To play hide and seek

Palazzo della Morte by Stefania Filo Speziale and the practice of “filth”

Abstract

The Palazzo della Morte, one of the mature works by Stefania Filo Speziale is a rational sequence of severely voluptuous spaces, which it silently comes out of the bowels of Naples with some very elegant references, bearers of the “irrational” condition of space. The Palazzo which is “playing hide and seek”, deploys itself as a process that rises from the “underground” which, reordering the matter of the project, organises spaces and environments following empirical processes, and in fact confirming that this architecture is “Super” Modern. Palazzo della Morte clashes with the imaginary constructed around the concept of the “palazzina” (block of flats), by using tools that subtend spaces rewritten in their grammar. The Palace, from its Renaissance prototype, is converted into an oblong variation, distorted, without axial symmetry, where the absence of the façade and the reorganisation of the levels re-elaborate on the composition of the Palace, distributing the spaces beginning from urban needs related to density and especially of traditional practices adopted over time by Naples.