User:F.Damiani/Massimo Pica Ciamarra

Massimo Pica Ciamarra (Naples, 9 July 1937) is an Italian architect

Training and early years
He studied at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Naples Federico II, drawing inspiration from the teachings of Giulio De Luca, Ezio De Felice and above all Roberto Pane, who together with a few others were trying to put a stop to the building spree that was affecting the city of Naples, which had been devastated by the war. He acquired a critical view of the rationalism of the Modern Movement and, thanks also to a course on Palladian architecture in Vicenza at Pane's instigation, Pica Ciamarra began to develop, during his university years, "the idea that modernity can inhabit the most ancient principle and that the great legacy of the historic city, which must be recovered, lies in the sense of continuous relations".

The encounter with Team X and the ideas expressed by “Le Carré Bleu, feuille internationale d'architecture” further contributed to his training. From Bruno Zevi, who involved him in IN/Arch, the National Institute of Architecture, Pica Ciamarra inherited the idea that "architecture is essentially space and that, precisely for this reason, it must avoid static, symmetrical, monumental, banally elementary configurations".

In 1960 he completed his first work, the extension of the Officine Angus, an Anglo-Swiss factory producing industrial gaskets in the province of Naples, applying various technical experiments to overcome the "conflict between form, function and structure" and go beyond the "stereotype of the conventional industrial building". The building was awarded a prize in 1969 by IN/Arch. In 1963 Pica Ciamarra began a collaboration with Riccardo Dalisi, with whom he had developed experiences in Francesco Della Sala's studio. What they have in common is "the rejection of the functionalist demand that leads to an anti-urban approach, the propensity to explore unexplored paths, the idea that architecture should be open to the complexity of reality, the unconventional adherence to the teachings of the great masters of the Modern Movement". His unrealised projects include a primary school in Chiaia (Naples) and the “Un seme per la metropolis”, presented at the Bologna City Council competition to rethink the typological characteristics of the new compulsory school, both designed to open the school to the city in a constant dialogue with the surrounding urban environment. In 1964, together with Michele Capobianco, they won the design of the Borsa Merci in Naples on Corso Meridionale, the first major work of public architecture with which they were confronted.

Between 1966 and 1970 Pica Ciamarra designed the multi-family house in Posillipo, in the Neapolitan district of the same name, an example of "humanised rationalism" whose aim was to encourage relations between the people living there. The projects for Casa Winspeare, also in Naples, Casa Renner in Baia Domitia and Casa Wenner in Marechiaro date from the same period.

Team Pica Ciamarra Associati
Dalisi and Pica Ciamarra's last joint work was the project submitted for the competition for the Free University of Brussels in 1969, the year in which Pica Ciamarra was awarded a professorship in architectural design at the University of Naples. He then began a new association with Luciana De Rosa, former assistant to Carlo Cocchia. Their collaboration began with the joint design of a number of private residences: Casa G. at Punta Lagno Massa Lubrense (1971-73) and Casa C. at Massa Lubrense (1973-76), which had in common the objective of overcoming the box-like form of the building by breaking it up with jagged volumes that interrupt its unity and follow the design of the land.

In 1971 Studio Pica Ciamarra Associati was set up in Posillipo, with Luciana De Rosa and later Antimo Rocereto; in the 1980s Claudio De Martino and then Patrizia Bottaro, Paola Gargiulo, Carolina Poidomani, Emanuele Pica Ciamarra and Alexander De Siena, Guido De Martino and Angelo Verderosa joined the firm, along with engineers and other specialists.

The period of student protests and various studies on university buildings led Pica Ciamarra to take a particular interest in this subject, which he had already tackled in 1966 with the competition for the new Faculty of Science and Pharmacy in Messina, which he won in 1968. In 1971 "Occam's Razor" was submitted for the competition for the new University of Florence, which had to be built around the Florence-Prato-Pistoia link road. The work was not a winner, but that same year they built the headquarters of the Pharmacy Departments of the University of Messina, a tripartite configuration based on the need to overcome the single box-shaped block by exploiting the differences in level on the model of Le Corbusier's Tourette. A typology that will return several times in the works of Pica Ciamarra Associati.

Among the unbuilt projects is the one for the University of Lattakya in Syria (1973, the first international competition by invitation, followed by those for Yarmouk University and the College of Engineering and Technology - University of Jordan). In 1975 they designed a project for the University of Salerno (2nd prize), which aimed to integrate university facilities with urban amenities by means of a vast system of public pedestrian routes. In the winning project, headed by Mario Ingrami, approved in 1979, the most volumetrically important buildings were entrusted to Pica Ciamarra; the work dragged on for over twenty years. The E.R. Caianiello Library opened in 1997. The Arcavacata campus project for the University of Calabria dates back to 1972. Initially limited to the multifunctional unit housing departments, faculties, library and computer centres, it was subsequently extended between 1974 and 1977 with new classroom and office blocks. The idea behind the project is the same as that of the Angus Workshops, i.e. a project that is constantly in progress, to which other volumetric units may be added over time according to need, modifying the function of the existing ones, with a view to a living, constantly changing university. Inside the multipurpose building, the central gallery picks up on the idea of the Commodities Exchange of a covered urban square. Defined as a "manifesto work" by Studio Pica Ciamarra Associati, the Arcavacata Multipurpose Building effectively completes Pica Ciamarra's design maturity, recovering all the original ideas that emerged in the early years, and were then the starting point for almost all the major projects that followed.

The energy crisis of the Seventies also prompted Pica Ciamarra to study the themes of bio-architecture, with the aim of designing buildings with low energy consumption and based as far as possible on natural lighting and ventilation mechanisms, as well as a new focus on green spaces. This was the basis for the unrealised projects for the 167 district in Sessa Aurunca, the schools in Chiari and Montichiari, and the "bioclimatic" council houses in Pistoia, drawn up in 1979 and described in the article by Pica Ciamarra and Luciana De Rosa “Alla ricerca delle informazioni perdute” published in 1980 in "Spazio e Società".

Main project
Pica Ciamarra had already designed the Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice), inaugurated in 1990, as part of the Centro Direzionale in Naples, whose volume plan was designed by Kenzō Tange. The project, coordinated by Corrado Beguinot, is completely antithetical to the Tange plan, since it precedes it chronologically. The raised covered square, an agora and meeting place common to the enormous building, betrays Pica Ciamarra's signature. Pica Ciamarra's hostility to Tange's project is evident, since the Directional Centre is radically opposed to the rest of the urban fabric, isolated by its elevation above street level, and thus lacking the idea of continuous crossings of the city which underlies Pica Ciamarra's design. Tange's plan strongly constrains Pica Ciamarra's projects, but he does not hesitate to depart from the constraints wherever possible: in the case of the ENEL Towers, the unity of the glass façade and the symmetry of the original design of the two buildings is interrupted. The second pair of skyscrapers achieves the same idea by placing the installations in a central open space which also allows for greater air circulation. Both pairs of buildings are characterised by external lifts.

Between 1984 and 1990 Pica Ciamarra Associati firm worked in the Fuorigrotta area, west of Naples, on the new Fuorigrotta square and the CNR motor institute. The latter, which derives from a 1984 competition, puts into practice those principles of bio-architecture theorised since the 1970s: the building is concave to protect against the sun and to achieve high thermal insulation, avoiding the reflection of heat from the asphalt, double-glazed windows, limited openings, a sloping lawn to protect the lower floors from noise, and a large fountain with nebulised water to cool the streams. The innovative rainwater recovery system in large full-height containers on the sides of the building serves the fire-fighting system, the laboratory cooling circuit, the heat pump air conditioning system and the fountain. In 1995, similar considerations informed the Teuco-Guzzini building in Recanati.

The Piazza di Fuorigrotta, inaugurated on the occasion of the 1990 World Cup, in an uneven area of over five hectares overlooked by the San Paolo Stadium, the Polytechnic, the Mostra d'Oltremare, and the Campi Flegrei underground station, was a major challenge for the visionary nature of the project: three towers at the apexes of a triangle paved in wood (Torre dell'Informazione; Torre della Memoria; Torre del Tempo e dei Fluidi) house video walls, a laser system, Europe's largest sundial, music and wind machines. Neglect soon condemned the futuristic construction to decay, integrated with a pool of water and pedestrian paths on tapis-roulant.

The project for the Monte Sant'Angelo university campus, designed with Michele Capobianco, is also on the edge of the Soccavo and Fuorigrotta districts. A long gestation period, and not yet completed in its final configuration after more than thirty years, and the traditional neglect of the spaces, limit the effectiveness of the intervention.

The experience of the City of Science
Co-founder of the IDIS Foundation for the promotion of scientific culture, Pica Ciamarra has designed the Città della Scienza project in the former Federconsorzi area in Bagnoli. Here he has restored a former factory by the sea, using the bioclimatic principles tested with the Istituto Motori; the other main building, inside, keeps to the existing shell and is intended as a conference centre, offices and BIC overlooking two long covered squares. The project, a finalist for the Gold Medal for Architecture at the Triennale di Milano in 2003, Mention Speciale du “Trophées Sommet de la Terre et Batiment” and winner of the international Dedalo Minosse award in 2004, was completed in stages: the renovation of the first building in 1996 ("Museo vivo della Scienza"), the Congress Centre and Business Innovation Centre in 2003, and the Museum of the Human Body, Corporea, opened in 2017. However, the "Living Museum of Science" was destroyed by arson in 2013 and never rebuilt. Some similarities with the Congress Centre can be found in the Sangiorgio Library in Pistoia in the former Breda area, inaugurated in

Urban planning
He took part in the 1970s in the design of the Naples City Council's Framework Plan for Equipment, where he asserted a logic of intervention that developed the themes of Team X, which later inspired the Plan for the Recovery of the Piscinola and Marianella neighbourhoods, aimed at restoring unity to the urban fabric distorted by years of illegal building in an area that had until recently been open countryside, while at the same time recovering the existing urban values. However, implementation will only be partial. In these experiments, pedestrian routes, interchange systems with underground lines, urban squares and public spaces as social condensers take on fundamental importance, and these are substantial themes in subsequent urban planning projects. These themes are also developed with proposals for alternative mobility integrated into the network of public spaces: for example in the redevelopment of the Rione Libertà in Benevento and in "KO CO2" in Terlizzi. .

In the field of town planning, Pica Ciamarra shows great interest and activism in the redevelopment of the former industrial area of Bagnoli, partly because the only functioning structure in the area is the City of Science, which he designed. He took part in the design competitions for the urban park (which he did not win) and the Sports Park (which he won, was built but not inaugurated, and is now abandoned), but he criticised the overall approach adopted by Vezio De Lucia's urban plan, which was also taken up by the recent Invitalia plan, suggesting that challenging underground metro lines should be replaced by surface tram lines, and that the agricultural conversion of industrial areas should be promoted. Still on the urban planning front, he designed the Urban Park and facilities in Cava de' Tirreni and Salerno's Porta Ovest, with a long and contradictory construction process that should be completed in 2022. He also designed the detailed plan for the former Saint Gobain area in Caserta which, together with the subsequent Municipal Urban Plan, marked an interesting link between town planning and architecture. Research on these themes is carried out within the Firm by the working group coordinated by Patrizia Bottaro.

Other interventions
More than thirty projects carried out in various regions have been selected by MIBAC among the "Architecture of the Second Half of the XXth Century". University buildings include the Papardo and Annunziata buildings for the University of Messina (1968-74), the Rectorate/Aula Magna/Library unit at the University of Fisciano (1983-2002), the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery in Caserta (1996, still under construction), the University of Molise in Campobasso (2005), and the Via dei Mulini complex at the University of Sannio in Benevento (2008). The renovation of historic buildings is also important. Not only Città della Scienza, but above all the renovation of the eighteenth-century Palazzo Saluzzo di Corigliano, in the heart of the historic centre of Naples, on Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, which houses the departments of the University of Naples "L'Orientale", where finds of Greek walls and ancient stables have been brought to light and incorporated into the new underground classrooms. At the same time, the eighteenth-century Palazzo Mascabruno in Portici was restored to house parts of the Faculty of Agriculture. The Pica Ciamarra Firm also subsequently tackled the restoration of the neighbouring Royal Palace of Portici. Between 1985 and 1992 the firm was responsible for the restoration of the Teatro Fraschini in Pavia and in 1987 (an unfinished project) for the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station in the Villa Comunale in Naples.

Studio Pica Ciamarra designed the San Paolo Shopping Centre in Fuorigrotta, Naples (1989, inaugurated in 2000) and the Via Argine Shopping Centre (2002, inaugurated in 2010), as well as the Torre Ingastone Shopping Centre in Palermo (2005, inaugurated in 2010).

Other important buildings are the CEINGE - International Centre for Genetic Engineering - in Naples, the emergency and reception department of the Niguarda Hospital in Milan, the building on Via Marina in Naples - now the Palazzo del Mediterraneo, home of the L'Orientale University - the Teuco-Guzzini building in Recanati, and the Sangiorgio Library in Pistoia.

Theoretical activity
Massimo Pica Ciamarra’s activity is characterised by a continuous intellectual and theoretical commitment. From 1971 to 2007 he taught Architectural Design at the University of Naples, without ever having been a full professor.

In 1987 he founded the Campania section of IN/Arch in which, between 1997 and 2011, he succeeded Bruno Zevi as national vice-president. In 2006 he took over the editorship of Le Carré Bleu, feuille internationale d'architecture, Team X's historic magazine, and proposed the issue-manifesto Fragments / Symbiose and, in 2008, the Declaration of Human Duties, in relation to habitat and lifestyles. Since 2012 he has been vice-president of the Italian Foundation for Bio-architecture and the Sustainable Anthropization of the Environment and a member of the I.A.A. - International Academy of Architecture.

In Architettura e dimensione urbana (1977), through a reflection on his projects, he expressed "the conviction that urban space is what interests architectural intervention on the topological plane, so that the urban block and the building in itself are no longer the spatial formalisation of the city, but the prevalence of the system of relations over the parts", from which it follows that "every action in the pre-existing city must be a fragment of the urban continuum".

He returned to this theme in 1997 with the volume ''Interactions. Principles and methods of architectural design and in 2010 with Integrare. Il progetto sul finire dell'era della separazione''. He also explored the themes of sustainability, bio-architecture, rational utopia and, more recently, spatial architecture, coining the neologism "OrbiTecture" and launching a collaboration with the "Center for Near Space" of the Italian Institute for the Future, designing a spatial habitat of planetomorphic conception inspired by principles of sustainability, which won the Sorrento Prize for the Environment in 2019.

In 2018 the "Civilizing the Urban - ETS" Foundation joined Pica Ciamarra Associati. This was the occasion for the publication of the homonymous volume which discusses the roots, thesis and perspective of the long theoretical and experimental research present in the extensive monographic exhibition at the Museo della Pace / MAMT of the Fondazione Mediterraneo. On this occasion Pica Ciamarra received the Mediterranean Award "Architecture" - Special Edition 2018.

Main works

 * Officine Angus, Casavatore, 1961-67
 * Nuova Borsa Merci, Napoli (with Michele Capobianco and Riccardo Dalisi)
 * Casa a Posillipo, Napoli, 1967-70
 * Unità Polifunzionale di Arcavacata - Università della Calabria, Rende, 1972-74
 * Palazzo di Giustizia, Napoli, 1975; (with Corrado Beguinot coord., Michele and Antonio Capobianco, Daniele Zagaria)
 * Restauro del Palazzo Saluzzo di Corigliano, Napoli, 1979 (with Ezio De Felice and Ugo Carputi)
 * Facoltà di Scienze ed Economia a Monte Sant'Angelo, Napoli, 1981 (with Michele Capobianco)
 * Restauri della Reggia di Portici e Palazzo Mascabruno per la Facoltà di Agraria, Portici, 1983-84
 * Torri ENEL, Napoli, 1985-90 (with Giulio De Luca, Renato and Francesco Avolio De Martino)
 * Polo Tecnologico del C.N.R. e Piazza a Fuorigrotta, Napoli, 1984-87
 * Coppia di Grattacieli al Centro Direzionale, Napoli, 1988
 * Centro Commerciale San Paolo a Fuorigrotta, Napoli, 1989
 * Sede Teuco-Guzzini, Recanati, 1995
 * Biblioteca E.R.Caianiello, Biblioteche dell'Università di Salerno 1997
 * Città della scienza, Napoli, 1993-03
 * Centro Commerciale via Argine, Napoli, 2003-10
 * CEINGE-Biotecnologie Avanzate, Napoli, 2004
 * Biblioteca San Giorgio, Pistoia - 2000-07 (with Angelo Verderosa, Federico Calabrese, Franco Arcidiacono)
 * Complesso di Torre Ingastone, Palermo 2005-10
 * Corporea - Città della Scienza
 * Vip lounge, Aeroporto di Napoli-Capodichino

Books

 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Poetica del frammento e conversione ecologica, CivETS, 2021 - ISBN: 978-88-944192-4-5
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra (a cura), verso Napoli Città Metropolitana, CivETS, 2021 - ISBN: 978-88-944192-3-8
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Speranza / Memoria, CivETS, 2020 - ISBN: 978-88-944192-3-8
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Verso il Codice della Progettazione, CivETS, 2019 - ISBN: 978-88-944192-1-4
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Integrare. Il progetto sul finire dell'era della separazione, Jaca Book, Milano, 2010 - ISBN: 978-88-16-40968-2
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Etimo: costruire secondo principi, Liguori, Napoli, 2004 -  ISBN: 978-88-20-73600-2
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Interazioni. Principi e metodi della progettazione architettonica, Clean, Napoli, 1997 - ISBN: 88-86701276
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, La cultura del progetto, Graffiti, Napoli, 1996
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Qualità e concezione del progetto, Officina Edizioni, Roma, 1994
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra (a cura di), Città futura, Clean, Napoli, 1988
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Manuale delle opere di urbanizzazione, Parte IV, Franco Angeli, Milano, 1983
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Architettura e dimensione urbana, Cooperativa Editrice Economia e Commercio, Napoli, 1977
 * Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Architettura e dimensione urbana, Cooperativa Editrice Economia e Commercio, Napoli, 1977

Other works

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