David Charlton

unpicked palimpsest

This project questions the concealment and restrictions of the ‘protective’ strategies of UNESCO and World Heritage status.

In Napoli’s historic centre the remains of a huge Roman theatre are embedded in an overlay of domestic and commercial buildings, densely occupied and slowly crumbling.

At street level, small clues suggest something older grafted into the city block; a slight curvature in a facade, an occupied ‘buttress’ spanning the road. From the air the semi-circular plan is clearly seen as a fan of rooftop volumes.

Where are the interfaces between the colliding elements of antique theatre and stacked dwellings? One ordered, public, monumental, centralized and hidden, the other private, domestic, expedient, irregular but visible.

The proposal extends the existing underground excavations upwards in a delicate but radical undoing of the hybrid fabric. A permissive demolition choreographed around an existing courtyard creates a vantage point. The courtyard void is inverted to become a solid tower, and a means to view the newly exposed palimpsest of histories, functions and conditions. A building within a building, and a study of itself, it also functions as an entrance to the underground vaults, project archive, and spiraling viewpoints over the whole.