Sulle tracce di Stefania Filo Speziale prima del grattacielo

Stefania Filo Speziale (1905-1988), the first woman to graduate in Architecture in Naples and a pupil of Marcello Canino, decided to lose track of herself by destroying her project drawings, thus making it difficult to attempt to reconstruct her professional figure. Without dwelling on her most famous works, such as the Metropolitan Cinema-Theatre and Della Morte Palace, it will consider her mature but less explored activity, which took place in the first half of the 1950s, considering that 1958 saw the completion of the skyscraper of Società Cattolica di Assicurazioni. The overall reading and chronological ‘reordering’ of these episodes, supported by rare graphic acquisitions, even of unpublished works, such as the ‘residential building’ in Carelli Park, can contribute to a broader understanding of the designer’s production, beyond the commonplace. Always attentive “to the need dictated by the psychological factor” of the inhabitants, to whom she destined green spaces and social places, she proposed the compositional type-morphological diversification of buildings, with broken plants and the play of volumes, and different texture of surfaces. Particularly in the INA-Casa ‘laboratory’, such as the neighbourhoods at Capodichino (1951) and Agnano (1953), she made use of experimental research on the urban landscape. What emerges is a personality capable of interpreting the evolution of modernity and deeply embedded in the cultural context of the 1950s.