The Corviale/Rome and the Vele/Naples: How a “monster” can become an urban opportunity, or not?

In the last 20 years in Italy, any remaining social and political criticism of modern architecture and its supposed "monsters" has focused on a series of social housing complexes that were built in some suburban locations up and down the country during the 1970s. These were all designed by well-known modernist architects to house thousands of people in accordance with modernist methodologies of housing typologies and functional organization; they were all conceived as gigantic machines à habiter. But a few years after their construction these housing complexes shifted from being a "modern utopia" to a "contemporary ghetto". The "Corviale" project in Rome and the Vele in Naples are 2 emblematic examples of this trend. Built in the early 1970s to the designs of Mario Fiorentino and Franz Di Salvo, respectively, both these housing complexes were the result of an important cultural debate on the role of macro-structures as a solution to the challenge of creating a community while housing huge numbers of inhabitants. Both were designed as "urban utopias" but built without all the amenities. The final result was the construction of huge, modern phalansteries, isolated from the city. Our research will focus on the history of these two projects and on their parallel but opposite destinies. The demolition of the Veie began in the mid-1990s and the population was moved to an alternative housing complex designed with a lower density and anonymous architecture; whereas an alternative destiny awaited Corviale, which became in the late 1990s a social and political workshop, and a focus of speculations by a new generation of local Italian designers as to how its use could be re-imagined. More recently, the municipality of Rome has launched an international competition to transform all the community spaces. A specific functional program has been imagined after a set of workshops with the local population. The two stories represent the "tip of the iceberg" of a more diffuse potential public discussion on modern architecture in Italy.