stairs departing and then yeah come up from here and you arrive in the hall where they come back together again in a vaulted hall which is illuminated from the back with these windows. This is the plan again here historians have suggested in fact this comes from a stair again from Fischer von Erlach for his cathedral in Salzburg which is the stair at a very very very far back it's something you wouldn't experience if you go to the church because it's reserved to the priests but in plan it's significantly similar in fact to that of some tradition that's there. On the other hand there is the hopwing which again you know is placed symmetrical to the courtyard somehow sort of sort of to the portal and then also here it develops around the same motif it's two stairs which go up and up together. So here we see it it's located at the very far back and it creates this kind of very theatrical backdrop to the daily life in the palazzo yeah so it almost in fact they almost in fact look like the niches you would have in a theater yeah to look at the performance. This the drawing actually I was talking to you about before so this drawing it's one of the only drawings that Wolfling includes in the Renaissance in Baroque book when talking about the Baroque palazzo and on this idea of the it's the directionality of it. So this is the palazzo Mattenero which has the lodge of famously only at the back which frames the ten entrance to a garden behind which I guess here is interesting in relation to the case of something similar because it develops along the very same motif but then again here you know what I was saying before it's interesting because he gets rid of the lodger and somehow joins stair and lodging to one element which also has let's say this very let's say representative and theatrical let's say effect and which also let's say allows all the people in the building to access the floors individually. So in fact now there are more than 40 units in the building so the rooms have been chopped up in corridors and so forth and all our access to this there. Expressively this is quite interesting it starts to move away actually from the typical tropes or language of classical architecture and in fact it seems to almost look much more at the kind of muscular architecture of Roman infrastructure such as Aquidot's for instance when you're inside it's a very let's say thick and dense elements which you know with big wall sections and piers and you're always let's say exposed to these very aggressive openings which face one onto each other. Actually there is in relation to Fuga which was a big fan of San Felice there is a stair in Rome in Palazzo Corsini which has a very similar effect. So this is as you walk up and then every time it frames the garden of the back. So in fact it is a structure of this dick which is between a courtyard and a garden. So it's this kind of buffer between these two dimensions of the Palazzo which at the same time it articulates all the life inside it. This is the relationship between the two openings of two ramps going up and down that's the window onto the garden of the back. Now in terms of expression you see these are these distorted openings which seem fairly arbitrary but in fact there was a lot of talking going on in Europe at the time on how one would deal with the question of the oblique. In fact there is one caramel which is a Spanish priest, a mathematician, physicist and improvised architect who writes an entire treatise called Arquitectura Civil Recta i Oblique where he tries to in fact canonize these exceptional moments within architectural expression where you are let's say. In fact it comes from a very painterly approach which deals with let's say a correct mathematical way to distort architectural elements in relation to perspectival view if you're doing a painting but also to these very unique moments such as the stair for example when you are in actual fact building. So I'm sure he might or might not have looked at this book but it was a very influential book at the time. In fact Caramel builds also a project in Italy in... Where is it? It's a piazza with a church at the end which has occurred façade. In Jevon exactly, exactly. But here we can also tell the difference so if Caramel for example theorized that if you have a column between a straight section and oblique one you always put the line in which it breaks at the exact middle of the column we already see how St. Felicius starts to develop his own approach to the matter which is in fact much more refined and elegant and this is most let's say noticeable also if you compare it with the people who have later tried to emulate him. So for example this is by an engineer architect called Attanasio and it's actually 200 meters away from that palazzo but here you can see how the architect is still in some way dicting of a post-lintel system which in fact is abandoned entirely here where we have a much more seamless and smooth expression. This is the case somehow with all the imitations of St. Felicius, St. Felicius' particular solution which are actually very many many many enabled and which somehow give an idea of how this peculiar let's say exceptional case ended up becoming if you want an assertive type of nobility or dwelling within the old town which I guess brings us back on the general conversation we can have later maybe on how we can define this metropolitan architecture in the first place. Maybe the most interesting case which is actually what I'm working on now is actually how to connect this to Fuga who works later in Naples on a large poor house, a cemetery and the granary building but which beforehand and almost during the same years St. Felicius built his own palace has this very peculiar staircase actually when you enter in the courtyard of Palazzo da Consulta at your back which develops exactly along that motif and we know that Fuga was in fact in Naples before building his palace and he probably would have visited the construction site at that building which was one of the most let's say exotic novelties which everyone would go see during its construction and this is also to address that question you were saying before Fuga being a late Baroque architect and not an early if you want enlightenment one and this is kind of a way to make an interesting hinge between these two definitions of these there's also another interesting hinge which is<|it|><|translate|> a big actually unspoken in all this situation, and he is like, he's the champion of Italian architecture very unmentioned at the time but that's another story with us on another occasion. That's it. Thank you for your question. When you say that you've already spoken here of this tale about stairs and solutions, the diagonal, I mean I'm curious now. So could you please? Yeah, sure. This is actually another site project I'm developing now for a symposium that will be in April at the Courtauld, where they asked us to choose specific architectural drawings to take out from the archives and talk about, you know, let's say, a round table of 10-15 people. And I have started to do research on a series of studies Juarez has done, has been drawing for stage sets for the Teatro Toboni in Rome. And now what's interesting with Juvarra, independently from that, is that somehow the young group Juvarra in Rome is one of the most, let's say, he wins this very big competition fact done by Toboni himself, I think. I'm not entirely, I don't remember that exactly. And he is, let's say, the figure everyone is looking at at the time. So for example, we know that Casper von Wittel sends Luigi van Bitteli to study under Juvarra during the years he's doing these theater drawings, and which will curiously, let's say, which where he probably picks up many of the motifs which will curiously reoccur within the Regen Caserta, but also within the drawings which van Bitteli did for the theater in Caserta. And this, let's say, is part of a side chapter in the importance of theater actually in early enlightenment as a space, which actually takes over, if you want, the sacred pulpit of religion as a proper, let's say, political site. On the other hand, there is Fuga, which famously for his first project for the Albert Goli Pauveri, in fact, drafts an option which is a most literal translation of a project Juvarra had done for the consulta, for the people consulta in Rome 10 years before. And it's a one to one borrowing of that. So Juvarra is a bit disfigured, which let's say has a very, and also some fiddles in fact is, if you want, it's always associated with Juvarra, because Juvarra also comes to Naples and does a few church decorations for I don't remember which festivity for the Duomo, which obviously were a very important case study for some fiddles himself. This was at the beginning of the 1700s, so at the same time he's doing the stage sets for the Ottoboni Theater, and Santelice being himself engaged in the construction of a funeral architecture was for sure, if you want, studying Juvarra's solutions. On the other hand, I mean, the other fascination I have with Juvarra is, first of all, he's an architect of extreme talent, which demonstrates somehow a very refined capacity to develop bespoke solutions for very peculiar problems. And on the other hand, he is also an architect which probably most of all exposes, let's say, an approach which is typical of early enlightenment, which is very eclectic, but not eclectic meaning flamboyantly, if you want, over the bar, but eclectic in a sense of being able to make use of different, if you want, architectural expressions or languages, depending on the case. So which, of course, is something which we can refer back to Fischer Ponellach, but which is also actually one of the biggest qualities of Fuga, for instance, who is able to create the most austere, almost Jansenese architecture at the same time he's doing Palazzo della Consulca, for example. Well, of course, it's a danger that, oh, really, I would be happy if you can give us an answer to my question. Maybe it's a difficult question to answer because I even don't let you know how to formulate the question. Your part here, I mean, I think we wanted to have you here for two reasons. I think, first of all, because what you bring in in terms of, I mean, the particularity of the work of Fuga as Fuglice is extremely interesting and beautiful on its own right, on a tectonic level, on the kind of, I mean, especially the staircase he does for himself. So Palazzo seems to today, maybe perhaps from a Swiss perspective, so contemporary. Yeah. Almost shocked, right? I mean, I think that's an aspect of it. I mean, certain Swiss architects will be happy to make such things. At the same time, there is, you touched upon that, this argument of making a facade for a building which is inside the building because you have these very narrow streets, you have these big gates, and then in some strange way you can bring the facade deep inside. That is another, I think, very important, very fascinating thing of the architecture you show. Then, of course, if you try to zoom out even more, and you know that you're the third fragment of our attempt, of course, together with students to define what today could be metropolitan architecture, in which I think the default answer is not allowed, which is, ah, it's building within the metropolis, but rather an architecture which tries to carry in itself a kind of promise of the metropolis. I mean, to recall for ourselves, Christopher Hannaway, he brought in, I mean, amongst other topics, this idea of this, I would say, collective living, which is highly individualized. I mean, to sort of say that you're totally on your own, but you're part of an infrastructure which is so big that you can do things which you cannot otherwise. I think when we saw last time Madein, so, Charles Bonnet, he was, of course, and he was asked to talk about his own architecture, he was showing this, I would have to say, most high-tech kind of architecture, highly expressive in terms of the bold and very often, by the way, without a steel kind of system of it. In some sense, when we look at this, some of the architecture buildings, they seem to touch both, but maybe that's purely projection. I was wondering how you see that. I think the interesting slide probably, the matrix basically with all the stairs, exactly. So, I think if there is one, there's more than one, but if there is one, if you want, instance where we can start to talk about this there, something which is more than itself. So now, it's in relation to, if you want, this assertive type, which is the open-stair napkins. And which, as I kind of briefly explained, but one should, in fact, explain much better, which is actually born out of a very idiosyncratic, let's say, urban condition. So, Naples is a case where collective dwelling, if you want, as we refer to today. So therefore, the idea of building, of having your own house within a larger compound, united by a staircase, a common staircase or a common circulation, is in fact one of the cities to have it earliest, precisely because of the, let's say, the spatial, if you want, how do you say, constraints, which the city posed to its inhabitants, which would continuously build on top, and on top, and on top. And to a certain extent, you know, we can also say that this way of living has largely or vastly conditioned, I would say, and I would love to think, a certain approach to, let's say, the idea of a neighbor itself. In a city like Naples, or the idea of private, or ideas such as private and public affairs within, let's say, domestic compounds, for example, in a city like Naples. And the whole, if you want, theatricality of Neapolitan life. So that is, I think, definitely a discussion to be made. On the other hand, we can talk here, I think, of, I don't know if metropolitan maybe is the right word, but maybe it's more cosmopolitan, if you want, so an architecture which is at once, it's a strongly rooted to its context, to the point that, you know, it's almost kind of indisturnable from it. But also, if you want, refers to a whole system of ideas which is, which goes totally beyond its immediate reach. And which I very briefly tried to mention, so now. So then there's this idea of this parasite, you know, like this stairs which punctually somehow, through a single typology, infects. If you want the entirety of the urban tissue in a very discrete way, that's a very much effect, let's say, the way the city works, at a smaller scale. So this, I think, is also an interesting matter, you know, because I always actually ask myself, okay, what could be another case in which a single architectural element has been so, if you want, so assertive and so deterministic for the way in which let's say a city works. And I kind of struggle to find it. It's more easy to find it, for example, in legislative measures. So for example, when a city says you can't build more than four, then you start to have, you know, a series of consequences to that which develop into traditions. So that's kind of easier. It's easier to, let's say, to find it within that kind of framework. But it's less easy to find it, let's say, in similar terms to some finishes. And that, I think, is possibly something interesting. Or it could maybe be the, there's a technological aspect to it, you know, it could maybe be the elevator and the roof, for example. But that's, I think, on the edge. Being the elevator almost an invisible element, you know, it doesn't play such an old... But I think, I mean, coming back to this... But sorry, just very briefly, I would also dare to say that this is a technological aspect too. Oh yeah. Even though it has no wiring. No, no, true, true. True. No, and coming back to the stairs, I mean, I think there's indeed this, again, weird parallel, you know, because let me say as ancestors, you know, of this metapointan architecture, we were obviously looking, and being Paris now, the center of our attention for the first semester, we were obviously looking at a certain ITAC architecture, as Catherine was mentioning, and it's the Asupasion. But even later, let me say, Nouvelle, and obviously if you talk about Paris, you have to talk about Boutbourg, and then suddenly I think there's this, again, weird analogy, you know, that the stairs from an element which was completely high, no, hidden before, sorry, during all Paranascence, now that suddenly comes the first thing you see in a building. If you consider Boutbourg, you consider, I don't know, the Lloyds in London, you know. Suddenly, with this sort of architecture, the stairs is the absolute protagonist. It comes to the facade, it defines the way in which you look at the building, even defines the way in which you think at the building. So the building is a building of floors, no more than a building of staying, I would say, or so. I think it's interesting, this sort of transformation, and now the elements becomes central to a certain idea of architecture. Yes, actually I didn't state it so clearly that the intelligent thing here with all these projects is in fact an issue which is, if you want, a very, let's say, a matter of fact functional issue, here assumes, if you want, the core expressive, if you want, functions. The problem becomes the architecture. Yeah. In fact, Louis Cannon, maybe even more so, is probably the... Another one to look at in these terms. I sort of have trouble to believe, but that has more to do with the fact that I cannot understand how people lived in buildings in the 17th or 18th century. I have sometimes trouble to understand that it was one house or a house with one reddish floor. As you said, when I visited it with you, many of the buildings were also his own. Yeah, you had the feeling that it was always meant as a building for men. Yeah, no, his own, for sure, was meant at least for two, because there was the Duke renting the flat downstairs, because San Felicio was noble of birth, but also not so rich. So somehow, let's say, he had to recoup the money he had borrowed to build this palazzo by renting out the floor. Which is also, for example, what happens in Tristanzara's house, Los, where the floor immediately above the house of Tristanzara is actually up-floor to rent out, to recoup building costs. But then there's also something else to it, which I feel is less apparent on the pictures, much more when you're there. But you mentioned it, I think, briefly. The stairs are the protagonists, as you said. I mean, in location, in composition, but also in the way they are detailed, in the sense that the rest of the building often looks far less cheaper done, more trashy, to some extent, which I find also in relationship, I would say, to the studio very interesting. So it's this kind of, what's the hierarchy of the architecture, to a certain sense. Yeah, no, that's true. In fact, this has to do, I think, with a broader topic, which is when you start a project, particularly with projects like this, where you have a given context, and budgets which are usually not so high, in fact, for palazzo standards. Where do you put the energy in how, let's say, you, and how do you deal with, let's say, contextual questions? And here, it's exactly that. If you want, we have these signature pieces, somehow, which obviously are related to the rest, but which clearly, let's say, are centers of gravity, for the internal architecture and expression. Questions from the public? Yes. Here, the first kind of the... Just to follow up with this discussion, it's maybe very interesting also to note that you started by showing this festive machine, that are an element of sonography, and in a way, this staircase could be even interpreted as sonography themselves, and kind of outrageous type of sonography, that is a collision between architecture and the world, in a very technological way. So, if you look at this staircase... No, not this one. This one. So, this staircase here... Play. I think you have to press play. Play. Play. No, because I wanted to go faster, but whatever, let's do it, as it's done. So, if you look at this staircase here, and then compare it to that tower I showed before, it's in fact exactly the same element, which just kind of occupies a courtyard, rather than being freestanding in a square, as that element actually is, which again suggests that in fact, it's probably something which has much more to do, it's probably something which has... Even though this is a later project, so this is 1740, the other one was around mid-1720s, it also kind of suggests that if you want this choreographic element, it's as important as was the functional one of accessing, if you want, two parts of the palazzos with one stair and with other lodger. So, even there, it's like an economy of means, somehow, which allows you to do two things with one thing. So, but yeah, definitely there's a... Like the link is super strong. I'm interested in that. More questions. But this, I think, is also interesting, this idea of the gravity, if you want, of the design of these entire complexes on these staircases, is actually, I think, one of the most interesting features of Fugas architecture always, where mostly, I'm not interested in Palazzo Corsini and in the Albertian Naples, you have an extreme economy of means in dealing with, let's say, the organization of space, in dealing with the expression on the facade, except for these two exceptional moments on the one hand, in the Palazzo Corsini, in the staircase, which was a stair gallery, in fact, where the bishop, because that was the cousin of the pope, Neri Corsini, had all his collection of statues. And on the other hand, in the Al-Daghari Poverty, which is... The church. Yeah, exactly. Which is... Do I have it? Yes. That building up there... I could zoom out, but whatever. The church in the center, which is effectively the only true, if you want, intense moment, experientially speaking... Yeah, which connects everything, actually. Yeah, which actually connects everything, and which acts as a core for the entire project, which otherwise is a very dry building, which even in art history is always kind of neglected as a kind of late failure, late experiment, like something which arrives too late, in fact, because that's kind of... Maybe that's also an interesting case for the brief Metropolitan architecture. His Pugas project under Charles of Bourbon, which actually are located in Naples, but address the entire rain, so from Naples to Palermo. So buildings which are incredibly out of scale for their context, but which, let's say, geographically, and which managerially have to do with a much larger scope. So that inspires more questions, Christ. More questions? Nothing? I think they... I have another one. Yeah, another one. We were noticing before that in many of these stairs, obviously the geometry, the fact that you got the flights, and so the diagonal lines are even obviously implicating a sort of perspective of, how to say, distortion. Yeah. I mean, you wonder whether you got this sort of, how to say, intentional playing with perspective, which is very much what you think about Bach, among other things. You wonder which is the consciousness, no? Because obviously if you are staging the stairs as the main element, then suddenly you got in your hands a formidable tool, no, in order to even play with perspective. And when you look at them from the courtyards, no, seeing that, let me say that, for example, the routes which are going down, no, and it's very much, again, an incredible, how to say, trick, no? Yeah. There is an interesting theory, actually, an architect who is living in the Palazzo at the moment, is developing by drawing it all, which has to do with the vaulting of these urges. But mostly those where he is kind of trying to prove that the last ones are much more tilted than the ones below, so that you could see, let's say, they're under part from the bottom. So from one perspective, in fact, from one point of view. Which, of course, means that, yeah, this comment that you made is entirely pertinent, even more so. This whole idea of distortion is, in fact, a painterly problem before it is an architectural problem. So it has to do, for example, with, and it's a problem which architects have dealt with since Guero de la Francesca. How do you properly distort a Corinthian order with mathematical rules which are, let's say, as rigorous as those of Vitruvius? Also, and in paintings, in painting, obviously, maybe it's slightly easier, but in the case of building, actually, these elements, it's more tricky. And that's kind of the central point of debate, in fact, of Guarini and Caramuel, when they have this epistol exchange, where Guarini, in fact, accuses Caramuel of having no clue whatsoever how you built, how to build, and what it means to work tectonically with elements. And, let's say, claiming that, in fact, he is an architectural amateur and should spend more words on painting rather than building. But you see also here, with Sant'Vicius, on the Palazzo, he moves towards an architecture of wall rather than elements, right? So as a result, he can simplify his kind of programming, so he seems like he, I mean, also the other much more narrow, I forgot the name, other court, the one with the... I see, this one, here. I mean, in a way, there's so little detail that he's able to get away with it. Yeah, yeah, yes. And here less, like here you still have if you want to. But the other one very much, they're almost reduced, the orders are almost reduced to lines, to guiding lines. This is what you notice in the people who have tried to do these stairs again in Naples, which they have to struggle always because they want to keep the... here, it's more of this here, where they even steps down here where you have this very kinky moment where something diagonal ends up into a capital. This one is better. That's Nicola Tania Kotsyrika, and Aleutius Great-Ancient. But he didn't get out of commissions because he was slightly later than San Felicius at the time in which the two big guys in Naples were Fugan and Vitelli. And then there were the architects associated to them, I forgot the names, but they were the ones getting all the jobs. And San Felicius would only be able to do these temporary actually structures once again because they were getting all the big commissions. In fact, the only big commission San Felicius gets is the gardens of Capodimunta. And yeah, that's about it. Sad story, sad story. Good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
 Allow me to introduce a bishop Balabi who let's say I know from time back at the time  I was actually together with Andrea Fitching in Mauricio and I happen to be in your jury.  Yeah, my diploma. One of the only positive voices.  Trying to salvage him from Pallirio Giacti's attempt to totally destroy it.  Today Fabricio is a unit master professor at AA school and that of course that is a box which  contains many things because there's many voices at the AA school. So they think increasingly  his project, if I could call it like that, concentrates on architecture history. I had  luck actually to be guided around by Fabricio in Napoli to see these very buildings he's  going to talk about, about San Felice. I think it's part of his increasing fascination for  Italian Baroque, then even more specifically Napolitan Baroque of which I would like to  add Fuga is also an integrity party, although some people might consider him not entirely  a Baroque architect. But today there is San Felice's, I would have to say staircase's,  but of course much more than that. San Felice is this Baroque architect which I guess never  anybody heard of until Fabricio decided to write an article about him. We in our studio  we like very much because as a third incarnation in this series of lectures which we see, we  feel related to metropolitan architecture, we felt there's a possible interpretation  of course there to be tested by Fabricio where these big shared compounds with a high I would  say level of individuality seem to find their kind of common language in this particularity  of this circulation devices there. Now I give the word to you, but thanks a lot for coming.  Thank you.  This is about the microphone.  Should I talk in the microphone?  Maybe.  Can you hear me? I would rather not. That's okay. Yeah? Can you hear me? Okay. So I'm going  to present the work I've been doing the last couple of years now. I've already moved on  a bit, but on San Felice in Naples. And this is a work which came out probably as a scare  storm was hinting through a fascination. There are these staircases which she has designed  are relatively let's say famous in Naples, not at all renowned let's say in academic  circles abroad. And therefore I had very personally let's say started to go visit them and become  interested in them and started to do proper research to understand how they had come into  being. So to a certain extent I think also in relation to the brief you're doing this  year, I'll try with this presentation to address a very let's say peculiar in particular  architectural problem which has to do with let's say how to deal with staircases typologically  with enabling and in terms of their expression at the moment in time in which architecture  still but almost still let's say expresses itself through a language. And then I will  try to let's say address how they fit within a broader context which has to do with the  open stair as a typology if you want which flourishes in 18th century in Naples, so in  the 1700s. So the basic problem in designing a staircase which is visible on the facade  of a building is that if the flights run parallel to the facade, the windows or the arches by  which they are lit form a diagonal line which cuts across the horizontal of the floors. Or  if the staircase is on a square plan with the flights running alternately parallel with  the facade and at right angles to it, the openings on the landings will come at levels  halfway between the floors. So this is a quote from Anthony Blunt which I'm not sure  you're all familiar with but he's an architectural historian which is obviously dead by now but  he used to be the head of the Courtauld Institute in London, the personal advisor of the Queen's  collection of paintings and a communist spy at the same time. And he wrote a beautiful  book called Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo Architecture. Within the chapter on St. Elisha  he talks about this very peculiar problem which has to do with let's say the challenge  architects have been faced with since Renaissance I would say to deal with let's say a misfit.  So on the one hand a language which has a certain series of rules which let's say in  years they try to figure out how to transform into a proper architectural language. On the  other hand they necessitate to apply these rules to buildings and typologies which they  were not meant for. So I'll try to give you three cases in which these problems occur.  The first one when the staircase runs perpendicular to the facade we can see Palazzo da Celleria  here where let's say the architect has tried to integrate them within the caveatio so that  somehow even though in fact it is a misfit because to light the stair you have to drop  down the windows there is an attempt to somehow amalgamate it in the composition of the whole.  So it's and you will see the time and time again it's always a matter of trying to hide  this element which in fact is endemic to classical architecture it does not belong to it. So  that staircase is this one here. Another example which where we have the staircase running  parallel to the wall is in Palazzo Farnese which is let's say hidden altogether. So here  the stairs lead from the top and the windows are in fact walled out. And possibly the third  example is when we have the arcade staircase which goes up, right, on more than one level.  And here we see this very peculiar problem of which Santelish is a master at solving  which is this. So this awkward triangle which occurs between the diagonal line of the stair  and the base in the capitals of the column which is to a certain extent a bestemia. I  don't know how to say this but it's a very, how do you say bestemia in English? It's like  a cur, it's an architectural curse somehow. It's something very wrong and it's actually  an object of a very fierce debate between Guarini and another architectural story, well  architectural theorist I will mention later which is called Juan Caramuel. They talk, let's  say there is an exchange of letter precisely on this detail. How to deal with let's say  this combination of you know classical orders which have a rule and this diagonal line introduced  by the staircases. So this is the staircase Santelish designs for his own palazzo in Naples.  In fact it's one of the, let's say the last projects which belongs to a series in his  own work. So it's not one of his last projects because eventually he will live until the  end of the 1740s but this is the moment in which he is most busy let's say in working  for the local mobility. And that has to do with a series of historical questions which  maybe I'll explain later but in 1735 there is a change in the regime of Naples which  had until then been a vice royalty under the Aragonese, the Austrian Habsburg and so forth  and in 1735 suddenly the Bourbons come to Naples and bring with them a new series of  architects and a new series of let's say concerns in matter of how they were to exert their  power architecturally speaking. So Santelish is basically out of the picture. So he will  live another 10 years but he's not very influential. So this is kind of the height of his career.  As I said before this, the discussion on his staircase in his palazzo is actually more  interesting to see in correlation with something which develops almost as a Neapolitan type  which is that of the open stair. And let's say there are a number of ways in which we  can interpret this type, how it came into being. On the one hand historians have followed  the traditional path of starting with the masterpiece and in a sense, how do you say,  referring all the later pieces to that. On the other hand instead we can see it as a very  let's say matter of fact architectural problem which arises due to a series of very peculiar  conditions the city of Naples has had in its development between the 1500s and the 1700s.  I'm going to explain that later. We should probably briefly introduce Santelish because  I guess nobody has ever heard of him in here. And this is a portrait he had made of himself  in 1735. There are a few things which already make this portrait quite eloquent in terms  of for example the architecture which is framing him. We see references to treatises in France  such as Philippe de Lormes, the Tombe sort of bit of tour. And the inscription at the  base of this arch is very interesting. It's called the Patricius Nebolitamus. So it's  basically the word architect doesn't even appear in this particular inscription. In  fact he's quite keen on clarifying or stating his state of birth. He's a nobleman belonging  to the Sege de Montagna which is a very important area of which at the time at least owned a  very big part of the northern eastern part of the Newstovall town in Naples. He's holding  books which obviously mean that it's an expression of let's say a certain cultural finesse and  awareness of what is going around in Europe as I said which is further corroborated by  let's say the particular elements which characterize this picture. So he is an amateur in actual  fact, not a trained architect in an academy because Naples didn't even have an academy  comparable to that of Saint-Lucas for example in Rome. And his education was in fact entirely  crafted out of self-interest on books and working for a very famous painter actually  called Francesco Salimena which is one of the highest representative of late Baroque  painting in Naples. So in fact it's interesting he was, being a nobleman could have been  a very, how do you say, could have put him in a position of extreme let's say advantage  because obviously he would get much more commissions but in his particular case it was actually  a deterrent because his father had destined him for law studies and it is only when the  father dies around 1693 if I'm not mistaken that he is actually able to embark in a career  within the arts. So his brother which was the Archbishop of Nardofdoll which is a very  small town in Puglia where Saint-Lucas eventually does his first projects, talks, shows some  drawings of his to this painter Francesco Salimena which was let's say the absolute superstar  of the entire art scene in Naples at the time. And a particular painter let's say very much  in tune with other Baroque painters around Italy but famously let's say a sort of anachronistic  painter almost to an extent who is able to for example put I don't know the exuberance  of Barocci and the let's say composition of Raphael within the same painting. But from  the one hand we have let's say you know all the theatricality which is you know which we  usually assign to Baroque painting with diagonal compositions and the figures let's say come  out of concentrating at the center this is the the exposure of Elidorus from the temple.  We also have a let's say a very composed set in which this occur which of course you know  refers to the school of Athens this very famous painting by Raphael which dates to 150-200  years back. So yes this for us is important because we start to understand how San Felici  actually arrives at the building site as a decorator much more than as an architect.  So someone who works within a condition which is given and then develops let's say a language  in correlation to that somehow. And so his first let's say works on his own in fact consists  of what were called at the time Machina da Festa so celebratory machines in fact which  were ephemeral architectures for the celebration of important events within the city for example  the incarnation of the king or the birth of a king's son or daughter or the how do you  say the end of a plague for instance and in fact even though they were ephemeral and obviously  not much remains but the drawings and the paintings of this structure they were an incredibly  important part in the let's say in the governmental dynamics of the city. So in fact these were  architectural machines as much as machines for consensus with which let's say the power  that be would impress and please the population and let's say gain consensus by you know getting  these very pompous and exuberant manifestations of power. This is one of the first actually  designed by San Felicia and you know we can already notice somehow a very exuberant language  which has to do of course with the fact that these are temporary structures where architects  would probably experiment much more than if it were a permanent building but here it's  carried forth to an extent where we have references which go actually beyond even European references.  This has to do with a situation in which Napoli is at that time so at the end of 1600s Naples  is in fact one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe. It is third in size after London  Paris so bigger than Rome in terms of population at least and it is let's say even though it  is a vice royalty at the end of the 1600s and even at the beginning of the 1700s so  it's not the capital of a reign until the Bourbons arrive in 1734 even though it is a vice royalty  it still let's say attracts a big wealth of artists, architects and writers for example  which spend a very long time there and develop important works and let's say contribute to  a very large exchange of ideas which occurs there. One of them for example is Gaspar van  Witten which is a Dutch painter famously the father of Luigi van Vitelli which then  would be the architect of the Royal Palace in Casetta in Naples even though van Vitelli  is actually brought up in Rome. Another for example interesting example is Fischer von  Erlach which spends five to ten years in Naples when Naples is under the dominion of the Austrian  Habsburgs and in fact this is one of the last projects St. Felicia does which is a machina  de festas on a celebratory machine to be built here and it was built and there are paintings  of it and everything which quite curiously refers to or has a lot of analogies with the  famous drawing of the pagoda in the porcelain pagoda in Nanjing and we are sure that let's  say St. Felicia has the chance to see the entwurf not only because we know that Fischer van  Erlach was in Naples for an extended period in fact he builds one of the biggest celebratory  machines Fischer van Erlach ever to be seen which was called Maestoso Teatro del mare  the majestic theater of the sea so it was a huge construction of a circle of I don't  know how many meters in diameter but there were basically in the middle of the bay a  gigantic platform with two pyramids and a triumphal arch in the middle and they would  have bullfights around and then a whole project of illumination with torches on the ocean  which illuminated the entire gulf basically so it was a gigantic project realized we  unfortunately have no trace of it visually or I have not found it but it's in the chronicles  for example of the city different writers write about it and surely St. Felicia was  about ten maybe when he saw this but surely let's say the entire city of Naples was exposed  to the spectacle and surely this would have given a strong impression to him so that's  anyways a side chapter even though we'll see that motif of this stair coming back toward  the end of the presentation we should focus probably on what St. Felicia is most famous  for which is in fact these very famous well Naples at least stairwells for palaces and  here again you know the Austrian influence comes back also with other people for example  Jakob Brandtauer which was one of the most famous architects at the end of the 1600s  also has a residency in Naples for some ten years he held the brand together with him  comes to Naples in fact so in fact there is a very curious amalgamation of interests  and architectural styles which comes to Naples and obviously the architects they are very  receptive to this. The staircases of St. Felicia are a very curious phenomenon which let's  say develops along two parallel lines these parallel lines in fact give the title to the  presentation we have snails and we have hawk wings and this is the description actually  the biographer of the lives of painters, sculptors and the Neapolitan architects gives of these  stairs so this is if you want Naples' Vasari to a certain extent even though it's actually  not a very good book and it's even quite inaccurate in most of the descriptions but anyways he  gives this curious Zomorfic analogy to describe these two types of staircases which St. Felicia  does one type is the snails so these are the stairs which develops like a spiral somehow  and which let's say historians mostly associate with the Austrian model of the staircase in  the hall and then instead there are the hawk wings which are let's say I would say an invention  of St. Felicia himself and the hawk wings are called hawk wings because they are they look  like a hawk with its wings open and so these are the two types in probably two of St. Felicia's  most let's say or is best let's say projects one is the stair of Palazzo Bartolone di  Maio which is an enclosed stair case in a large well with windows obviously in the courtyard  the other one is the one of his own so the hawk wing refers to this kind of geometry.  Yeah I'll give you a few examples so one recurrent motif is that these stairs are always working  in close proximity to a courtyard so you would access them through the main court of the building  and usually you would some finish would make you cross the entire of the courtyard to explain  why later but anyways this is a famous case in Palazzo Serra di Cassano it's a bit of a  unique type so it's something that St. Felicia never develops again this and it is a stairwell  which develops within a large hall so it's in fact two snails which start together here  then go up and then meet together at the top again and this has to do very much with how  the users of the building would access it you know with a carriage from here crossing the  courtyard the carriage would sit here one guest or one person would go on one side one on  the other side and then they would meet upstairs again and it's quite beautiful actually the  way in which the hall is dealt with which is entirely unadorned it is a white a huge  white vaulted space fairly abstract and then you have the use of this very typical Neapolitan  stone which is Piperno it's like a volcanic stone very porous and darkish gray but here  we can already see that something let's say interesting is going on in relation to the  staircase with Palazzo Barberini so the Bernini one where the balustrades are distorted to  follow the geometry of the rail yeah and they're not straight with a little triangular that's  a stone inserted in between so let's say the most famous one is the one I showed before  so Palazzo Barberini mayo this is it may look quite normal nowadays in fact it's an exceptional  stair entirely done with cantilevering vaults which was a very difficult thing to do at  that time and with a very weird geometry in plan it is somehow it develops with concave  you know this concave side is jut into the space which give it a very weird weird weird  presence when you're in there almost seems like it's falling on to you again here the  reference is very clear and it's the plan of Alessan Carlino and you know this is like  it's no mystery but Romino was probably the most famous and copied architect of the time  and mostly enables even more so so this is an association which in fact makes very much  sense the Hawkeings on the other hand are more difficult to place within the history  of architecture this as I said is the one he built for his own Palazzo which he does  towards the end of his career and they are usually placed at the end or they always place  at the end of the courtyard so they make this huge mise en scene at the end of the courtyard  and leading to a garden in the back and somehow let's say within very tight streets of Naples  they are a bit the true facade of these buildings these buildings you're never really able to  appreciate them frontally as you would appreciate the Palazzo for example on square in other  Italian cities you're always in very small roads and I'm going to talk about that very  briefly later so in a sense in this staircases through the portals gives you if you want  the grandeur which the facades were not really able to express or which you could not really  read in the facades so here obviously historians have gone all over the place in trying to  understand where this motive came from there are let's say there's a very large bunch which  associated with a drawing from Paladio but in fact that's a staring section so it's  never really shown in innovation even though the drawing was very famous and we know again  that some Felicia through a friendship was not an expert but had for sure read the books  another case which is discussed often is the Stagos stairwells to the churches this is  a quite also peculiar phenomenon to Naples because it has to do with the fact that these  churches were inserted within the urban fabric and somehow you have to on the one hand elevate  them from the ground and on the other hand some you wanted to align them to the buildings  on the street because you didn't want to create a recess so that the church would not kind  of manifest itself on the street and streetscape so you would have these actually stairs in  rooms yeah which so this is a facade which actually gives on a stairwell not on the church  itself and this is the stair that goes up and here we can already start seeing this diagonal  motif but I don't think it's particularly relevant the most bizarre of all is in fact  is there in St. Jaipur in Austria and here a historian has made a whole investigation  based on dates and let's say on the possible kinships the two architects had so this is  the front tower in fact which has been had been in Naples but the dates here and suggest  that somehow they were not that was not aware of it and they're not particularly really  doesn't really matter it's probably much more interesting in fact to discuss the stairs  in relation to a few of the peculiar characteristics of Naples is morphology so this is a map of  Naples at the end of the 1500s and in fact it doesn't really change much for a hundred  years or so so I said before already in Naples between the 1500 and the 7th and mid 1700  is a vice-realtive which basically means that the ruling powers never really invested on  urban transformation there with very large project which for example we can see in other  cities in fact the these the city of Naples always develops punctually with new buildings  which are very big and grand but which let's say only in the very long time span have an  influence on the immediate surrounding in this case what is interesting is that somehow  what we get is that the urban tissue of the city remains pretty much a medieval tissue  so the plots are very very small and and fairly irregular in shape and that's it the possibility  to expand them is very difficult somehow so architects are always faced especially in  the 1700s when let's say noblemen start to inhabit the city to come back because the 1600  was a very bad period there was a plague Naples was a very was famously very dangerous city  to live in somehow so during nobility preferred to live outside of the city in villas but let's  say what's probably even more influenced to let's say the situation San Felicia finds  when he goes to work let's say on these palazos is a series of laws called paramatic  sanzioni which child six of Habsburg puts in place one after the other which forbids  the construction within the city walls and in the immediate outside so what would occur  basically was that the only way you could not expand buildings at all at that time and  this was a measure to control the population which was famously insubordinate and let's  say that's also with the countryside which were becoming less and less operative agriculturally  a lot of people wanted to move the city so these laws are put in place to somehow maintain  a balance between the population of the two but in fact they have the effect the city  still grows but only vertically and on the existing tissue so what we get somehow is  these buildings these blocks which are six to seven or eight floors in height which is  very unique but which retain a very small footprint and that's for whoever has tried  to design a pala let's say a palazzo with a courtyard in such a situation is a very  difficult design challenge so this is let's say an average if you want block taken from  the Partil Espagnoli which is one of the most in fact regular parts of the city and in black  there are the staircases and here you can see this idea the staircase at the back of  the courtyard is in fact as much a vernacular if you want response to a series of climatic  and let's say if you want urban conditions then it is let's say an artistic if you want  decision so in the work of San Felicia probably the first case in which we can find a very  interesting response to this condition is in fact palazzo Laudiana which you visited  right yeah so this is a palazzo which San Felicia builds for his cousin who had just married  and wealthy of his wife's dory so the money you get when you marry a woman decides to  renovate let's say a property he has in the old town in Naples so the building is this  one here and it's actually in a quite interesting place because it's this you see that it's  all quite a mess but generally let's say on a grid and suddenly here you have a circle  and that's because that whole block that whole chunk used to be a Roman was built on the  foundations of a Roman and Roman theater therefore let's say you can still find the peers actually  of the theater in the city around so it's here and here we have a few interesting architectural  maneuvers which San Felicia does and which let's say are interesting in relation to series  of tendency we have to do with nobility how nobility would live at that time so this  is how a typical for example palazzo staircase would work you try to put them as close as  possible to the entrance so that when you arrive you go up to the stair in this case  we have this peculiar thing that the stairs move actually very far back this is interesting  for two reasons the first one is like a very strong relationship which you kind of arrive  at establishing between the street escape between the street view and the stair at the  back the second one has to do with the increasing let's say popularity reception used to have  in the 1700s in Naples so the idea of receiving guests and placing the stair at the back would  have guests go through all the display rooms before you would arrive to the main living  room so in fact you would experience as a guest a larger extent of the palazzo and therefore  be impressed if you want by all the features on display in these rooms such as books, paintings  and so forth so let's say this building here is not the first case in fact in which we  see a rhomboidal stair it's shaped like a diamond this is a motif which San Felicia  develops in a few other staircases before so it's turned in fact 45 degrees from this  type of staircase and that has to do with the fact that in that way you would arrive  in the center of the rooms rather than on the side which is a very undesirable place  to enter a room of course that also creates another series of consequences which let's  say are very interesting for example in relation to how you see the stair developing in at  the end of the court so when you experience it frontally you see it developing like that  rather than parallel to the wall so that's we go back to that problem we described at  the beginning so you touch it with the minimum point which is the landing somehow and on  the other hand let's say the vaulting becomes incredibly interesting question to you now  with the palazzo I showed you a picture of before what's even more interesting is that  the staircase is doubled so you enter from one part and you can go up in either direction  so it's not just like this one where you go like this and then you're forced to enter  here and for example to access these rooms you have to go through the entire palazzo  at one point here the staircase is doubled so that at every landing you can enter on  both sides and this makes it possible that you don't need a loggia in front of the stair  so if here for example you would have a loggia here which would distribute on one side and  the other let's say the people depending on where they want you to go in the palazzo  or in the case of 2% of palazzo's all around the courtyard in the stair San Felice proposes  in Palazzo Laureano in fact we have let's say a symmetrical stair which let's say reads  itself of the loggia and therefore if you want results in more let's say cohesive and  unitarian if you want scheme on the other hand it's also like a very monumental gesture  which of course has a whole series of expressive consequences the other thing which is interesting  is that here the stair let's say invades the courtyard so it's not relegated behind walls  anymore and these historians have let's say justified by the fact that these windows were  existing already before so in fact this was a way to somehow not touch the windows which  would light existing rooms yeah and therefore the palace already existed before the staircase  is the insertion if you want and this is the typical situation in the time architects  would very rarely get a commission to design the whole palazzo or to rebuild the whole  palazzo but at any rate let's say here you know by means of this invasion we are exposed  to that very tricky moment which what Blunt was describing before again which here is  let's say very eloquently solved but we'll talk about it more in his own thoughts so  where it's even more refined I'll just show you a few pictures of let's say how this  presents itself when you arrive there so there are these two staircases going up and then  you have the situation where doors repeat themselves at four floors so it's always the same always  as you go up sometimes you have stairs which allow you to mitigate between levels because  obviously not all if you if you have a staircase which is so let's say repetitive you don't  always get at the same let's say level in the floors so quite interesting series of  measures if you want to repeat themselves one for the other then the other thing which  is quite impressive is the way in fact the windows are developed which are from here  look fairly normal but in fact are very carefully designed detail which is quite unique in history  of architecture entirely so this is a scheme which let's say shows us this window in plan  it's quite impressive because let's say first of all San Felicia aligns the edges of the  window to let's say the view you would have of the palazzo right so that somehow you would  never experience the thickness of the wall in its entirety but on the other hand he kind  of undoes this measure by developing this weird detail which has a double effect of  sorts so you in fact have a sense of depth but it's a thick depth so in fact it looks  very slim even though it's a monstrously big window and and this let's say is you know  you actually understand when you're on the other side of the window of this opening and  it's kind of significant of the importance for example that this architect in particular  was giving to the gaze of this window from the moment in which you enter yeah was a very  theatrical sort of moment which which is something actually typical of Baroque palaces which  start to achieve a directionality in relation for example to Schimploschente palazzo which  where the courtyard usually was something harmonious on all sides and which usually tried to establish  the tail a core in Baroque palaces I'll show you later there's a drawing of Batswacht  Day in Rome which which Wolfman for example deals as a like a contemporary reference we  always have let's say a certain axial relation to the space which then and in particular  let's well actually so we'll move to his own palazzo which in fact may be the last thing  I'll talk about by him it's a project which lasted five to six years to construct it it's  located in a very let's say at the moment popularistic area of the city so you can buy  for example a flat inside it nice big flat for like a hundred and fifty thousand euros  and it's quite grimy it's more or less falling apart somehow but anyways it was built in  a a borgo or a very small settlement just outside the city walls in fact it was an illegal  settlement and this is important because we have to understand that the geometry in fact  of of the palazzo and this weird let's say situation which arises from it is is contingent  to the fact that here some fiddles have to work with existing foundations and these foundations  were most probably the foundation of an informal construction so in fact it's a very tricky  case to work with if we look at the plan of the palazzo this is kind of the extent of  this plot with the garden at the back some finish it uses it divides it in two courtyards  each courtyard has a stair and each courtyard is dealt with let's say differently somehow  and so when you would see for example this building from the street it has two portals  these are all photographs by Anthony Blount by the way it has two which goes there in  the 60s to document it has two portals one let's say gives you a direct view onto a snail  and the other one gives you a direct view onto a hawk wing now these two courtyards are  interesting in relation to one another because some finish here does something which it becomes  increasingly a tendency at the time which is he builds a palazzo for himself of course  but actually rents an entire floor of it so in that case he would use the courtyard with  the hawk wing and let's say the tenant of the first floor which I'll show you in a minute  instead would use the other staircase that doesn't mean that they would live in separate  courtyards both of the apartments actually developed along the two courtyards so on one  entire floor but they just had a different means of access and also actually a very different  experience of access so this you can see it in the quite let's say peculiar relation between  floors so the piano nobile is actually the last floor which is San Felicia's and the  slightly lower piano nobile is the one that he would rent out and then on the bottom obviously  servants and so forth.  Yeah here's a plan I'm gonna quickly show you the stairs now how they work let's say  in relation to the access of entrance but effectively let's say this this was the means  of access for the the tenant this was the means of access for San Felicia himself and  the two courtyards are let's say develop let's say in relation to the stairs but also develop  with their very different motives on that so here we can see that the edges of the courtyard  are like trimmed off and that you know is an expressive trope which again is actually typical  of Baroque architecture but it's more interesting to see how the stair develops so it's two snails  which touch each other after one round which they go up and this gives it quite let's say  interesting theatrical effect when you arrive so it starts as one stair which then let's  say splits in two and then the stairs goes around goes around these very thick nozzles  yeah so yeah here you can see developing this is a deep tip which shows you more or less  the experience you'd have when you arrive there with these two stairs departing and  then yeah come up from here and you arrive in the hall where they come back together  again in a vaulted hall which is illuminated from the back with these windows.  This is the plan again here historians have suggested in fact this comes from a stair  again from Fischer von Erlach for his cathedral in Salzburg which is the stair at a very very  very far back it's something you wouldn't experience if you go to the church because  it's reserved to the priests but in plan it's significantly similar in fact to that  of some tradition that's there.  On the other hand there is the hopwing which again you know is placed symmetrical to the  courtyard somehow sort of sort of to the portal and then also here it develops around the  same motif it's two stairs which go up and up together.  So here we see it it's located at the very far back and it creates this kind of very  theatrical backdrop to the daily life in the palazzo yeah so it almost in fact they almost  in fact look like the niches you would have in a theater yeah to look at the performance.  This the drawing actually I was talking to you about before so this drawing it's one  of the only drawings that Wolfling includes in the Renaissance in Baroque book when talking  about the Baroque palazzo and on this idea of the it's the directionality of it.  So this is the palazzo Mattenero which has the lodge of famously only at the back which  frames the ten entrance to a garden behind which I guess here is interesting in relation  to the case of something similar because it develops along the very same motif but then  again here you know what I was saying before it's interesting because he gets rid of the  lodger and somehow joins stair and lodging to one element which also has let's say this  very let's say representative and theatrical let's say effect and which also let's say  allows all the people in the building to access the floors individually.  So in fact now there are more than 40 units in the building so the rooms have been chopped  up in corridors and so forth and all our access to this there.  Expressively this is quite interesting it starts to move away actually from the typical  tropes or language of classical architecture and in fact it seems to almost look much more  at the kind of muscular architecture of Roman infrastructure such as Aquidot's for instance  when you're inside it's a very let's say thick and dense elements which you know with big  wall sections and piers and you're always let's say exposed to these very aggressive  openings which face one onto each other.  Actually there is in relation to Fuga which was a big fan of San Felice there is a stair  in Rome in Palazzo Corsini which has a very similar effect.  So this is as you walk up and then every time it frames the garden of the back.  So in fact it is a structure of this dick which is between a courtyard and a garden.  So it's this kind of buffer between these two dimensions of the Palazzo which at the  same time it articulates all the life inside it.  This is the relationship between the two openings of two ramps going up and down that's the  window onto the garden of the back.  Now in terms of expression you see these are these distorted openings which seem fairly  arbitrary but in fact there was a lot of talking going on in Europe at the time on how one  would deal with the question of the oblique.  In fact there is one caramel which is a Spanish priest, a mathematician, physicist and improvised  architect who writes an entire treatise called Arquitectura Civil Recta i Oblique where  he tries to in fact canonize these exceptional moments within architectural expression where  you are let's say.  In fact it comes from a very painterly approach which deals with let's say a correct mathematical  way to distort architectural elements in relation to perspectival view if you're doing a painting  but also to these very unique moments such as the stair for example when you are in actual  fact building.  So I'm sure he might or might not have looked at this book but it was a very influential  book at the time.  In fact Caramel builds also a project in Italy in...  Where is it?  It's a piazza with a church at the end which has occurred façade.  In Jevon exactly, exactly.  But here we can also tell the difference so if Caramel for example theorized that if you  have a column between a straight section and oblique one you always put the line in which  it breaks at the exact middle of the column we already see how St. Felicius starts to develop  his own approach to the matter which is in fact much more refined and elegant and this  is most let's say noticeable also if you compare it with the people who have later tried to  emulate him.  So for example this is by an engineer architect called Attanasio and it's actually 200 meters  away from that palazzo but here you can see how the architect is still in some way dicting  of a post-lintel system which in fact is abandoned entirely here where we have a much more seamless  and smooth expression.  This is the case somehow with all the imitations of St. Felicius, St. Felicius' particular  solution which are actually very many many many enabled and which somehow give an idea  of how this peculiar let's say exceptional case ended up becoming if you want an assertive  type of nobility or dwelling within the old town which I guess brings us back on the general  conversation we can have later maybe on how we can define this metropolitan architecture  in the first place.  Maybe the most interesting case which is actually what I'm working on now is actually how to  connect this to Fuga who works later in Naples on a large poor house, a cemetery and the granary  building but which beforehand and almost during the same years St. Felicius built his own palace  has this very peculiar staircase actually when you enter in the courtyard of Palazzo  da Consulta at your back which develops exactly along that motif and we know that Fuga was  in fact in Naples before building his palace and he probably would have visited the construction  site at that building which was one of the most let's say exotic novelties which everyone  would go see during its construction and this is also to address that question you were  saying before Fuga being a late Baroque architect and not an early if you want enlightenment  one and this is kind of a way to make an interesting hinge between these two definitions  of these there's also another interesting hinge which is  a big actually unspoken in all this situation, and he is like, he's the champion of Italian  architecture very unmentioned at the time but that's another story with us on another occasion.  That's it.  Thank you for your question.  When you say that you've already spoken here of this tale about stairs and solutions, the diagonal, I mean I'm curious now.  So could you please?  Yeah, sure.  This is actually another site project I'm developing now for a symposium that will be in April at the Courtauld, where they asked us to choose specific architectural drawings to take out from the archives and talk about, you know, let's say, a round table of 10-15 people.  And I have started to do research on a series of studies Juarez has done, has been drawing for stage sets for the Teatro Toboni in Rome.  And now what's interesting with Juvarra, independently from that, is that somehow the young group Juvarra in Rome is one of the most, let's say, he wins this very big competition fact done by Toboni himself, I think.  I'm not entirely, I don't remember that exactly.  And he is, let's say, the figure everyone is looking at at the time.  So for example, we know that Casper von Wittel sends Luigi van Bitteli to study under Juvarra during the years he's doing these theater drawings, and which will curiously, let's say, which where he probably picks up many of the motifs which will curiously reoccur within the Regen Caserta, but also within the drawings which van Bitteli did for the theater in Caserta.  And this, let's say, is part of a side chapter in the importance of theater actually in early enlightenment as a space, which actually takes over, if you want, the sacred pulpit of religion as a proper, let's say, political site.  On the other hand, there is Fuga, which famously for his first project for the Albert Goli Pauveri, in fact, drafts an option which is a most literal translation of a project Juvarra had done for the consulta, for the people consulta in Rome 10 years before.  And it's a one to one borrowing of that.  So Juvarra is a bit disfigured, which let's say has a very, and also some fiddles in fact is, if you want, it's always associated with Juvarra, because Juvarra also comes to Naples and does a few church decorations for I don't remember which festivity for the Duomo, which obviously were a very important case study for some fiddles himself.  This was at the beginning of the 1700s, so at the same time he's doing the stage sets for the Ottoboni Theater, and Santelice being himself engaged in the construction of a funeral architecture was for sure, if you want, studying Juvarra's solutions.  On the other hand, I mean, the other fascination I have with Juvarra is, first of all, he's an architect of extreme talent, which demonstrates somehow a very refined capacity to develop bespoke solutions for very peculiar problems.  And on the other hand, he is also an architect which probably most of all exposes, let's say, an approach which is typical of early enlightenment, which is very eclectic, but not eclectic meaning flamboyantly, if you want, over the bar, but eclectic in a sense of being able to make use of different, if you want, architectural expressions or languages,  depending on the case. So which, of course, is something which we can refer back to Fischer Ponellach, but which is also actually one of the biggest qualities of Fuga, for instance, who is able to create the most austere, almost Jansenese architecture at the same time he's doing Palazzo della Consulca, for example.  Well, of course, it's a danger that, oh, really, I would be happy if you can give us an answer to my question.  Maybe it's a difficult question to answer because I even don't let you know how to formulate the question.  Your part here, I mean, I think we wanted to have you here for two reasons. I think, first of all, because what you bring in in terms of, I mean, the particularity of the work of Fuga as Fuglice is extremely interesting and beautiful on its own right, on a tectonic level, on the kind of, I mean, especially the staircase he does for himself.  So Palazzo seems to today, maybe perhaps from a Swiss perspective, so contemporary.  Yeah.  Almost shocked, right? I mean, I think that's an aspect of it. I mean, certain Swiss architects will be happy to make such things.  At the same time, there is, you touched upon that, this argument of making a facade for a building which is inside the building because you have these very narrow streets, you have these big gates, and then in some strange way you can bring the facade deep inside.  That is another, I think, very important, very fascinating thing of the architecture you show. Then, of course, if you try to zoom out even more, and you know that you're the third fragment of our attempt, of course, together with students to define what today could be metropolitan architecture,  in which I think the default answer is not allowed, which is, ah, it's building within the metropolis, but rather an architecture which tries to carry in itself a kind of promise of the metropolis.  I mean, to recall for ourselves, Christopher Hannaway, he brought in, I mean, amongst other topics, this idea of this, I would say, collective living, which is highly individualized.  I mean, to sort of say that you're totally on your own, but you're part of an infrastructure which is so big that you can do things which you cannot otherwise.  I think when we saw last time Madein, so, Charles Bonnet, he was, of course, and he was asked to talk about his own architecture, he was showing this, I would have to say, most high-tech kind of architecture, highly expressive in terms of the bold and very often, by the way,  without a steel kind of system of it. In some sense, when we look at this, some of the architecture buildings, they seem to touch both, but maybe that's purely projection.  I was wondering how you see that.  I think the interesting slide probably, the matrix basically with all the stairs, exactly.  So, I think if there is one, there's more than one, but if there is one, if you want, instance where we can start to talk about this there, something which is more than itself.  So now, it's in relation to, if you want, this assertive type, which is the open-stair napkins.  And which, as I kind of briefly explained, but one should, in fact, explain much better, which is actually born out of a very idiosyncratic, let's say, urban condition.  So, Naples is a case where collective dwelling, if you want, as we refer to today.  So therefore, the idea of building, of having your own house within a larger compound, united by a staircase, a common staircase or a common circulation, is in fact one of the cities to have it earliest,  precisely because of the, let's say, the spatial, if you want, how do you say, constraints, which the city posed to its inhabitants, which would continuously build on top, and on top, and on top.  And to a certain extent, you know, we can also say that this way of living has largely or vastly conditioned, I would say, and I would love to think, a certain approach to, let's say, the idea of a neighbor itself.  In a city like Naples, or the idea of private, or ideas such as private and public affairs within, let's say, domestic compounds, for example, in a city like Naples.  And the whole, if you want, theatricality of Neapolitan life.  So that is, I think, definitely a discussion to be made.  On the other hand, we can talk here, I think, of, I don't know if metropolitan maybe is the right word, but maybe it's more cosmopolitan, if you want, so an architecture which is at once, it's a strongly rooted to its context, to the point that, you know, it's almost kind of indisturnable from it.  But also, if you want, refers to a whole system of ideas which is, which goes totally beyond its immediate reach.  And which I very briefly tried to mention, so now.  So then there's this idea of this parasite, you know, like this stairs which punctually somehow, through a single typology, infects.  If you want the entirety of the urban tissue in a very discrete way, that's a very much effect, let's say, the way the city works, at a smaller scale.  So this, I think, is also an interesting matter, you know, because I always actually ask myself, okay, what could be another case in which a single architectural element has been so, if you want, so assertive and so deterministic for the way in which  let's say a city works.  And I kind of struggle to find it.  It's more easy to find it, for example, in legislative measures.  So for example, when a city says you can't build more than four, then you start to have, you know, a series of consequences to that which develop into traditions.  So that's kind of easier.  It's easier to, let's say, to find it within that kind of framework.  But it's less easy to find it, let's say, in similar terms to some finishes.  And that, I think, is possibly something interesting.  Or it could maybe be the, there's a technological aspect to it, you know, it could maybe be the elevator and the roof, for example.  But that's, I think, on the edge.  Being the elevator almost an invisible element, you know, it doesn't play such an old...  But I think, I mean, coming back to this...  But sorry, just very briefly, I would also dare to say that this is a technological aspect too.  Oh yeah.  Even though it has no wiring.  No, no, true, true.  True.  No, and coming back to the stairs, I mean, I think there's indeed this, again, weird parallel, you know, because let me say as ancestors, you know, of this metapointan architecture,  we were obviously looking, and being Paris now, the center of our attention for the first semester,  we were obviously looking at a certain ITAC architecture, as Catherine was mentioning, and it's the Asupasion.  But even later, let me say, Nouvelle, and obviously if you talk about Paris, you have to talk about Boutbourg,  and then suddenly I think there's this, again, weird analogy, you know, that the stairs from an element which was completely high,  no, hidden before, sorry, during all Paranascence,  now that suddenly comes the first thing you see in a building.  If you consider Boutbourg, you consider, I don't know, the Lloyds in London, you know.  Suddenly, with this sort of architecture, the stairs is the absolute protagonist.  It comes to the facade, it defines the way in which you look at the building,  even defines the way in which you think at the building.  So the building is a building of floors, no more than a building of staying, I would say, or so.  I think it's interesting, this sort of transformation, and now the elements becomes central to a certain idea of architecture.  Yes, actually I didn't state it so clearly that the intelligent thing here with all these projects is in fact an issue which is,  if you want, a very, let's say, a matter of fact functional issue, here assumes, if you want, the core expressive, if you want, functions.  The problem becomes the architecture.  Yeah.  In fact, Louis Cannon, maybe even more so, is probably the...  Another one to look at in these terms.  I sort of have trouble to believe, but that has more to do with the fact that I cannot understand how people lived in buildings in the 17th or 18th century.  I have sometimes trouble to understand that it was one house or a house with one reddish floor.  As you said, when I visited it with you, many of the buildings were also his own.  Yeah, you had the feeling that it was always meant as a building for men.  Yeah, no, his own, for sure, was meant at least for two, because there was the Duke renting the flat downstairs,  because San Felicio was noble of birth, but also not so rich.  So somehow, let's say, he had to recoup the money he had borrowed to build this palazzo by renting out the floor.  Which is also, for example, what happens in Tristanzara's house, Los, where the floor immediately above the house of Tristanzara  is actually up-floor to rent out, to recoup building costs.  But then there's also something else to it, which I feel is less apparent on the pictures, much more when you're there.  But you mentioned it, I think, briefly. The stairs are the protagonists, as you said.  I mean, in location, in composition, but also in the way they are detailed, in the sense that the rest of the building often looks far less cheaper done,  more trashy, to some extent, which I find also in relationship, I would say, to the studio very interesting.  So it's this kind of, what's the hierarchy of the architecture, to a certain sense.  Yeah, no, that's true. In fact, this has to do, I think, with a broader topic, which is when you start a project,  particularly with projects like this, where you have a given context, and budgets which are usually not so high, in fact, for palazzo standards.  Where do you put the energy in how, let's say, you, and how do you deal with, let's say, contextual questions?  And here, it's exactly that. If you want, we have these signature pieces, somehow, which obviously are related to the rest,  but which clearly, let's say, are centers of gravity, for the internal architecture and expression.  Questions from the public? Yes. Here, the first kind of the...  Just to follow up with this discussion, it's maybe very interesting also to note that you started by showing this festive machine,  that are an element of sonography, and in a way, this staircase could be even interpreted as sonography themselves,  and kind of outrageous type of sonography, that is a collision between architecture and the world, in a very technological way.  So, if you look at this staircase... No, not this one.  This one. So, this staircase here...  Play. I think you have to press play. Play. Play.  No, because I wanted to go faster, but whatever, let's do it, as it's done.  So, if you look at this staircase here, and then compare it to that tower I showed before,  it's in fact exactly the same element, which just kind of occupies a courtyard, rather than being freestanding in a square,  as that element actually is, which again suggests that in fact, it's probably something which has much more to do,  it's probably something which has... Even though this is a later project, so this is 1740, the other one was around mid-1720s,  it also kind of suggests that if you want this choreographic element, it's as important as was the functional one of accessing,  if you want, two parts of the palazzos with one stair and with other lodger.  So, even there, it's like an economy of means, somehow, which allows you to do two things with one thing.  So, but yeah, definitely there's a... Like the link is super strong.  I'm interested in that.  More questions.  But this, I think, is also interesting, this idea of the gravity, if you want, of the design of these entire complexes on these staircases,  is actually, I think, one of the most interesting features of Fugas architecture always,  where mostly, I'm not interested in Palazzo Corsini and in the Albertian Naples,  you have an extreme economy of means in dealing with, let's say, the organization of space,  in dealing with the expression on the facade, except for these two exceptional moments on the one hand,  in the Palazzo Corsini, in the staircase, which was a stair gallery, in fact, where the bishop,  because that was the cousin of the pope, Neri Corsini, had all his collection of statues.  And on the other hand, in the Al-Daghari Poverty, which is...  The church.  Yeah, exactly.  Which is... Do I have it?  Yes.  That building up there...  I could zoom out, but whatever.  The church in the center, which is effectively the only true, if you want, intense moment,  experientially speaking...  Yeah, which connects everything, actually.  Yeah, which actually connects everything, and which acts as a core for the entire project,  which otherwise is a very dry building, which even in art history is always kind of neglected  as a kind of late failure, late experiment, like something which arrives too late, in fact,  because that's kind of...  Maybe that's also an interesting case for the brief Metropolitan architecture.  His Pugas project under Charles of Bourbon, which actually are located in Naples, but address the entire rain,  so from Naples to Palermo.  So buildings which are incredibly out of scale for their context, but which, let's say, geographically,  and which managerially have to do with a much larger scope.  So that inspires more questions, Christ.  More questions?  Nothing?  I think they...  I have another one.  Yeah, another one.  We were noticing before that in many of these stairs, obviously the geometry,  the fact that you got the flights, and so the diagonal lines are even obviously implicating  a sort of perspective of, how to say, distortion.  Yeah.  I mean, you wonder whether you got this sort of, how to say, intentional playing with perspective,  which is very much what you think about Bach, among other things.  You wonder which is the consciousness, no?  Because obviously if you are staging the stairs as the main element, then suddenly you got in your hands  a formidable tool, no, in order to even play with perspective.  And when you look at them from the courtyards, no, seeing that, let me say that, for example,  the routes which are going down, no, and it's very much, again, an incredible, how to say, trick, no?  Yeah.  There is an interesting theory, actually, an architect who is living in the Palazzo at the moment,  is developing by drawing it all, which has to do with the vaulting of these urges.  But mostly those where he is kind of trying to prove that the last ones are much more tilted  than the ones below, so that you could see, let's say, they're under part from the bottom.  So from one perspective, in fact, from one point of view.  Which, of course, means that, yeah, this comment that you made is entirely pertinent, even more so.  This whole idea of distortion is, in fact, a painterly problem before it is an architectural problem.  So it has to do, for example, with, and it's a problem which architects have dealt with since Guero de la Francesca.  How do you properly distort a Corinthian order with mathematical rules which are, let's say, as rigorous as those of Vitruvius?  Also, and in paintings, in painting, obviously, maybe it's slightly easier, but in the case of building, actually, these elements, it's more tricky.  And that's kind of the central point of debate, in fact, of Guarini and Caramuel, when they have this epistol exchange,  where Guarini, in fact, accuses Caramuel of having no clue whatsoever how you built, how to build,  and what it means to work tectonically with elements.  And, let's say, claiming that, in fact, he is an architectural amateur and should spend more words on painting rather than building.  But you see also here, with Sant'Vicius, on the Palazzo, he moves towards an architecture of wall rather than elements, right?  So as a result, he can simplify his kind of programming, so he seems like he, I mean, also the other much more narrow, I forgot the name, other court, the one with the...  I see, this one, here.  I mean, in a way, there's so little detail that he's able to get away with it.  Yeah, yeah, yes.  And here less, like here you still have if you want to.  But the other one very much, they're almost reduced, the orders are almost reduced to lines, to guiding lines.  This is what you notice in the people who have tried to do these stairs again in Naples,  which they have to struggle always because they want to keep the... here, it's more of this here, where they even steps down here where you have this very kinky moment where something diagonal ends up into a capital.  This one is better.  That's Nicola Tania Kotsyrika, and Aleutius Great-Ancient.  But he didn't get out of commissions because he was slightly later than San Felicius at the time in which the two big guys in Naples were Fugan and Vitelli.  And then there were the architects associated to them, I forgot the names, but they were the ones getting all the jobs.  And San Felicius would only be able to do these temporary actually structures once again because they were getting all the big commissions.  In fact, the only big commission San Felicius gets is the gardens of Capodimunta.  And yeah, that's about it.  Sad story, sad story.  Good.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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Allow me to introduce a bishop Balabi who let's say I know from time back at the time I was actually together with Andrea Fitching in Mauricio and I happen to be in your jury. Yeah, my diploma. One of the only positive voices. Trying to salvage him from Pallirio Giacti's attempt to totally destroy it. Today Fabricio is a unit master professor at AA school and that of course that is a box which contains many things because there's many voices at the AA school. So they think increasingly his project, if I could call it like that, concentrates on architecture history. I had luck actually to be guided around by Fabricio in Napoli to see these very buildings he's going to talk about, about San Felice. I think it's part of his increasing fascination for Italian Baroque, then even more specifically Napolitan Baroque of which I would like to add Fuga is also an integrity party, although some people might consider him not entirely a Baroque architect. But today there is San Felice's, I would have to say staircase's, but of course much more than that. San Felice is this Baroque architect which I guess never anybody heard of until Fabricio decided to write an article about him. We in our studio we like very much because as a third incarnation in this series of lectures which we see, we feel related to metropolitan architecture, we felt there's a possible interpretation of course there to be tested by Fabricio where these big shared compounds with a high I would say level of individuality seem to find their kind of common language in this particularity of this circulation devices there. Now I give the word to you, but thanks a lot for coming. Thank you. This is about the microphone. Should I talk in the microphone? Maybe. Can you hear me? I would rather not. That's okay. Yeah? Can you hear me? Okay. So I'm going to present the work I've been doing the last couple of years now. I've already moved on a bit, but on San Felice in Naples. And this is a work which came out probably as a scare storm was hinting through a fascination. There are these staircases which she has designed are relatively let's say famous in Naples, not at all renowned let's say in academic circles abroad. And therefore I had very personally let's say started to go visit them and become interested in them and started to do proper research to understand how they had come into being. So to a certain extent I think also in relation to the brief you're doing this year, I'll try with this presentation to address a very let's say peculiar in particular architectural problem which has to do with let's say how to deal with staircases typologically with enabling and in terms of their expression at the moment in time in which architecture still but almost still let's say expresses itself through a language. And then I will try to let's say address how they fit within a broader context which has to do with the open stair as a typology if you want which flourishes in 18th century in Naples, so in the 1700s. So the basic problem in designing a staircase which is visible on the facade of a building is that if the flights run parallel to the facade, the windows or the arches by which they are lit form a diagonal line which cuts across the horizontal of the floors. Or if the staircase is on a square plan with the flights running alternately parallel with the facade and at right angles to it, the openings on the landings will come at levels halfway between the floors. So this is a quote from Anthony Blunt which I'm not sure you're all familiar with but he's an architectural historian which is obviously dead by now but he used to be the head of the Courtauld Institute in London, the personal advisor of the Queen's collection of paintings and a communist spy at the same time. And he wrote a beautiful book called Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo Architecture. Within the chapter on St. Elisha he talks about this very peculiar problem which has to do with let's say the challenge architects have been faced with since Renaissance I would say to deal with let's say a misfit. So on the one hand a language which has a certain series of rules which let's say in years they try to figure out how to transform into a proper architectural language. On the other hand they necessitate to apply these rules to buildings and typologies which they were not meant for. So I'll try to give you three cases in which these problems occur. The first one when the staircase runs perpendicular to the facade we can see Palazzo da Celleria here where let's say the architect has tried to integrate them within the caveatio so that somehow even though in fact it is a misfit because to light the stair you have to drop down the windows there is an attempt to somehow amalgamate it in the composition of the whole. So it's and you will see the time and time again it's always a matter of trying to hide this element which in fact is endemic to classical architecture it does not belong to it. So that staircase is this one here. Another example which where we have the staircase running parallel to the wall is in Palazzo Farnese which is let's say hidden altogether. So here the stairs lead from the top and the windows are in fact walled out. And possibly the third example is when we have the arcade staircase which goes up, right, on more than one level. And here we see this very peculiar problem of which Santelish is a master at solving which is this. So this awkward triangle which occurs between the diagonal line of the stair and the base in the capitals of the column which is to a certain extent a bestemia. I don't know how to say this but it's a very, how do you say bestemia in English? It's like a cur, it's an architectural curse somehow. It's something very wrong and it's actually an object of a very fierce debate between Guarini and another architectural story, well architectural theorist I will mention later which is called Juan Caramuel. They talk, let's say there is an exchange of letter precisely on this detail. How to deal with let's say this combination of you know classical orders which have a rule and this diagonal line introduced by the staircases. So this is the staircase Santelish designs for his own palazzo in Naples. In fact it's one of the, let's say the last projects which belongs to a series in his own work. So it's not one of his last projects because eventually he will live until the end of the 1740s but this is the moment in which he is most busy let's say in working for the local mobility. And that has to do with a series of historical questions which maybe I'll explain later but in 1735 there is a change in the regime of Naples which had until then been a vice royalty under the Aragonese, the Austrian Habsburg and so forth and in 1735 suddenly the Bourbons come to Naples and bring with them a new series of architects and a new series of let's say concerns in matter of how they were to exert their power architecturally speaking. So Santelish is basically out of the picture. So he will live another 10 years but he's not very influential. So this is kind of the height of his career. As I said before this, the discussion on his staircase in his palazzo is actually more interesting to see in correlation with something which develops almost as a Neapolitan type which is that of the open stair. And let's say there are a number of ways in which we can interpret this type, how it came into being. On the one hand historians have followed the traditional path of starting with the masterpiece and in a sense, how do you say, referring all the later pieces to that. On the other hand instead we can see it as a very let's say matter of fact architectural problem which arises due to a series of very peculiar conditions the city of Naples has had in its development between the 1500s and the 1700s. I'm going to explain that later. We should probably briefly introduce Santelish because I guess nobody has ever heard of him in here. And this is a portrait he had made of himself in 1735. There are a few things which already make this portrait quite eloquent in terms of for example the architecture which is framing him. We see references to treatises in France such as Philippe de Lormes, the Tombe sort of bit of tour. And the inscription at the base of this arch is very interesting. It's called the Patricius Nebolitamus. So it's basically the word architect doesn't even appear in this particular inscription. In fact he's quite keen on clarifying or stating his state of birth. He's a nobleman belonging to the Sege de Montagna which is a very important area of which at the time at least owned a very big part of the northern eastern part of the Newstovall town in Naples. He's holding books which obviously mean that it's an expression of let's say a certain cultural finesse and awareness of what is going around in Europe as I said which is further corroborated by let's say the particular elements which characterize this picture. So he is an amateur in actual fact, not a trained architect in an academy because Naples didn't even have an academy comparable to that of Saint-Lucas for example in Rome. And his education was in fact entirely crafted out of self-interest on books and working for a very famous painter actually called Francesco Salimena which is one of the highest representative of late Baroque painting in Naples. So in fact it's interesting he was, being a nobleman could have been a very, how do you say, could have put him in a position of extreme let's say advantage because obviously he would get much more commissions but in his particular case it was actually a deterrent because his father had destined him for law studies and it is only when the father dies around 1693 if I'm not mistaken that he is actually able to embark in a career within the arts. So his brother which was the Archbishop of Nardofdoll which is a very small town in Puglia where Saint-Lucas eventually does his first projects, talks, shows some drawings of his to this painter Francesco Salimena which was let's say the absolute superstar of the entire art scene in Naples at the time. And a particular painter let's say very much in tune with other Baroque painters around Italy but famously let's say a sort of anachronistic painter almost to an extent who is able to for example put I don't know the exuberance of Barocci and the let's say composition of Raphael within the same painting. But from the one hand we have let's say you know all the theatricality which is you know which we usually assign to Baroque painting with diagonal compositions and the figures let's say come out of concentrating at the center this is the the exposure of Elidorus from the temple. We also have a let's say a very composed set in which this occur which of course you know refers to the school of Athens this very famous painting by Raphael which dates to 150-200 years back. So yes this for us is important because we start to understand how San Felici actually arrives at the building site as a decorator much more than as an architect. So someone who works within a condition which is given and then develops let's say a language in correlation to that somehow. And so his first let's say works on his own in fact consists of what were called at the time Machina da Festa so celebratory machines in fact which were ephemeral architectures for the celebration of important events within the city for example the incarnation of the king or the birth of a king's son or daughter or the how do you say the end of a plague for instance and in fact even though they were ephemeral and obviously not much remains but the drawings and the paintings of this structure they were an incredibly important part in the let's say in the governmental dynamics of the city. So in fact these were architectural machines as much as machines for consensus with which let's say the power that be would impress and please the population and let's say gain consensus by you know getting these very pompous and exuberant manifestations of power. This is one of the first actually designed by San Felicia and you know we can already notice somehow a very exuberant language which has to do of course with the fact that these are temporary structures where architects would probably experiment much more than if it were a permanent building but here it's carried forth to an extent where we have references which go actually beyond even European references. This has to do with a situation in which Napoli is at that time so at the end of 1600s Naples is in fact one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe. It is third in size after London Paris so bigger than Rome in terms of population at least and it is let's say even though it is a vice royalty at the end of the 1600s and even at the beginning of the 1700s so it's not the capital of a reign until the Bourbons arrive in 1734 even though it is a vice royalty it still let's say attracts a big wealth of artists, architects and writers for example which spend a very long time there and develop important works and let's say contribute to a very large exchange of ideas which occurs there. One of them for example is Gaspar van Witten which is a Dutch painter famously the father of Luigi van Vitelli which then would be the architect of the Royal Palace in Casetta in Naples even though van Vitelli is actually brought up in Rome. Another for example interesting example is Fischer von Erlach which spends five to ten years in Naples when Naples is under the dominion of the Austrian Habsburgs and in fact this is one of the last projects St. Felicia does which is a machina de festas on a celebratory machine to be built here and it was built and there are paintings of it and everything which quite curiously refers to or has a lot of analogies with the famous drawing of the pagoda in the porcelain pagoda in Nanjing and we are sure that let's say St. Felicia has the chance to see the entwurf not only because we know that Fischer van Erlach was in Naples for an extended period in fact he builds one of the biggest celebratory machines Fischer van Erlach ever to be seen which was called Maestoso Teatro del mare the majestic theater of the sea so it was a huge construction of a circle of I don't know how many meters in diameter but there were basically in the middle of the bay a gigantic platform with two pyramids and a triumphal arch in the middle and they would have bullfights around and then a whole project of illumination with torches on the ocean which illuminated the entire gulf basically so it was a gigantic project realized we unfortunately have no trace of it visually or I have not found it but it's in the chronicles for example of the city different writers write about it and surely St. Felicia was about ten maybe when he saw this but surely let's say the entire city of Naples was exposed to the spectacle and surely this would have given a strong impression to him so that's anyways a side chapter even though we'll see that motif of this stair coming back toward the end of the presentation we should focus probably on what St. Felicia is most famous for which is in fact these very famous well Naples at least stairwells for palaces and here again you know the Austrian influence comes back also with other people for example Jakob Brandtauer which was one of the most famous architects at the end of the 1600s also has a residency in Naples for some ten years he held the brand together with him comes to Naples in fact so in fact there is a very curious amalgamation of interests and architectural styles which comes to Naples and obviously the architects they are very receptive to this. The staircases of St. Felicia are a very curious phenomenon which let's say develops along two parallel lines these parallel lines in fact give the title to the presentation we have snails and we have hawk wings and this is the description actually the biographer of the lives of painters, sculptors and the Neapolitan architects gives of these stairs so this is if you want Naples' Vasari to a certain extent even though it's actually not a very good book and it's even quite inaccurate in most of the descriptions but anyways he gives this curious Zomorfic analogy to describe these two types of staircases which St. Felicia does one type is the snails so these are the stairs which develops like a spiral somehow and which let's say historians mostly associate with the Austrian model of the staircase in the hall and then instead there are the hawk wings which are let's say I would say an invention of St. Felicia himself and the hawk wings are called hawk wings because they are they look like a hawk with its wings open and so these are the two types in probably two of St. Felicia's most let's say or is best let's say projects one is the stair of Palazzo Bartolone di Maio which is an enclosed stair case in a large well with windows obviously in the courtyard the other one is the one of his own so the hawk wing refers to this kind of geometry. Yeah I'll give you a few examples so one recurrent motif is that these stairs are always working in close proximity to a courtyard so you would access them through the main court of the building and usually you would some finish would make you cross the entire of the courtyard to explain why later but anyways this is a famous case in Palazzo Serra di Cassano it's a bit of a unique type so it's something that St. Felicia never develops again this and it is a stairwell which develops within a large hall so it's in fact two snails which start together here then go up and then meet together at the top again and this has to do very much with how the users of the building would access it you know with a carriage from here crossing the courtyard the carriage would sit here one guest or one person would go on one side one on the other side and then they would meet upstairs again and it's quite beautiful actually the way in which the hall is dealt with which is entirely unadorned it is a white a huge white vaulted space fairly abstract and then you have the use of this very typical Neapolitan stone which is Piperno it's like a volcanic stone very porous and darkish gray but here we can already see that something let's say interesting is going on in relation to the staircase with Palazzo Barberini so the Bernini one where the balustrades are distorted to follow the geometry of the rail yeah and they're not straight with a little triangular that's a stone inserted in between so let's say the most famous one is the one I showed before so Palazzo Barberini mayo this is it may look quite normal nowadays in fact it's an exceptional stair entirely done with cantilevering vaults which was a very difficult thing to do at that time and with a very weird geometry in plan it is somehow it develops with concave you know this concave side is jut into the space which give it a very weird weird weird presence when you're in there almost seems like it's falling on to you again here the reference is very clear and it's the plan of Alessan Carlino and you know this is like it's no mystery but Romino was probably the most famous and copied architect of the time and mostly enables even more so so this is an association which in fact makes very much sense the Hawkeings on the other hand are more difficult to place within the history of architecture this as I said is the one he built for his own Palazzo which he does towards the end of his career and they are usually placed at the end or they always place at the end of the courtyard so they make this huge mise en scene at the end of the courtyard and leading to a garden in the back and somehow let's say within very tight streets of Naples they are a bit the true facade of these buildings these buildings you're never really able to appreciate them frontally as you would appreciate the Palazzo for example on square in other Italian cities you're always in very small roads and I'm going to talk about that very briefly later so in a sense in this staircases through the portals gives you if you want the grandeur which the facades were not really able to express or which you could not really read in the facades so here obviously historians have gone all over the place in trying to understand where this motive came from there are let's say there's a very large bunch which associated with a drawing from Paladio but in fact that's a staring section so it's never really shown in innovation even though the drawing was very famous and we know again that some Felicia through a friendship was not an expert but had for sure read the books another case which is discussed often is the Stagos stairwells to the churches this is a quite also peculiar phenomenon to Naples because it has to do with the fact that these churches were inserted within the urban fabric and somehow you have to on the one hand elevate them from the ground and on the other hand some you wanted to align them to the buildings on the street because you didn't want to create a recess so that the church would not kind of manifest itself on the street and streetscape so you would have these actually stairs in rooms yeah which so this is a facade which actually gives on a stairwell not on the church itself and this is the stair that goes up and here we can already start seeing this diagonal motif but I don't think it's particularly relevant the most bizarre of all is in fact is there in St. Jaipur in Austria and here a historian has made a whole investigation based on dates and let's say on the possible kinships the two architects had so this is the front tower in fact which has been had been in Naples but the dates here and suggest that somehow they were not that was not aware of it and they're not particularly really doesn't really matter it's probably much more interesting in fact to discuss the stairs in relation to a few of the peculiar characteristics of Naples is morphology so this is a map of Naples at the end of the 1500s and in fact it doesn't really change much for a hundred years or so so I said before already in Naples between the 1500 and the 7th and mid 1700 is a vice-realtive which basically means that the ruling powers never really invested on urban transformation there with very large project which for example we can see in other cities in fact the these the city of Naples always develops punctually with new buildings which are very big and grand but which let's say only in the very long time span have an influence on the immediate surrounding in this case what is interesting is that somehow what we get is that the urban tissue of the city remains pretty much a medieval tissue so the plots are very very small and and fairly irregular in shape and that's it the possibility to expand them is very difficult somehow so architects are always faced especially in the 1700s when let's say noblemen start to inhabit the city to come back because the 1600 was a very bad period there was a plague Naples was a very was famously very dangerous city to live in somehow so during nobility preferred to live outside of the city in villas but let's say what's probably even more influenced to let's say the situation San Felicia finds when he goes to work let's say on these palazos is a series of laws called paramatic sanzioni which child six of Habsburg puts in place one after the other which forbids the construction within the city walls and in the immediate outside so what would occur basically was that the only way you could not expand buildings at all at that time and this was a measure to control the population which was famously insubordinate and let's say that's also with the countryside which were becoming less and less operative agriculturally a lot of people wanted to move the city so these laws are put in place to somehow maintain a balance between the population of the two but in fact they have the effect the city still grows but only vertically and on the existing tissue so what we get somehow is these buildings these blocks which are six to seven or eight floors in height which is very unique but which retain a very small footprint and that's for whoever has tried to design a pala let's say a palazzo with a courtyard in such a situation is a very difficult design challenge so this is let's say an average if you want block taken from the Partil Espagnoli which is one of the most in fact regular parts of the city and in black there are the staircases and here you can see this idea the staircase at the back of the courtyard is in fact as much a vernacular if you want response to a series of climatic and let's say if you want urban conditions then it is let's say an artistic if you want decision so in the work of San Felicia probably the first case in which we can find a very interesting response to this condition is in fact palazzo Laudiana which you visited right yeah so this is a palazzo which San Felicia builds for his cousin who had just married and wealthy of his wife's dory so the money you get when you marry a woman decides to renovate let's say a property he has in the old town in Naples so the building is this one here and it's actually in a quite interesting place because it's this you see that it's all quite a mess but generally let's say on a grid and suddenly here you have a circle and that's because that whole block that whole chunk used to be a Roman was built on the foundations of a Roman and Roman theater therefore let's say you can still find the peers actually of the theater in the city around so it's here and here we have a few interesting architectural maneuvers which San Felicia does and which let's say are interesting in relation to series of tendency we have to do with nobility how nobility would live at that time so this is how a typical for example palazzo staircase would work you try to put them as close as possible to the entrance so that when you arrive you go up to the stair in this case we have this peculiar thing that the stairs move actually very far back this is interesting for two reasons the first one is like a very strong relationship which you kind of arrive at establishing between the street escape between the street view and the stair at the back the second one has to do with the increasing let's say popularity reception used to have in the 1700s in Naples so the idea of receiving guests and placing the stair at the back would have guests go through all the display rooms before you would arrive to the main living room so in fact you would experience as a guest a larger extent of the palazzo and therefore be impressed if you want by all the features on display in these rooms such as books, paintings and so forth so let's say this building here is not the first case in fact in which we see a rhomboidal stair it's shaped like a diamond this is a motif which San Felicia develops in a few other staircases before so it's turned in fact 45 degrees from this type of staircase and that has to do with the fact that in that way you would arrive in the center of the rooms rather than on the side which is a very undesirable place to enter a room of course that also creates another series of consequences which let's say are very interesting for example in relation to how you see the stair developing in at the end of the court so when you experience it frontally you see it developing like that rather than parallel to the wall so that's we go back to that problem we described at the beginning so you touch it with the minimum point which is the landing somehow and on the other hand let's say the vaulting becomes incredibly interesting question to you now with the palazzo I showed you a picture of before what's even more interesting is that the staircase is doubled so you enter from one part and you can go up in either direction so it's not just like this one where you go like this and then you're forced to enter here and for example to access these rooms you have to go through the entire palazzo at one point here the staircase is doubled so that at every landing you can enter on both sides and this makes it possible that you don't need a loggia in front of the stair so if here for example you would have a loggia here which would distribute on one side and the other let's say the people depending on where they want you to go in the palazzo or in the case of 2% of palazzo's all around the courtyard in the stair San Felice proposes in Palazzo Laureano in fact we have let's say a symmetrical stair which let's say reads itself of the loggia and therefore if you want results in more let's say cohesive and unitarian if you want scheme on the other hand it's also like a very monumental gesture which of course has a whole series of expressive consequences the other thing which is interesting is that here the stair let's say invades the courtyard so it's not relegated behind walls anymore and these historians have let's say justified by the fact that these windows were existing already before so in fact this was a way to somehow not touch the windows which would light existing rooms yeah and therefore the palace already existed before the staircase is the insertion if you want and this is the typical situation in the time architects would very rarely get a commission to design the whole palazzo or to rebuild the whole palazzo but at any rate let's say here you know by means of this invasion we are exposed to that very tricky moment which what Blunt was describing before again which here is let's say very eloquently solved but we'll talk about it more in his own thoughts so where it's even more refined I'll just show you a few pictures of let's say how this presents itself when you arrive there so there are these two staircases going up and then you have the situation where doors repeat themselves at four floors so it's always the same always as you go up sometimes you have stairs which allow you to mitigate between levels because obviously not all if you if you have a staircase which is so let's say repetitive you don't always get at the same let's say level in the floors so quite interesting series of measures if you want to repeat themselves one for the other then the other thing which is quite impressive is the way in fact the windows are developed which are from here look fairly normal but in fact are very carefully designed detail which is quite unique in history of architecture entirely so this is a scheme which let's say shows us this window in plan it's quite impressive because let's say first of all San Felicia aligns the edges of the window to let's say the view you would have of the palazzo right so that somehow you would never experience the thickness of the wall in its entirety but on the other hand he kind of undoes this measure by developing this weird detail which has a double effect of sorts so you in fact have a sense of depth but it's a thick depth so in fact it looks very slim even though it's a monstrously big window and and this let's say is you know you actually understand when you're on the other side of the window of this opening and it's kind of significant of the importance for example that this architect in particular was giving to the gaze of this window from the moment in which you enter yeah was a very theatrical sort of moment which which is something actually typical of Baroque palaces which start to achieve a directionality in relation for example to Schimploschente palazzo which where the courtyard usually was something harmonious on all sides and which usually tried to establish the tail a core in Baroque palaces I'll show you later there's a drawing of Batswacht Day in Rome which which Wolfman for example deals as a like a contemporary reference we always have let's say a certain axial relation to the space which then and in particular let's well actually so we'll move to his own palazzo which in fact may be the last thing I'll talk about by him it's a project which lasted five to six years to construct it it's located in a very let's say at the moment popularistic area of the city so you can buy for example a flat inside it nice big flat for like a hundred and fifty thousand euros and it's quite grimy it's more or less falling apart somehow but anyways it was built in a a borgo or a very small settlement just outside the city walls in fact it was an illegal settlement and this is important because we have to understand that the geometry in fact of of the palazzo and this weird let's say situation which arises from it is is contingent to the fact that here some fiddles have to work with existing foundations and these foundations were most probably the foundation of an informal construction so in fact it's a very tricky case to work with if we look at the plan of the palazzo this is kind of the extent of this plot with the garden at the back some finish it uses it divides it in two courtyards each courtyard has a stair and each courtyard is dealt with let's say differently somehow and so when you would see for example this building from the street it has two portals these are all photographs by Anthony Blount by the way it has two which goes there in the 60s to document it has two portals one let's say gives you a direct view onto a snail and the other one gives you a direct view onto a hawk wing now these two courtyards are interesting in relation to one another because some finish here does something which it becomes increasingly a tendency at the time which is he builds a palazzo for himself of course but actually rents an entire floor of it so in that case he would use the courtyard with the hawk wing and let's say the tenant of the first floor which I'll show you in a minute instead would use the other staircase that doesn't mean that they would live in separate courtyards both of the apartments actually developed along the two courtyards so on one entire floor but they just had a different means of access and also actually a very different experience of access so this you can see it in the quite let's say peculiar relation between floors so the piano nobile is actually the last floor which is San Felicia's and the slightly lower piano nobile is the one that he would rent out and then on the bottom obviously servants and so forth. Yeah here's a plan I'm gonna quickly show you the stairs now how they work let's say in relation to the access of entrance but effectively let's say this this was the means of access for the the tenant this was the means of access for San Felicia himself and the two courtyards are let's say develop let's say in relation to the stairs but also develop with their very different motives on that so here we can see that the edges of the courtyard are like trimmed off and that you know is an expressive trope which again is actually typical of Baroque architecture but it's more interesting to see how the stair develops so it's two snails which touch each other after one round which they go up and this gives it quite let's say interesting theatrical effect when you arrive so it starts as one stair which then let's say splits in two and then the stairs goes around goes around these very thick nozzles yeah so yeah here you can see developing this is a deep tip which shows you more or less the experience you'd have when you arrive there with these two stairs departing and then yeah come up from here and you arrive in the hall where they come back together again in a vaulted hall which is illuminated from the back with these windows. This is the plan again here historians have suggested in fact this comes from a stair again from Fischer von Erlach for his cathedral in Salzburg which is the stair at a very very very far back it's something you wouldn't experience if you go to the church because it's reserved to the priests but in plan it's significantly similar in fact to that of some tradition that's there. On the other hand there is the hopwing which again you know is placed symmetrical to the courtyard somehow sort of sort of to the portal and then also here it develops around the same motif it's two stairs which go up and up together. So here we see it it's located at the very far back and it creates this kind of very theatrical backdrop to the daily life in the palazzo yeah so it almost in fact they almost in fact look like the niches you would have in a theater yeah to look at the performance. This the drawing actually I was talking to you about before so this drawing it's one of the only drawings that Wolfling includes in the Renaissance in Baroque book when talking about the Baroque palazzo and on this idea of the it's the directionality of it. So this is the palazzo Mattenero which has the lodge of famously only at the back which frames the ten entrance to a garden behind which I guess here is interesting in relation to the case of something similar because it develops along the very same motif but then again here you know what I was saying before it's interesting because he gets rid of the lodger and somehow joins stair and lodging to one element which also has let's say this very let's say representative and theatrical let's say effect and which also let's say allows all the people in the building to access the floors individually. So in fact now there are more than 40 units in the building so the rooms have been chopped up in corridors and so forth and all our access to this there. Expressively this is quite interesting it starts to move away actually from the typical tropes or language of classical architecture and in fact it seems to almost look much more at the kind of muscular architecture of Roman infrastructure such as Aquidot's for instance when you're inside it's a very let's say thick and dense elements which you know with big wall sections and piers and you're always let's say exposed to these very aggressive openings which face one onto each other. Actually there is in relation to Fuga which was a big fan of San Felice there is a stair in Rome in Palazzo Corsini which has a very similar effect. So this is as you walk up and then every time it frames the garden of the back. So in fact it is a structure of this dick which is between a courtyard and a garden. So it's this kind of buffer between these two dimensions of the Palazzo which at the same time it articulates all the life inside it. This is the relationship between the two openings of two ramps going up and down that's the window onto the garden of the back. Now in terms of expression you see these are these distorted openings which seem fairly arbitrary but in fact there was a lot of talking going on in Europe at the time on how one would deal with the question of the oblique. In fact there is one caramel which is a Spanish priest, a mathematician, physicist and improvised architect who writes an entire treatise called Arquitectura Civil Recta i Oblique where he tries to in fact canonize these exceptional moments within architectural expression where you are let's say. In fact it comes from a very painterly approach which deals with let's say a correct mathematical way to distort architectural elements in relation to perspectival view if you're doing a painting but also to these very unique moments such as the stair for example when you are in actual fact building. So I'm sure he might or might not have looked at this book but it was a very influential book at the time. In fact Caramel builds also a project in Italy in... Where is it? It's a piazza with a church at the end which has occurred façade. In Jevon exactly, exactly. But here we can also tell the difference so if Caramel for example theorized that if you have a column between a straight section and oblique one you always put the line in which it breaks at the exact middle of the column we already see how St. Felicius starts to develop his own approach to the matter which is in fact much more refined and elegant and this is most let's say noticeable also if you compare it with the people who have later tried to emulate him. So for example this is by an engineer architect called Attanasio and it's actually 200 meters away from that palazzo but here you can see how the architect is still in some way dicting of a post-lintel system which in fact is abandoned entirely here where we have a much more seamless and smooth expression. This is the case somehow with all the imitations of St. Felicius, St. Felicius' particular solution which are actually very many many many enabled and which somehow give an idea of how this peculiar let's say exceptional case ended up becoming if you want an assertive type of nobility or dwelling within the old town which I guess brings us back on the general conversation we can have later maybe on how we can define this metropolitan architecture in the first place. Maybe the most interesting case which is actually what I'm working on now is actually how to connect this to Fuga who works later in Naples on a large poor house, a cemetery and the granary building but which beforehand and almost during the same years St. Felicius built his own palace has this very peculiar staircase actually when you enter in the courtyard of Palazzo da Consulta at your back which develops exactly along that motif and we know that Fuga was in fact in Naples before building his palace and he probably would have visited the construction site at that building which was one of the most let's say exotic novelties which everyone would go see during its construction and this is also to address that question you were saying before Fuga being a late Baroque architect and not an early if you want enlightenment one and this is kind of a way to make an interesting hinge between these two definitions of these there's also another interesting hinge which is<|it|><|translate|> a big actually unspoken in all this situation, and he is like, he's the champion of Italian architecture very unmentioned at the time but that's another story with us on another occasion. That's it. Thank you for your question. When you say that you've already spoken here of this tale about stairs and solutions, the diagonal, I mean I'm curious now. So could you please? Yeah, sure. This is actually another site project I'm developing now for a symposium that will be in April at the Courtauld, where they asked us to choose specific architectural drawings to take out from the archives and talk about, you know, let's say, a round table of 10-15 people. And I have started to do research on a series of studies Juarez has done, has been drawing for stage sets for the Teatro Toboni in Rome. And now what's interesting with Juvarra, independently from that, is that somehow the young group Juvarra in Rome is one of the most, let's say, he wins this very big competition fact done by Toboni himself, I think. I'm not entirely, I don't remember that exactly. And he is, let's say, the figure everyone is looking at at the time. So for example, we know that Casper von Wittel sends Luigi van Bitteli to study under Juvarra during the years he's doing these theater drawings, and which will curiously, let's say, which where he probably picks up many of the motifs which will curiously reoccur within the Regen Caserta, but also within the drawings which van Bitteli did for the theater in Caserta. And this, let's say, is part of a side chapter in the importance of theater actually in early enlightenment as a space, which actually takes over, if you want, the sacred pulpit of religion as a proper, let's say, political site. On the other hand, there is Fuga, which famously for his first project for the Albert Goli Pauveri, in fact, drafts an option which is a most literal translation of a project Juvarra had done for the consulta, for the people consulta in Rome 10 years before. And it's a one to one borrowing of that. So Juvarra is a bit disfigured, which let's say has a very, and also some fiddles in fact is, if you want, it's always associated with Juvarra, because Juvarra also comes to Naples and does a few church decorations for I don't remember which festivity for the Duomo, which obviously were a very important case study for some fiddles himself. This was at the beginning of the 1700s, so at the same time he's doing the stage sets for the Ottoboni Theater, and Santelice being himself engaged in the construction of a funeral architecture was for sure, if you want, studying Juvarra's solutions. On the other hand, I mean, the other fascination I have with Juvarra is, first of all, he's an architect of extreme talent, which demonstrates somehow a very refined capacity to develop bespoke solutions for very peculiar problems. And on the other hand, he is also an architect which probably most of all exposes, let's say, an approach which is typical of early enlightenment, which is very eclectic, but not eclectic meaning flamboyantly, if you want, over the bar, but eclectic in a sense of being able to make use of different, if you want, architectural expressions or languages, depending on the case. So which, of course, is something which we can refer back to Fischer Ponellach, but which is also actually one of the biggest qualities of Fuga, for instance, who is able to create the most austere, almost Jansenese architecture at the same time he's doing Palazzo della Consulca, for example. Well, of course, it's a danger that, oh, really, I would be happy if you can give us an answer to my question. Maybe it's a difficult question to answer because I even don't let you know how to formulate the question. Your part here, I mean, I think we wanted to have you here for two reasons. I think, first of all, because what you bring in in terms of, I mean, the particularity of the work of Fuga as Fuglice is extremely interesting and beautiful on its own right, on a tectonic level, on the kind of, I mean, especially the staircase he does for himself. So Palazzo seems to today, maybe perhaps from a Swiss perspective, so contemporary. Yeah. Almost shocked, right? I mean, I think that's an aspect of it. I mean, certain Swiss architects will be happy to make such things. At the same time, there is, you touched upon that, this argument of making a facade for a building which is inside the building because you have these very narrow streets, you have these big gates, and then in some strange way you can bring the facade deep inside. That is another, I think, very important, very fascinating thing of the architecture you show. Then, of course, if you try to zoom out even more, and you know that you're the third fragment of our attempt, of course, together with students to define what today could be metropolitan architecture, in which I think the default answer is not allowed, which is, ah, it's building within the metropolis, but rather an architecture which tries to carry in itself a kind of promise of the metropolis. I mean, to recall for ourselves, Christopher Hannaway, he brought in, I mean, amongst other topics, this idea of this, I would say, collective living, which is highly individualized. I mean, to sort of say that you're totally on your own, but you're part of an infrastructure which is so big that you can do things which you cannot otherwise. I think when we saw last time Madein, so, Charles Bonnet, he was, of course, and he was asked to talk about his own architecture, he was showing this, I would have to say, most high-tech kind of architecture, highly expressive in terms of the bold and very often, by the way, without a steel kind of system of it. In some sense, when we look at this, some of the architecture buildings, they seem to touch both, but maybe that's purely projection. I was wondering how you see that. I think the interesting slide probably, the matrix basically with all the stairs, exactly. So, I think if there is one, there's more than one, but if there is one, if you want, instance where we can start to talk about this there, something which is more than itself. So now, it's in relation to, if you want, this assertive type, which is the open-stair napkins. And which, as I kind of briefly explained, but one should, in fact, explain much better, which is actually born out of a very idiosyncratic, let's say, urban condition. So, Naples is a case where collective dwelling, if you want, as we refer to today. So therefore, the idea of building, of having your own house within a larger compound, united by a staircase, a common staircase or a common circulation, is in fact one of the cities to have it earliest, precisely because of the, let's say, the spatial, if you want, how do you say, constraints, which the city posed to its inhabitants, which would continuously build on top, and on top, and on top. And to a certain extent, you know, we can also say that this way of living has largely or vastly conditioned, I would say, and I would love to think, a certain approach to, let's say, the idea of a neighbor itself. In a city like Naples, or the idea of private, or ideas such as private and public affairs within, let's say, domestic compounds, for example, in a city like Naples. And the whole, if you want, theatricality of Neapolitan life. So that is, I think, definitely a discussion to be made. On the other hand, we can talk here, I think, of, I don't know if metropolitan maybe is the right word, but maybe it's more cosmopolitan, if you want, so an architecture which is at once, it's a strongly rooted to its context, to the point that, you know, it's almost kind of indisturnable from it. But also, if you want, refers to a whole system of ideas which is, which goes totally beyond its immediate reach. And which I very briefly tried to mention, so now. So then there's this idea of this parasite, you know, like this stairs which punctually somehow, through a single typology, infects. If you want the entirety of the urban tissue in a very discrete way, that's a very much effect, let's say, the way the city works, at a smaller scale. So this, I think, is also an interesting matter, you know, because I always actually ask myself, okay, what could be another case in which a single architectural element has been so, if you want, so assertive and so deterministic for the way in which let's say a city works. And I kind of struggle to find it. It's more easy to find it, for example, in legislative measures. So for example, when a city says you can't build more than four, then you start to have, you know, a series of consequences to that which develop into traditions. So that's kind of easier. It's easier to, let's say, to find it within that kind of framework. But it's less easy to find it, let's say, in similar terms to some finishes. And that, I think, is possibly something interesting. Or it could maybe be the, there's a technological aspect to it, you know, it could maybe be the elevator and the roof, for example. But that's, I think, on the edge. Being the elevator almost an invisible element, you know, it doesn't play such an old... But I think, I mean, coming back to this... But sorry, just very briefly, I would also dare to say that this is a technological aspect too. Oh yeah. Even though it has no wiring. No, no, true, true. True. No, and coming back to the stairs, I mean, I think there's indeed this, again, weird parallel, you know, because let me say as ancestors, you know, of this metapointan architecture, we were obviously looking, and being Paris now, the center of our attention for the first semester, we were obviously looking at a certain ITAC architecture, as Catherine was mentioning, and it's the Asupasion. But even later, let me say, Nouvelle, and obviously if you talk about Paris, you have to talk about Boutbourg, and then suddenly I think there's this, again, weird analogy, you know, that the stairs from an element which was completely high, no, hidden before, sorry, during all Paranascence, now that suddenly comes the first thing you see in a building. If you consider Boutbourg, you consider, I don't know, the Lloyds in London, you know. Suddenly, with this sort of architecture, the stairs is the absolute protagonist. It comes to the facade, it defines the way in which you look at the building, even defines the way in which you think at the building. So the building is a building of floors, no more than a building of staying, I would say, or so. I think it's interesting, this sort of transformation, and now the elements becomes central to a certain idea of architecture. Yes, actually I didn't state it so clearly that the intelligent thing here with all these projects is in fact an issue which is, if you want, a very, let's say, a matter of fact functional issue, here assumes, if you want, the core expressive, if you want, functions. The problem becomes the architecture. Yeah. In fact, Louis Cannon, maybe even more so, is probably the... Another one to look at in these terms. I sort of have trouble to believe, but that has more to do with the fact that I cannot understand how people lived in buildings in the 17th or 18th century. I have sometimes trouble to understand that it was one house or a house with one reddish floor. As you said, when I visited it with you, many of the buildings were also his own. Yeah, you had the feeling that it was always meant as a building for men. Yeah, no, his own, for sure, was meant at least for two, because there was the Duke renting the flat downstairs, because San Felicio was noble of birth, but also not so rich. So somehow, let's say, he had to recoup the money he had borrowed to build this palazzo by renting out the floor. Which is also, for example, what happens in Tristanzara's house, Los, where the floor immediately above the house of Tristanzara is actually up-floor to rent out, to recoup building costs. But then there's also something else to it, which I feel is less apparent on the pictures, much more when you're there. But you mentioned it, I think, briefly. The stairs are the protagonists, as you said. I mean, in location, in composition, but also in the way they are detailed, in the sense that the rest of the building often looks far less cheaper done, more trashy, to some extent, which I find also in relationship, I would say, to the studio very interesting. So it's this kind of, what's the hierarchy of the architecture, to a certain sense. Yeah, no, that's true. In fact, this has to do, I think, with a broader topic, which is when you start a project, particularly with projects like this, where you have a given context, and budgets which are usually not so high, in fact, for palazzo standards. Where do you put the energy in how, let's say, you, and how do you deal with, let's say, contextual questions? And here, it's exactly that. If you want, we have these signature pieces, somehow, which obviously are related to the rest, but which clearly, let's say, are centers of gravity, for the internal architecture and expression. Questions from the public? Yes. Here, the first kind of the... Just to follow up with this discussion, it's maybe very interesting also to note that you started by showing this festive machine, that are an element of sonography, and in a way, this staircase could be even interpreted as sonography themselves, and kind of outrageous type of sonography, that is a collision between architecture and the world, in a very technological way. So, if you look at this staircase... No, not this one. This one. So, this staircase here... Play. I think you have to press play. Play. Play. No, because I wanted to go faster, but whatever, let's do it, as it's done. So, if you look at this staircase here, and then compare it to that tower I showed before, it's in fact exactly the same element, which just kind of occupies a courtyard, rather than being freestanding in a square, as that element actually is, which again suggests that in fact, it's probably something which has much more to do, it's probably something which has... Even though this is a later project, so this is 1740, the other one was around mid-1720s, it also kind of suggests that if you want this choreographic element, it's as important as was the functional one of accessing, if you want, two parts of the palazzos with one stair and with other lodger. So, even there, it's like an economy of means, somehow, which allows you to do two things with one thing. So, but yeah, definitely there's a... Like the link is super strong. I'm interested in that. More questions. But this, I think, is also interesting, this idea of the gravity, if you want, of the design of these entire complexes on these staircases, is actually, I think, one of the most interesting features of Fugas architecture always, where mostly, I'm not interested in Palazzo Corsini and in the Albertian Naples, you have an extreme economy of means in dealing with, let's say, the organization of space, in dealing with the expression on the facade, except for these two exceptional moments on the one hand, in the Palazzo Corsini, in the staircase, which was a stair gallery, in fact, where the bishop, because that was the cousin of the pope, Neri Corsini, had all his collection of statues. And on the other hand, in the Al-Daghari Poverty, which is... The church. Yeah, exactly. Which is... Do I have it? Yes. That building up there... I could zoom out, but whatever. The church in the center, which is effectively the only true, if you want, intense moment, experientially speaking... Yeah, which connects everything, actually. Yeah, which actually connects everything, and which acts as a core for the entire project, which otherwise is a very dry building, which even in art history is always kind of neglected as a kind of late failure, late experiment, like something which arrives too late, in fact, because that's kind of... Maybe that's also an interesting case for the brief Metropolitan architecture. His Pugas project under Charles of Bourbon, which actually are located in Naples, but address the entire rain, so from Naples to Palermo. So buildings which are incredibly out of scale for their context, but which, let's say, geographically, and which managerially have to do with a much larger scope. So that inspires more questions, Christ. More questions? Nothing? I think they... I have another one. Yeah, another one. We were noticing before that in many of these stairs, obviously the geometry, the fact that you got the flights, and so the diagonal lines are even obviously implicating a sort of perspective of, how to say, distortion. Yeah. I mean, you wonder whether you got this sort of, how to say, intentional playing with perspective, which is very much what you think about Bach, among other things. You wonder which is the consciousness, no? Because obviously if you are staging the stairs as the main element, then suddenly you got in your hands a formidable tool, no, in order to even play with perspective. And when you look at them from the courtyards, no, seeing that, let me say that, for example, the routes which are going down, no, and it's very much, again, an incredible, how to say, trick, no? Yeah. There is an interesting theory, actually, an architect who is living in the Palazzo at the moment, is developing by drawing it all, which has to do with the vaulting of these urges. But mostly those where he is kind of trying to prove that the last ones are much more tilted than the ones below, so that you could see, let's say, they're under part from the bottom. So from one perspective, in fact, from one point of view. Which, of course, means that, yeah, this comment that you made is entirely pertinent, even more so. This whole idea of distortion is, in fact, a painterly problem before it is an architectural problem. So it has to do, for example, with, and it's a problem which architects have dealt with since Guero de la Francesca. How do you properly distort a Corinthian order with mathematical rules which are, let's say, as rigorous as those of Vitruvius? Also, and in paintings, in painting, obviously, maybe it's slightly easier, but in the case of building, actually, these elements, it's more tricky. And that's kind of the central point of debate, in fact, of Guarini and Caramuel, when they have this epistol exchange, where Guarini, in fact, accuses Caramuel of having no clue whatsoever how you built, how to build, and what it means to work tectonically with elements. And, let's say, claiming that, in fact, he is an architectural amateur and should spend more words on painting rather than building. But you see also here, with Sant'Vicius, on the Palazzo, he moves towards an architecture of wall rather than elements, right? So as a result, he can simplify his kind of programming, so he seems like he, I mean, also the other much more narrow, I forgot the name, other court, the one with the... I see, this one, here. I mean, in a way, there's so little detail that he's able to get away with it. Yeah, yeah, yes. And here less, like here you still have if you want to. But the other one very much, they're almost reduced, the orders are almost reduced to lines, to guiding lines. This is what you notice in the people who have tried to do these stairs again in Naples, which they have to struggle always because they want to keep the... here, it's more of this here, where they even steps down here where you have this very kinky moment where something diagonal ends up into a capital. This one is better. That's Nicola Tania Kotsyrika, and Aleutius Great-Ancient. But he didn't get out of commissions because he was slightly later than San Felicius at the time in which the two big guys in Naples were Fugan and Vitelli. And then there were the architects associated to them, I forgot the names, but they were the ones getting all the jobs. And San Felicius would only be able to do these temporary actually structures once again because they were getting all the big commissions. In fact, the only big commission San Felicius gets is the gardens of Capodimunta. And yeah, that's about it. Sad story, sad story. Good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
think it's part of his increasing fascination for coming. Thank you. This is about the microphone. nobleman belonging to the Sege de Montagna which with torches on the ocean which illuminated the famous and copied architect of the time and himself. This was at the beginning of the 1700s,