psychiatric hospitals

PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALS
Genoa Summer School is an international workshop
ideated by Vittorio Pizzigoni and Valter Scelsi, and
organized within the Department in Science for
Architecture, Università degli Studi di Genova.
www.genoasummerschool.it
Genoa Summer School is also a book series
edited by V. Pizzigoni and V. Scelsi
Araldica Edizioni
Piazza delle Vigne 22R
16124 Genova, Italy
Psychiatric Hospitals,
Genova, Araldica, 2015
ISBN 978-88-909680-6-8
Edited by
Vittorio Pizzigoni, Valter Scelsi
Editorial secretary
Giulia Poggi
Translator and Copy Editor
Susan Campbell
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publisher.
This project has been funded with the support from
the European Commission (Project no 2013-1-IT2ERA10-52959).
Genoa Summer School 2nd edition Genoa, 20th July – 3rd August 2014
«Two Psychiatric Hospitals»
A fifteen day intensive program developing architectural
projects on the sites of the two great psychiatric
hospitals in the Genoa metropolitan area: Quarto dei
Mille on the east and Pratozanino on the west.
PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALS
Teachers
Ido Avissar (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de
Versailles), Nicola Braghieri (École Polytechnique Fédérale
de Lausanne), Cherubino Gambardella (Seconda Università
degli Studi di Napoli), Andrea Gritti (Politecnico di Milano), Andreas Lechner (Technische Universität Graz), Cédric
Libert (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de
Versailles), Enric Massip Bosch (Escola Tècnica Superior
d’Arquitectura del Vallès), Morten Meldgaard (The Royal
Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design
and Conservation), Enrico Molteni (Università della
Svizzera Italiana), Thomas Padmanabhan (Eidgenössische
Technische Hochschule Zürich), Vittorio Pizzigoni
(Università degli Studi di Genova), Franz Prati (Università
degli Studi di Genova), Valter Scelsi (Università degli Studi
di Genova), Andrea Zanderigo (École Polytechnique Fédérale
de Lausanne) Critics
Carmen Andriani (Università degli Studi di Genova),
Michele Bonino (Politecnico di Torino), Silvia Capurro
(Director of Planning Department, Municipality of Genoa),
Maria Linda Falcidieno (Director of DSA, Università
degli Studi di Genova), Nerio Farinelli (President of
Levante District, Municipality of Genoa), Maria Carla
Filauro (CDP Imm. Srl), Amedeo Gagliardi (Association
Coordinamento per Quarto), Giovanni Galli (Università degli
Studi di Genova), Luca Nanni (Municipality of Cogoleto),
Daniela Pittaluga (Università degli Studi di Genova),
Lucio Ruocco (Architect and member of Associazione
Coordinamento per Quarto), Cosimo Schinaia (Psychiatrist
and psychoanalyst Spi), Maurizio Sinigaglia (City Planning
Manager, Municipality of Genoa), Anita Venturi (Mayor,
Municipality of Cogoleto)
Tutors
Valeria Arena, Eleonora Bertolotto, Pietro Bonometto,
Elisabetta Canepa, Francesco Forni, Valeria Guerrisi,
Valeria Iberto, Alex Macaluso, Alessandro Parodi,
Alessandro Perotta
Photographers
Stefano Graziani, Anna Positano
This book and the Genoa Summer School it concerns
were supported by the generous contribution of:
Università degli Studi
di Genova
Municipio di Levante,
Comune di Genova
Secretary
Elisabetta Canepa
Students
Sara Abd Alla, Rune Arleth, Natàlia Morató Ávalos, Inés
Brotons Borrel, Federica Carbonara, Alicia Santacana
Duarte, Adrien Faria, Coline Fidon, Barbara Fuseau,
Argenzia Cristina Gallotta, Alexander Gebetsroither,
Maria del Mar Esteve Guëll, Thomas Josef Hörmann,
Anna Maria Jäger, Nikola Jankovic, Gabrielle Jouy,
Krenare Juniku, Nuriye Ceren Kaplan, Alexandra Letard,
Gabriela Patricia Ortega Madarieta, Luigi Mandraccio,
Claudio Marini, Laura Hidalgo Martin, Daniela Morpurgo,
Giorgia Notaro, Ilaria Paleari, Camelia Marina Petre, Luis
Antonio Martin Sanchez, Cristina De Olañeta Santaugini,
Florian Scheucher, Claudia Siffredi, Ana Skrebic, Paul
Antoine Terrier, Elìn Thorisdottir, Zuzana Töröková,
Angelo Torre, Hong Ngoc Trinh, Stefano Varaldo
genoa
summer
school
edited by
Vittorio Pizzigoni and Valter Scelsi
CONTENTS
9
Introduction
Vittorio Pizzigoni, Valter Scelsi
11
In–out. Architecture and Madness
Carmen Andriani
120
italian text: In-out. Architettura e follia
17
Solitude and the City
Michele Bonino
20
Stultifera Architectura
Nicola Braghieri
26
Chronicles of Ordinary Madness.
The Real-estate Development Process for
the Former Psychiatric Hospital of Quarto
Silvia Capurro, Maurizio Sinigaglia
124
italian text: Il processo di “valorizzazione”.
Compendio immobiliare dell’ex ospedale psichiatrico
di Quarto
38
The Regeneration of the Site of the Old
“Quarto Psychiatric Hospital” as a Model
of a New Policy
Nerio Farinelli
133
italian text: La rigenerazione dell’ex ospedale
psichiatrico di Quarto come modello di una
nuova politica
40
The Great Divestitures: from Factories
to Hospitals – Reality in the Urban Context
of the 21st Century
Maria Carla Filauro
45
On Urban Regeneration for the Recognition
of the Common Good
Amedeo Gagliardi
135
italian text: Sulla ri-generazione urbana,
per il riconoscimento del benecomune
Folly’s Failure
Cherubino Gambardella
138
italian text: Il fallimento della follia
51
A Story Told Backward: at Some Point
I Noticed that Basaglia Always Wore a Tie
Stefano Graziani
62
Toward New Perception:
a Play in 3 Acts and Five Action
Andrea Gritti, Enric Massip Bosch
72
Prospective Archaeologies
Andreas Lechner
78
Paranoia, Appropriation and
the Appropriateness of Paranoia
Morten Meldgaard
84
Architecture’s Public Face
Thomas Padmanabhan
88
Pratozanino and Quarto. Values From
History and Elements for Restoration
Daniela Pittaluga
93
The Lacking Form of the Psychiatric Hospital
Vittorio Pizzigoni
100
Heterotopia After Function. Footnotes
Anna Positano
103
The Round Wall
Valter Scelsi
108
Therapy Places
Cosimo Schinaia
139
italian text: I luoghi della cura
113
The Grid and the Archipelago
Andrea Zanderigo
119
Testi in italiano
carmen andriani
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7
INTRODUCTION
Previous page:
Francisco Goya, Corral de Locos,
1794, oil on tin-plated iron
On May 11th, 1834, the first stone was solemnly placed
to build the Province of Genoa asylum in the town of
Cavalletto along the right bank of the Bisagno. The
architects, Carlo Barabino and Domenico Cervetto realized
a project that would house approximately 400 in-patients.
They may have imagined they were definitively solving the
problem of mental health care in Genoa.
A century later, in the 1930s the building in Cavaletto had
already stood unused and been demolished while the great
psychiatric hospitals of Quarto dei Mille and Cogoleto were
inaugurated. They were enormous compounds located, one
to the East and the other to the West of the city center and
housed up to 4,000 in-patients. Add to that a considerable
number of care takers and administrators as well as
an inestimable number of people dedicated to satellite
activities and one arrives at approximately 10,000 people
directly involved in this experience or interested in its
daily workings.
At the start of the 19th century the institutionalization
of mental illness was one of European medicine’s
greatest unsolved issues because of its importance
and magnitude. Due to a general sense of discomfort
regarding the subject, an Italian law in 1927 replaced the
term insane asylum with psychiatric hospital and prohibited
the use of the terms demented, insane, imbecile and maniac
in official documents, substituting them with mentally ill.
In 1978, Law 180, known as the Basaglia Law radically
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changed psychiatric care in Italy by instituting public
mental health services and closing psychiatric hospitals.
After that, all the enormous psychiatric hospitals built
throughout the nation in the 19th and 20th centuries were
progressively emptied. Some hospitals even completely
ceased to function as such.
As for the hospitals of Genoa, the disused areas were as
large as the inhabited areas nearby. Annexed by Greater
Genoa in 1926, Quarto is a neighborhood on the coast, noted
as the place where Garibaldi set off to lead his Expedition of
the Thousand. Cogoleto is a small sea-side town located on
the Western Italian Riviera. Both hospitals were built on
hills behind historically inhabited areas.
In Cogoleto, the area takes on the name of Pratozanino.
In both cases, large roads and railways circumvent the
now derelict hospitals. One could spend a lifetime driving
or taking the train in these coastal areas and never know
these hospitals existed.
From July 31st to August 1st 2013 Genoa Summer School
engaged in an intensive research program to explore
an approach to the two former psychiatric hospitals
of Quarto and Pratozanino based on architectural,
environmental and economic investigation. With the tool
of this architectural project, students, architects, experts,
politicians, psychologists and citizens came together
around this subject. This book is a collection of their words.
v.p., v.s.
10
CARMEN ANDRIANI
IN–OUT. ARCHITECTURE AND MADNESS
“Perhaps someday we will no longer really know what madness was.
Its face will have closed upon itself, no longer allowing us to decipher the
traces it may have left behind”.
According to Foucault’s reasoning, madness is what is held to be
no longer tolerable.
It is what surpasses the limit of the Known and becomes Alien,
Madness has something to do with the enigma of this outwardness
and it manifests itself in a state of anxiety and alienation. Madness afflicts the emerging middle class at the end of the 18th century. It is the ailment that arises in the apprehension that grows
within the four walls of home (the haunted houses of the early
1800s) later to be examined through Freudian psychoanalysis. It
is a feeling of disorientation on a land that changes more quickly
than can be understood (for Benjamin, the birth of the metropolis).
It is the discomfort brought on by outsize urban spaces and a
multitude of aimless people that together make up an unprecedented multitude.
Anthony Vidler’s late 20th century concept of the uncanny, considers the state of insecurity and fear that one lives with and the
space in which it is produced.
The headlong emergence of novelty forces one to be flexible
to sudden and sometimes unexpected change. If one does not
adapt, the price is temporal and spatial maladjustment. What
has been taken away, in this case, what came before – the past
and what we know- re-emerges as a disturbance. This concept
concerns the change from the familiar to the alien, the emergence of a dark side, of a residue that feeds on its own state of sep-
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12
It was Pinel the revolutionary who asked to speak to them one by
one and to free them from their chains.
How does physical space influence these segregation practices?
How can a place that was created to separate then become a
means of connection once its original function has ceased? In
what way can the same building over time respond to opposite
needs and effectively interpret them in place of exchange and
sharing? How much do light, the size of the surroundings, how
they are connected, how one internal space follows into another,
the broken relationship between inside and outside, the ability to
orient oneself count?
Pinel was dissuaded from entering those dark cells, from having
contact with those raving madmen tied up for years, some for
decades like animals in narrow spaces, never being able to leave.
He entered anyway and his theories were proven right. He was
convinced that the inmates were untreatable precisely because
they were denied air and light.
It is clear that the relationship with space is key to understanding this passage. The body inhabits space and shapes it by moving through it actively, consciously and critically.
The inability to perceive the line between one’s own interior and
the outside creates helpless disorientation and the chipping away
of a self that is no longer recognizable as such.
On the other hand, the ability to orientate oneself in changing
surroundings, such as those prevalent today and common in the
context of migration, means to be permeable, to take in the plurality of differences and enjoy the advantages of infinite abundance.
Continually from getting lost and finding one’s way again and,
“an intimate sense of disorientation that comes out of this”, according
to Sennet, can incite and feed, “real processes of change”. In this
migration from the inside to the outside of the mind, travel has
a symbolic and at the same time effective value. “As you set out
for Ithaca / hope the voyage is a long one, / full of adventure, full of discovery…” In these lines from Costantine Cavafi, travel is a mental
state and Ithaca, a destination that it is not important to reach.
What is important, rather, is the constant belief that one can
reach it.
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arateness and otherness. Psychiatric hospitals have long been
the sites of this separation.
Worlds in themselves, kept away from interpersonal relationships, which are considered disturbing in this context. The
madman goes back and forth in his private bubble, as if in a fish
bowl. From here he lets out words confused with groans and furious tirades.
The psychiatric hospital constituted the place of the forbidden;
it exercised the power of coercion. It legitimized the removal of
difference, of those who were thought different by the family,
the public and society.
It is natural to compare the spaces of these hospitals with those of
prisons. Hospital architecture must prohibit in the same way. In
its layout, the way the spaces connect and how they are shaped,
architecture makes it possible to prohibit communication, having a relationship with the outside, even having an “outside”. One
cannot escape the constant control or transgress indisputable
rules. From one closed room to another, from inside to inside.
“To place people in a closed, fenced-in courtyard with no purpose, supervised by a highly controlling nurse” (Schinaia, 1997).
The asylum originates at a time when madness was recognized
thus: a condition of deformity “treated like a truth we have been blind
to for too long”.
The French psychiatrist, Philippe Pinel, is the first to claim that
insanity is not a fault but an illness that requires a place to heal
or to be secluded. In both cases this place is one of separation and
almost never of redemption.
The contradictory behavior of conformist society recognizes deformity, separates it to keep it away and at the same time treats it
with no chance of being freedom.
The descriptions that the history of psychiatry gives us about treatment centers are incomplete and contradictory. From the house
near York, planned in England by the Society of Friends (Quakers),
“a rustic farm with no bars or grates on the windows where the passions of
the heart and the disorders of the spirit are soothed” to the well-known
account of the inmates of the Bicetre hospital, chained up for decades in dark cells and considered to be wild animals.
nal flee toward a never known outside. It is not enough to alter
the shape, to change physiognomy and personality as with an
architect’s scalpel. One must break the memory, the symbol, the
unheimlich that the architecture brings with it. This is a slow reconciliation process that works through new practices in the use
of space, through playful, sharing activities, through forms of
representation of reality that are aimed to exorcize it. Often art
in all its performative meanings is the first to enter and give an
effective solution: to stage a removal and accept the place in a
new way, give new meaning to the space and rewrite it by working on the difficult and highly controversial separation between
reason and madness.
With the passing of the Basaglia Law in 1978, psychiatric hospitals were no longer used for the purpose for which they were built.
Their structures no longer fulfilled their original role. Their cross
shaped, horseshoe and H plans, their long distribution corridors,
the closed courtyards all lose their original reason for being. This
begs the question, how can a space of separation become a space
of connection? In these cases, architecture is not enough. It is
not enough to change, destroy, open and relate. It is not enough
to suddenly make the external flow into the internal, accelerate
an exchange that was prohibited for so long, to make the inter-
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The idea of travel is associated with that of agitation. It is a dominant theme in “Orphic Songs” by Dino Campana who rewrote his
verse in an insane asylum after the original was lost. The theme of
travel, that of the night (mother of all forms of existence), and that of
return alternate in Campana’s dreamlike and agonizing writing.
Genoa is one of the places lauded by the poet, “Vast, inside, a barely
lingering odor / Of tar, watched over by the moons/ Electric, on the sea
barely breathing/ The vast port sleeps…” the city was beloved for its
port and its nights.
The theme of travel, approached by a wandering, lyrical poetic voice
evokes the agitation of the lone traveler Bruce Chatwin, who travelled continually, escaping nothing and fleeing toward anything.
“The best travelers are illiterate. The best travelers do not pause to record
their second-rate impressions, to be read third hand” he writes in the
first line of his unpublished manuscript “The Nomadic Alternative”. On the continuous movement of a man perennially fleeing
there is the tormenting issue of his own roots, “no stable home until age five, afterwards conflict, desperate attempts on my part to escape,
if not physically, then at least the invention of mystic paradise”.
Home as a place of discomfort and the first place of spatial disorientation, Magris in L’infinito viaggiare (Infinite Travelling)
writes, “The home is not an idyll, it is the place of real existence and
thus subject to conflict, misunderstanding, error, defeat, ruin…” We return to the concept of unheimlich or the familiar become alien,
a disturbing something that does not go away, something that
returns cyclically as an unconscious and destabilizing matter.
MICHELE BONINO
SOLITUDE AND THE CITY
Previous page and above:
Carmen Andriani,
otherliving_livingother
environment, Venice, 2008
16
Dedicated to the former mental hospitals in Quarto dei Mille and
Pratozanino, almost all the projects in the Summer School made
a very appropriate choice: to connect two places that were separated and detained back to the city. They find a new relation with
the urban fabric and activities. However, it is equally clear that
some of the projects emphasize this potential to an excess, as to
dispel the bleak memory that still resides within the buildings.
They propose a countless multiplication of uses and connections,
a massive presentation of walkways, places of collectivity and
gathering opportunities... This approach does not seem inappropriate at all, especially if the aim is to interpret the nature of
these places, yet it prompts some reflection. In its representations
and visions, today’s architecture constantly seems hyper-collective, hyper-connected. Architects’ unambiguous mandate, (seen
in each rendering or drawing from MVRDV to Renzo Piano be it
about a shopping center or a church), is obsessively becoming to
create social life at all costs, to push people to gather at all times,
within cameras, kites, even hot-air balloons. This is exaggerated sociability, which contradicts itself because it appears neutral
and dull.
However, only a few projects reasoned about loneliness: it was
certainly the most distressing trait in the history of those
buildings. Working on these places of solitude was an opportunity the Summer School clearly offered, but just a few works
exploited, subtly suggesting a more self-reflective experience of the city. Recently, confusion seems to be spreading between the essential involvement of the public sphere in any
type of urban building, and the fact that each place unavoidably becomes maximally collective, maddeningly connected
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to everything, unable to stimulate the personal dimension of
being a citizen or to revive a less indifferent way to be together. Consequently, it is useful to recall some interesting projects, based on the relationship between solitude and the city.
Alvaro Siza, with the Ibere Camargo
​​
Foundation in Porto Alegre
(2008), creates a manifesto of public connection, revealing it on
the bridges of the facades connecting different levels. Making
them coincide with the exhibition spaces rather than collective distribution, he invites one to the individual experience of
concentrating on the work of art, and moving alone through
the building. In 1983 Charles Correa, who recently passed away,
completes the construction of Kanchanjunga Apartments in
the heart of Mumbai. Although the tower explicitly reinterprets
the urban complexity of this city, it defines places of intimacy
and personal seclusion, in relation with the sea. In 1965, Louis
Kahn builds the Salk Institute in California, an institutional
and collective place, but the orientation of windows gives one an
individual relationship with the landscape of the Pacific Ocean
that favors concentration on research. The court, not shaded or inhospitable, is thought of as an abstract mediation between buildings and nature, rather than a generic meeting place.
Rafael Moneo, in his Harvard inaugural speech The Solitude of
Buildings (1985), recognizes the interest and convenience of those
buildings that abandon their author and prepare to live alone, as
they get closer to their conclusion, with no more polemic statements to define their meaning. In the above mentioned works,
the solitude of the building and the solitude of its experience coincide, suggesting an unexpected way to experience the city and
its collective dimension.
Louis Kahn, Salk Institute for
Biological Studies, 1959-1965, La Jolla,
San Diego, California (Courtesy Salk
Institute)
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NICOLA BRAGHIERI
STULTIFERA ARCHITECTURA
“Adam committed an act of great madness but this madness did not
remain within Adam; it was passed down to his offspring.”
Padre Fernando Zucconi, Lezioni sacre sopra la Divina Scrittura,
Lezione LXII., del Genesi, per meglio dichiarare quale stato sia
lo Stato di Natura caduta, si considera che fugga, perché fugga,
e dove fugga, dopo il peccato, Adamo colla Moglie in Paradiso...,
Stamperia Baglioni, Venezia 1741
According to classical definitions found in encyclopaedias and treatises, the terms architecture and madness seem to belong to different worlds, to irreconcilable spheres of life, behaviour and custom.
Architecture, strange as it may sometimes seem to architects,
has for centuries sought to assert its credibility and authority in
the field of science. It has tried to establish its status through logical discourse and to find fully reasoned motives for its formal
choices. Architects have conceived of themselves, with thinly
disguised satisfaction, as artisan intellectuals, capable of undertaking ambitious projects thanks to their flexible intellect. Their
ideal architect has a wise head (with four ears), a keen gaze (from
at least three eyes), safe hands (two are certainly not enough) and
feet firmly planted on the ground (but endowed with wings, of
course). The treatises never fail to present the architect as one
who is knowledgeable in all areas, capable of following through
logical procedures artfully and conscientiously, guided by a superior intellect or, if you will, by an unfailing power of reason.
In fact, architecture is consistently defined in the ancient treatises as the art of construction, with art being meant in its literal
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Sebastian Brant, Stultifera Navis,
Lateinische Übersetzung von
Narrenschiff, Basel 1494, von Jakob
Locher, Johann Grüninger,
Straßburg 1497
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the prototype of balance and wisdom that God had installed in
his garden, infirm carriers of the seed of irrationality that had
caused Adam’s fall. Indeed the act of biting the apple was an act
of madness, and one that indirectly engendered the birth of architecture, the need to create a refuge from the elements and
from wild beasts that had been absent from the garden of Eden.
This refuge, perhaps even before the clothes that served to cover the shame of his sin, was man’s first defence against nature,
which had suddenly become hostile.
All architects, deep within their raison d’être and their formal
identity, carry the seed of original sin. The live in the ambiguous
state of being both born of man’s weakness and necessary to his
survival, both vessels of madness and bringers of salvation. Original sin contains the roots of the seven deadly sins, and still
today these define architecture’s fascinating dark side. Most important of all are lust and pride. Lust, the unbridled desire that
led Adam to succumb to the serpent’s temptation, also inspires
decorative and attractive buildings. Architecture must imbue
the constructed form with sensuality if it is to elevate itself from
the status of an act of simple necessity. It must make raw materials seductive, communicate a message. Thus, architecture can
expurgate original sin and offer protection but at the same time
remain a perpetual cause and effect of sin. Therefore the architect is, by definition, proud. Architecture must distance itself
from its original task of building simple shelters and the architect must become a demiurge of form, a creator, taking on a divine, sublime role. It is worth remembering that when man defied
God, he committed a second act of madness. Man’s most compelling work, the Tower of Babel, is once again at the source of his
woes but also of his fortune. The tower, in which everything is
contained and which is the source of everything, is emblematic
of the thousand-year-old story of building and its perpetual
struggle between probity and madness.
Ὕβρις, man’s hubris, was punished by the scattering of peoples
and the confusion of languages. However, man once again found
liberation from this punishment in the form of new, rich varieties of speech and expression. Perhaps this last, dramatic act of
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sense as a “creative discipline carried out through practical activity”. It
is portrayed as a craft or an interest, functioning on the border
between the worlds of abstract concepts and physical objects. The
classical concept of architecture does not envisage any deviation from a logical path whose course is clear and consistent, or
from the correct application of knowledge whose worth is proved
by the physical result. Poetry, imagination and passion seem to
have no place in the perfect human machine which must generate
this exemplary architecture.
Madness, on the other hand, is defined in the history of scientific thought as a behavioural pathology, neatly pigeonholed as
a deviation from normal behaviour or from normal modes of reasoning. Mad people, typically depicted dressed as court jesters
or clowns (who were not mad and in fact made madness their
craft) embodied a visible and therefore easily identifiable form of
earthly sin. The ship of fools, Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff, masterfully illustrated by Albrecht Dürer at the beginning of the
sixteenth century and already the subject of an extraordinary
triptych by Hieronimus Bosch in 1494, was a vessel in which orthodox thinkers and upholders of correct behaviour put out to
sea all those deemed to have tastes, habits, thoughts and interests that deviated from the right path of collective morality. The
madman was one who did not follow the straight path, a mercurial thinker or lunatic who succumbed to the temptation of
deviance under the influence of the moon, who might almost, at
any moment, transform himself into a werewolf. The madman
was also an invert whose tastes took unusual forms, an alien who
could not live to the rhythm of respectable society, or an asocial being to be pushed to the remotest corners of the collective
consciousness, to be suppressed, imprisoned, and, finally, the
black triangle firmly attached to his coat, to be eliminated. In
Vienna there is one surviving example of a Narrenturm, a Fool’s
tower, a piece of architecture that is at once magnificent and terrifying. All sorts of people were shut up here with the aim not
only of preserving society from inconvenient contamination or
disruption but also of cutting off potential misdemeanours at
their roots. These were contemptible beings, far removed from
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madness, the defiance of God, served to increase the beauty of
architecture, its variety, its complexity and its multiplicity.
Architecture is, then, the fruit of sin. It is defined by ambivalence and paradox, and treads a path that strays into falsehood. It
maintains the constant contradiction of drawing on sin to find
its forms and, at the same time, being purified by its recourse
to reason. Architects have found ways to imbue their dreams,
nightmares, caprices and mad visions with fantastical form,
but they have also caged and displayed their vanity within their
vast literature.
Madness is a bewitching weakness that insinuates itself cunningly into the architect’s artistic spirit. It is the element of individuality that defines the architect’s character and marks the difference between an expert and a genius: while the first employs
the merely mechanical intellect, the second allows the radical
flow of imagination free play. It is this imagination which, as
Francis Bacon warned, can result in “the illegal matrimony and divorce of many natural things”, but without which the architect cannot function.
Thomas Murner, Von dem großen
lutherischen Narren, Straßburg 1522
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The Site
The former Psychiatric Hospital of Quarto complex in east Genoa
is at the top of a hill that goes down to the sea along the avenue
Corso Europa with easy access from the north on Corso Europa and
from the south on the street via Aurelia. There is exceptional access to this troubled urban complex.
Its construction began in the late 1800s, roughly at the same time
as that of the urban via Galata asylum. This set of monumental
neoclassical buildings is organized on a square plan symmetrically divided into nine sub-parts. Each part is made up of a wide
courtyard with ornamental plants surrounded on all sides by
buildings so that every building is flanked by two courtyards.
The model is the Roman castrum where the two porticoed transverse paths (east-west) are at a right angle with the internal longitudinal paths.
The complex is divided into 22 pavilions, which are mostly two
stories with terracotta shingled roofs. The one story buildings
have flat roofs shared by adjacent blocks.
There are only two three-story buildings (pavilion 16 and 22) and
some buildings have rooms on the basement level.
The complex is almost completely surrounded by a vehicular access road while inside the complex, all paths are pedestrian, at
ground level with wide porticos as well as along the upper level
terraces. The complex is generally in decent condition. There are
signs of even recent maintenance on the facades of some of the
pavilions.
Historical review
Construction dates back to 1892, the year of the tender for a large
asylum in Quarto. In less than two years the Province of Genoa
patients from other institutions1 were transferred there.
The new building was meant to meet the needs of the latest insane asylum procedure requirements. At the same time, the project required it to satisfy the aesthetic of the architectural largesse and nobility that previously inspired the Genoese aid and
charitable institutions. The architect, Vincenzo Canetti, age 38,
was the project’s creator.
The tender project stipulated that “the services among the pavilions
must use a covered gallery that would connect the pavilions to each other
at the ground floor and the upper floor. The asylum needed to be made up of
two equally large compartments for the two sexes which would be separated
by the general service buildings”2
It was built on a site where a villa belonging to the Spinola family had once been. It was added on to an older hospital for the
mentally ill in the Abrara neighborhood (today, near the street
via Cesarea) which was torn down in 1913 due to the expansion of
the asylum in the city center. Early on, the villa was incorporated
into the asylum but was demolished in 1926 to allow for the asylum’s expansion (New Institute).
The Old Institute was developed along a central axis marking off
two symmetrical sections: the men’s and the women’s. The pa-
27
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SILVIA CAPURRO, MAURIZIO SINIGAGLIA
CHRONICLES OF ORDINARY MADNESS.
THE REAL-ESTATE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS FOR
THE FORMER PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL OF QUARTO
28
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tients were divided according to their behavior and the level of
difficulty to manage them. The project stipulated they should be
categorized into five distinct sections for a total of 700 beds: Calm
280 beds, Epileptic and mixed 140, Semi-agitated 140, Agitated 70, Ill 70.
“The building was growing when it did not hesitate to move ahead, or better, to re-present itself. This was a serious problem that had weighed for
years on the Province. 700 or 750 transferred patients at the most would
find shelter and treatment in the new asylum. But what about the others?
The president of the Provincial administration stated his position and insisted that the asylum be expanded. He contracted the same architect, Mr.
Canetti, to submit a project to increase the patient capacity of the building
under construction (it was under construction in February 1894) from 700
to 1300. It would not be a real building expansion but an addition or annex
that would be harmoniously connected”.3
Thus in the ‘30s the final adjustment of Quarto is completed.The
new structures (the current semi-hexagonal pavilion on the Northeast side of the complex) were inaugurated with a fascist ceremony
on October 28, 1933. They doubled the surface area and patient capacity of the hospital. Life in psychiatric hospitals continued until
after World War II with the same deep-rooted healthcare models.
In actual fact, these places became more and more socially marginalizing in an era of intense and convulsive socio-economic change.
The percentage of mentally ill asylum patients dropped as the total
number of patients at the Quarto and Cogoleto asylums soared.4
The Basaglia reform
As in many similar institutions, the change in psychiatric hospital management in Genoa coincided with the arrival of Franco
Basaglia’s student and colleague, Antonio Slavich.
Basaglia and Slavich worked together in Padua, Gorizia and Parma. Together, they initiated the first anti-institutional practice
in the treatment of mental illness. This gave rise to socio-political reflection on ways to transform psychiatric hospitals, promote alternative practices and innovate the treatment of mental illness. Slavich was also active in the democratic psychiatry
movement, promoting the application of Law 180 of 1978 on the
closure of asylums. This law came out of the Italian experience
and over 30 years it has spread to many other parts of the world
and is still considered the most advanced.
Slavich lived in Genoa from 1978 to 1993 and was called to be the
director of the psychiatric hospital in Quarto. He was sought-after by the left-leaning administrators and the Provincial Chairman for Hygiene and Public Health, Lamberto Cavallin, even
though his actions caused divisions in the Italian Communist
Party, among other organizations.
His project of reform won out in the end. Right after Law 180
passed, Slavich created four Psychiatric Diagnostic and Treatment Services and nine Local Services. Many of his colleagues
chose to work in Local Services and he was left alone. He had
difficulty reconciling the construction of new services with the
dismantling of psychiatric hospitals, but he stayed and fought.
He founded the museum Museo delle Forme Incosapevoli within the
hospital in Quarto, he became a city councilor and the first director of the first Department of Mental Health. He decided that
first, the psychiatric hospital in Cogoleto should close.
The psychiatric hospital in Quarto would formally close many
years later. In 1993, Slavich suffered a devastating heart attack,
and underwent massive heart surgery, which forced him to retire. He finally decided to move to Bolzano where he died in 2009.
While he was director, the idea came about to place the Architecture studio of Edoardo Praino, Lucio Rocco, Filippo Icardi, Elio
Marengo, the graphic designer Rocco Antonucci, and the pho-
tographers Giorgio Tagliafico and Paolo Gastaldo within the psychiatric hospital in Quarto. The studio was placed in the oldest
part of the hospital, which had previously been shut down. It was
next to the already operating Levante Cultural Center, which
brought together theatrical troupes such as those of Ugo Dighero,
Mario Jorio and Attilio Caffarena.
“At first, it was thrilling. There were still patients in the building some
of whom had lived there for over 20 years. It was moving to see fragile
human beings, up until recently without hope, realize that they are people
and not numbers. They could finally leave their bunker, participate in assemblies, live the lives that had been denied them. Except for the graphic
designer and photographers, the studio members were university friends
who had previously collaborated on research on the hospital in 1975”.5
After expensive renovation of a ward in the former 8th division,
between discussions and disagreements, even with hospital
management, the studio/hospital experiment quickly died out.
In 1986, what remained was a proposal to convert the hospital
Above and previous pages:
The Psichiatric Hospital of Genoa
Quarto dei Mille; aereal view,
30
photograph of the entrance at the
beginning of the XX century, general
plan in the actual state.
A recent development: the sale of the former psychiatric
hospital
After the closure of the asylum the complex continued to be used
to treat mentally ill patients who were unable to re-integrate into
society as well as to house general health services such as health
care clinics and local ASL offices. The hospital’s self-referential
context and the contamination of its health role with its social
and cultural activity brought about its decline.
In the first few years of the 21st century, the possibility was raised
of the Italian Institute of Technology6 being located in the Quarto site. However, the IIT was installed in the Bolzaneto neighborhood on the west side of the city. What remains of the project is
the € 5.000,000 complete renovation of the so-called nurses’ residence, approved by the Biasotti Council before the IIT moved to
the west side of Genoa. The site is now in desolation and neglect.
With the progressive distancing of the city’s interests from the
site, the Region of Liguria decided to take the first step to liquidate
ASL’s assets in 2008. What is sold is the part of the complex built
in the 1930s, as well as the newest part: some buildings including
those that once were classrooms for nurses and the offices of the
director and economist of Valcomp due, a company involved with
the Fintecna development company, which in turn is a branch of
the state-controlled colossus, Fintecna.
The 19th century complex remains the property of ASL and continues to provide health services and some of the socio-cultural
31
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into an educational complex. Based on new directions in teaching, this project envisioned a sort of campus within the city
where students could enjoy avant-garde computer services, a
video library, innovative viewing rooms for video cassettes and
videodisks (now called CD roms), which had just appeared on the
scene, all in pleasant, green surroundings. It was an intriguing
idea, which on paper would have Ministry funding, but it failed.
Among the problems were the differences of opinion of the local
authorities on how the complex should be used, and the fact that
there were still wards housing mental patients.
32
tion in force in the area and the new intended use requested for
the land Like the State regulation, the approval provision for the
schedule stipulates that 10% of the increased value taken from
the sale of the buildings be ceded to the municipality.
Article 1 stipulates that approval of the sales and development
schedule is sent to the municipality in question. Its city council
then has 45 days to decide whether to a) adopt the zoning variances or b) arrange for a conference [in accordance with law 7
(article 14 and on) of August 1990, n. 241 on New administrative
protocols and access to administrative documents] and make
changes to define the city planning regulation for the buildings
in question and approve the required changes to the city plan.
The regional council approved the schedule (resolution 280 of
13 March 2012 titled Sales and development schedule in accordance with art. 29 Regional law 37/2011- first step in liquidation)
requested by ARTE Genova.
In September 2012, ARTE Genova restated their request that the
Region introduce into the sales and development schedule a lot
of goods including the former psychiatric hospital complex in Quarto
Genoa and the former Martinez hospital in Pegli Genoa.
With Resolution 24 of 18 September 2012 the regional council put
the approval of the sixth step in liquidation and development up
to the committees in charge. Based on the committees’ opinions
and the analyses carried out by the Region of Liguria, the City of
Genoa, ASL 3, and ARTE, the Region only approved the development plan for the former Martinez hospital with resolution 1307
of 31 October 2012 and suspended judgment on the former psychiatric hospital in Quarto.
Reactions and the ongoing steps
Although the sale of even the 19th century pavilions went almost unnoticed, the ASL completely shutting down health care
operations finally attracted the city’s attention as to what was
happening.
One episode in particular ignited everyone’s scorn: a Dutch auction to sort out the remaining 80 residents of the former asylum
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activities from the Basaglia Reform although they are diminishing progressively.7
The first step toward privatization provoked little reaction in the
city. The exception was the isolated protests by relatives of psychiatric patients who lived in or were being treated at the Quarto facility. They pointed out that the senseless sale to Fintecna
included the main entrances to the complex, paving the way
for progressive isolation, physical and otherwise, of the extant
health care buildings.
The regional health budget problems become more and more severe, so the Region of Liguria passed law 22 of 24 December 2010 to
institute a fund fed by income from the sale of regional health real-estate holdings that are not directly used for health care or have
been designated for another use. This fund was instituted to limit
regional spending and procure and appropriate additional resources for reaching regional goals in various areas such as health.
In view of this, ASL 3 passed resolution 1265 of 22 November 2011,
which bestowed the Region of Liguria with a sales contract for
its remaining underused real-estate holdings. This included the
historic pavilions of the former psychiatric hospital in Quarto, that
is, the 19th century center of the complex.
As mentioned before, the decision to release and sell followed the
2006 resolution, and completed the process of total divestiture of
the Quarto complex.
The Region of Liguria sold the 19th century pavilions of the former psychiatric hospital in Quarto to ARTE Genova8 for approximately € 27.730,00 through a sales deed dated 30 December, 2011.
In regards to this, it should be noted that article 29 of law 37 of 27
December 2011 provided that non-essential buildings belonging
to the Region, to broader regional institutions and essential provincial or municipal institutions can be placed on the sale and development schedule, which is approved annually by the regional
council once it has heard the opinion of the Council commission
in charge. This is meant to facilitate zoning variances designed to
develop public holdings. Attached to the schedule is a data sheet
containing the location of the buildings, cadastral information,
sale value, the urban, rural and town planning-building regula-
34
plan in city-planning and administrative terms. Below, is a list
of its most salient points:
– To attribute to history the role of urban polarity on the east
side of Genoa that promotes development within the outlines of
historical memory, the architectural and environmental qualities of the places, and the social-health care services undertaken
there. – To enhance the relation between history and the urban
context, identify and select easier ways to access, move through
and use the buildings, and broaden the base of people who could
benefit from them.
– Actively conserve the value of the history and testimony of the
place by recognizing and developing not only its historical, monumental and panoramic quality, but also the quality of memory, the social-health care services network and its beneficiaries.
This should be done by finding the right mix that favors synergy
between current services and proposed ones, public and private,
while avoiding processes of marginalization and deterioration of
places and services.
– Given the partiality toward an urban re-zoning proposal over
the complexity of the commitments the various groups related
to this matter must take on, the re-appropriation project was
also translated into a Plan Agreement, conditioned on the urban
re-zoning proposal itself.
Re-zoning objectives
This re-zoning proposes to maintain the intended use to public
services for most of the buildings transferred to ARTE. Meanwhile, through the aforementioned planning process, the Region,
ASL, the Municipality, Committee and Coordination for Quarto
have outlined a socio-health care, city-planning, and economic
plan. The plan dovetails with the goal to create a well-equipped
urban center that will be able to guarantee the important architectural and environmental aspects of the complex and develop
the site’s ecological-panoramic role. The Region’s proposal set limits of intervention to the 19th century buildings and allocated pavilion 7, 8 and 10 to (servizi di interesse comune) and pavilions 4, 5
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in Quarto. In fact, last April ASL 3 published a tender notice (later
suspended) to find hospitals to take in the last resident patients
of the former psychiatric hospital.
No less baffling were the costs and the redistribution of ASL
health care services still at the site. 9
At this time, the visibility of Coordination for Quarto was broadened. This group unites the many associations and interests that
have launched a series of artistic and cultural events in Quarto. 10
The city of Genoa’s seminar for the Public Space Biennial organized
by INU Liguria (National Urban-Planning Institute) and the order
of Architects of Genoa city and province took place in the former
psychiatric hospital and attracted great numbers of participants.
Once people were generally aware that health care services
would be completely shut down and the former psychiatric hospital complex privatized, the then recently elected municipal administration became active in promoting the reappraisal of the
development program with the Region, ASL and ARTE.
This caused the Region to stop the urban re-zoning proposal. In
accordance with the Region’s special regulation on real-estate development, the proposal would have allocated the former psychiatric hospital to a private party, except for a group of pavilions at
the inner part of the complex. Pavilions 4-10 and 16 would still be
used for health care services.
This reappraisal was coordinated by the city of Genoa. The Municipality IX of Levante and planning committees took charge
of the problem of the former psychiatric hospital and its inhabitants so as to reconcile the needs of the administration with those
of civil and cultural society.
Through meetings from July 2012 to February 2013, a project outline was reached to re-appropriate the site. This would have to
be done keeping in mind 1) the many pre-conditions placed by
the ASL 3 re-organization plan, which was closely connected to
spending reduction policies imposed on the Regions especially
for public health and 2) the resulting securitization policies the
Region of Liguria enacted as of 2011 and financed by ARTE in its
capacity as an instrumental agency for regional development.
This particular re-zoning proposal translates a more complex
Reflections
This story points out the distance between abstract technical-legislative tools (which in this case can be given the negative label bureaucratic) and the complexity of the events and the
historical, social and city-planning consistency of the site and
its history.
The distance between these tools and defending values should
be covered by politics, in the noble sense of the word. When it is
not, formally correct but substantially perverse actions occur
such as the Dutch auction to transfer the patients at Quarto.
Fortunately in this case, the obtuse bureaucratic action on the
inhabitants of the former psychiatric hospital attracted media
attention that resulted in a general awareness of the situation.
This awareness extended itself to the site’s other values although it is ephemeral like anything that comes from the emotional reaction to the case. However, this happened almost too
late and so created conditions (see ARTE’s economic presentation that prescribes a daily timing of maturation of interest on
36
active loans to buy real-estate) that have led to a shorter time
frame for the work and thus, a simplification of the content.
We hope that this effort continues so that the former psychiatric
hospital in Quarto can be developed as a physical memory but
also as a living part of our city.
1 The institutions were: the Institute
of Bolzaneto, founded in 1885 for female
residential patients, and the S. Raffaele
Institute of Coronata, established in
1887. Later, Quarto also took on many
of the patients from the institutes of
La Spezia (1910) and Mondonuovo at S.
Francesco d’Albaro (1904).
2 I santuari della follia. Le istituzioni
manicomiali genovesi dall’800 ad oggi,
Province of Genoa, July 1980.
3 I santuari della follia. Le istituzioni
manicomiali genovesi dall’800 ad oggi,
Province of Genoa, July 1980.
4 From 1.919 in 1945, it rises to 2.689
in 1951, 2.818 in 1952, 2.904 in 1953,
2.995 in 1954, 3.304 in 1955.
5 Paolo Gastaldo, 1982 l’ex Ospedale
Psichiatrico di Quarto Genova. Il
Laboratorio di Architettura: un’esperienza
presso il centro culturale del Levante,
http:// spazioinwind.libero.it/ilsogno/
genova/quarto/
6 A national scientific organization
regulated by a private law foundation
It was created to promote scientific
research in Italy Its headquarters
are on the street Via Morego, 30 in
Bolzaneto, Genoa.
7 A national scientific organization
regulated by a private law foundation.
It was created to promote scientific
research in Italy Its headquarters
are on the street Via Morego, 30 in
Bolzaneto, Genoa.
8 Azienda Regionale Territoriale per
l’Edilizia della Provincia di Genova,
Regional Local Corporation for
Building in the Province of Genoa.
9 ASL 3 of Genoa, Resolution 1265 of 22
November 2011.
10 Specifically , September 21st -23rd,
2012 “Quarto Planet, from memory
to future possibility: three days of
gathering, ideas, art, guardianship,
health, wellness, rediscovery, green
areas, play and testimony” was
organized. The events were successful
and particularly full of initiatives.
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and 6 to regional health services. The re-zoning proposal, by contrast, also includes building C and a tract of land belonging to ASL
on the northwest side of the complex. The regional project placed
public services toward the outside of the division bringing them
in contact with the urban context across from Province of Genoa
headquarters and allocated most of the pavilions to public services be they for health related or neighborhood based. The proposal
that emerged from a working group actually overturns this plan.
Furthermore, the current proposal develops ASL’s holdings by allowing for 10,000 square meters of new construction inside the
green band that surrounds the former psychiatric hospital. This
has incited some controversy within the Coordination for Quarto
itself.
The urban re-zoning for partial development of the real-estate
(and the related Plan Agreement proposed by the city of Genoa)
are now (July 2013), after a long definition stage by the Region,
under examination by the city council.
For years all of us have completely forgotten the site of the old
Quarto Psychiatric Hospital: in 2012, suddenly, the awakening!
A bureaucratic fact acts as a detonator to the protest. The ASL 3
decides to transfer all the patients elsewhere because the structure will have to be sold by the Region of Liguria to cope with the
health system’s budget shortfalls.
The announcement is contrary to human dignity: this is a downward auction in which people are equated to things.
The Council of the District of Levante, at the beginning of its
current administrative cycle, shares its opposition to this plan
and unanimously approves a motion.It asks the Mayor and the
City Council of Genoa to take action against the Region of Liguria and the ASL 3 in order to revoke the patient transfers, to keep
the social and health care in public hands, to create a nonresidential Health Services Center (with services such as counseling,
addiction prevention, care for the elderly and the disabled), to
safeguard existing services such as psychiatry and, finally, last
but not least to create a restoration program for green areas and
for road connections. To realize all these goals it is mandatory to
create a programming group involving the Municipality of Genoa, the Region of Liguria, the Province of Genoa, the District of
Levante , ASL 3 and A.R.T.E.).
The technical committee is formed in the fall, it is coordinated by
the Planning Department and, at the beginning, it struggles to
take off. There are contrasts among the parties, a narrow vision
of the problems is manifest, without any overall view. The only
clear watchword is the necessity to make money. Then, slowly,
38
the thaw happens and with the careful direction of the Municipality the project takes shape.
In November 2013 an agreement on the program was signed. It
accepts the requests of the District of Levante, which result from
an ongoing dialogue with the group of associations gathered under the name of Coordination for Quarto.
In late January 2014, the District of Levante creates a temporary work group to prevent all the parties involved, once having
signed the agreement, from proceeding on their own and losing
sight of the overall redevelopment plan of the site.The goal is to
convince all the parties to sign a memorandum of understanding
on the coordination of their functions. No less important is the
method used, which aims to enable real processes of participatory democracy with citizens and with the associations on the
basis of more extensive, transparent and equitable information.
The workshop, organized by the Genoa Summer School and reserved for European students, with the aim of studying the renovation of the former Quarto Psychiatric Hospitals and Prato Zanino, is a great opportunity to inform the world about the history
of the site, which was a place of suffering and exclusion for many
years, and that now is going to change its skin to become a citadel
of health and wellness.
There is another aspect that must not be underestimated: to invite young people to engage in the redevelopment of Quarto is
a sign of foresight towards those who, for obvious age reasons,
are able to offer the most innovative ideas. Genoa is a city long
in crisis and this is mainly evident in the lack of ideas about its
own future.
We must exit from the crisis by always seeking the contribution
of everyone and recovering a sense of politics that thinks especially to the future of new generations.
A Native American saying warns about the limits of power because “we have not received the land as an inheritance from our fathers
but borrowed it from our grandchildren.”
Nerio Farinelli
The President of Levante District
39
nerio farinelli
NERIO FARINELLI
THE REGENERATION OF THE SITE OF
THE OLD QUARTO PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
AS A MODEL OF A NEW POLICY
Large containers of the production of the western world are empty
of the life that created and animated themselves throughout the
twentieth century, leaving the burden, and honor, to posterity to
appropriate architectures that are unusual in the typology and
size of the urban consolidated tissue. Important built resources
are opening to urban permeability: new opportunities are offered
to the community to create new relationships and consolidate a
new urban context, entrenching the impenetrable in the new urban collective consciousness.
Along with the large industrial areas in crisis for the relocation
of production, and with the buildings machine, which are obsolete for technological progress, other containers of equal incisiveness, contemporary in origin and motivations to the factories
of the modern industrial era, are decommissioned. We refer to
asylums, large structures created to control and cure the insane,
that, industrial development and accelerated urbanization produced in the same explosive years of modern industrialization.
Mental hospitals are growing in large numbers at the turn of
nineteenth and twentieth century, simultaneously with the
progress of psychiatry as a medical science, for the care of the
mental ill.
The classical urban psychiatric hospital that was popular in
the nineteenth century was based on an axial composition of
volumes. This progressed towards the more sparse pattern of a
village, introducing pavilions for industrial, crafts and farms,
which were necessary for the new criteria based on occupational
therapy.
40
However, the therapeutic results desired by the new psychiatric
science didn’t prove up to expectations. These hospitals remained,
in fact, the coercive containers for those marginalized by society.
This brought about the enactment in 1978 of Law 180 (Basaglia’s
law) which imposed the closure of asylums and settled on mandatory medical treatment at public mental health services.
The Psychiatric Hospitals of Genoa Province
The first Asylum of Genoa was inaugurated in 1841 in Via Galata,
with a capacity of 400 patients. In 1895 the Asylum of Quarto dei
Mille (the portion now called Old Institute) was inaugurated, with
a theoretical capacity of 700 guests. The number of patients soon
increased to the detriment of their hygiene and coexistence. The
construction of the Asylum of Pratozanino, Cogoleto, began in
1908 with later expansions lasting until 1934, with a capacity of
about 3600 guests. Around the ‘30s, it was decided to expand Quarto and create the New Institute and the House of Nurses, opened in
1934. In 1969, the Province built a new pavilion in Quarto, now
destined to educate. In 1975 the inmates in the two psychiatric
hospitals (Quarto and Pratozanino) exceeded the 3100 units.
The effects of Basaglia’s 1978 law were immediate, with a decrease
to 1870 units in 1980 and a gradual evacuation of hospitals, until
they were completely empty in the following decade. Still today
the volume of these buildings constitute important opportunities for regeneration and territorial recovery. In Pratozanino the
buildings are more than 53,000 square meters on a plot of about
75 hectares and in Genoa Quarto, they are about 57,000 square meters on a plot of about 11 hectares.
The Psychiatric Hospital of Pratozanino, today
Today the Psychiatric Hospital of Pratozanino looks like a complex where the logic of urban aggregation of volumes strikes
more than the architectural interest in the individual building.
Its appearance is affected by its distance from towns, which accentuates the closed world character of self-sufficiency.
The complex complies with the criteria in force at the time of
the construction of asylums. The plan is like a village, with two
41
maria carla filauro
MARIA CARLA FILAURO
THE GREAT DIVESTITURES: FROM FACTORIES
TO HOSPITALS – REALITY IN THE URBAN CONTEXT
OF THE 21ST CENTURY
Below: the Psychiatric Hospital
of Genoa, Quarto
The Psychiatric Hospital of Genoa Quarto, today
The Psychiatric Hospital of Genoa Quarto today uses less than half
of the original space to host social and health services and neuropsychiatry wards. The complex consists of two large containers,
the first made in the late 1800s (the Old Institute), and the second
completed in 1933 (the New Institute), for about 37,000 square meters; a recently refurbished building used as a guest house (3500
square meters of usable surface), two residential buildings, which
housed the residence of head physician and of the bursar (total
1750 square meters), the monumental entrance, a recent building
42
43
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maria carla filauro
Above: the Psychiatric Hospital
of Cogoleto, Pratozanino
orthogonal axes of distribution. In addition to the treatment
rooms,we can see, the church, the laundry, the kitchen, the mechanical workshop, the mattress workshop, carpenter’s workshop, blacksmith’s workshop, the printing press, the bread oven,
the convent and the farm.
In 1999 the Company’s public park of Knowledge, Discovery and
Science was formed, with the purpose to build a theme park in
the former Hospital. The Company was put into liquidation in
2008, without having achieved its purpose, but it contributed to
initiate a process of awareness and appreciation of the asset.
In this context we find the first feasibility projects: the creation
of a theme park on scientific discoveries or of a scientific-technological park. Both studies were included in the project that underlies the Planning Agreement of 2007, now in force. In addition
to providing the maintenance of the small existing health post,
the rule aims to create a technology center, with specialized production activities, as well as health care and residential services.
In 2008, the assets of Psychiatric Hospitals of Pratozanino and
Genoa Quarto are assigned to the current company CDP Immobiliare s.r.l. due to a 2006 regional financial law that governs
the sale of a real estate portfolio consisting of medical buildings
through a process of securitization.
The current guidelines are to identify an attractive function and
develop residential areas in steps, renovating the existing volumes and introducing new ones, tracing the lines of development advanced by the Master Plan of 1933.
maria carla filauro
used as clinics and offices (5000 square meters) and other minor
artifacts originally for offices and technical rooms. The green areas are mostly wooded and steep.
Today, the complex of the Psychiatric Hospital of Genoa Quarto
is divided into three lots relating to different properties: the Public Healthcare Company of Genoa, the Regional Agency for public
housing and CDP Immobiliare, with only the latter two aiming
to enhance their assets.
The program agreement signed in December 2013 provides for the
maintenance in the Old Institute of social and health care functions, integrated with cultural functions, and the inclusion of
urban character functions (residence, office, services) in the other buildings. A large urban park will be established in order to
reclaim the great green area.
Today the renovation of the Psychiatric Hospital of Genova Quarto is a major urban regeneration project, conducted through participatory processes, under public direction.
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AMEDEO GAGLIARDI
ON URBAN REGENERATION FOR
THE RECOGNITION OF THE COMMON GOOD
The experience of coordination of Quarto in Genoa
Since its beginning three years ago, the experience of coordinating the Quarto project in Genoa has been rich in political and
cultural ideas. As of its first developments, it has shown “how the
recognition of a public asset in terms of a place, an artifact, an architectural complex can take opposite trajectories” that identify an asset as
either superfluous or necessary for the public. I will try to tell this
tale, explain the different points of view and point out some useful ways to launch an urban regeneration project.
The question of what to do with psychiatric hospitals began long
ago but things began to change when Law 180 of 1978 closed them
and began a locally-based mental health practice. From that moment, the Genova Quarto Hospital, like others in our country, began to gradually decline. This was as if to confirm a general will
to slough off this terribly painful moment of history simply by
closing and abandoning these institutions. What happened with
the buildings confirms my point: the property passed from hand
to hand over the years without anyone developing a vision of how
to use it. In 1978, it belonged to the Province of Genoa, then to the
USL, then in turn to ASL3, after which it was divided among the
CDP, ARTE, ASL3 and the City of Genoa in 2007. Over 35 years and
despite numerous projects, (in the 1980s it was envisioned as the
site of the CNR, in 2006 as the site of IIT, while it served as the
site of many ASL3 services including its Management and some
residential services) the complex continues to exist in a state of
separation and neglect. More proof of this is the persistence of
walls that mark an undeclared inability to metabolize the history
of that place and thus to seriously overcome it.
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public, it begins a virtuous process that can bring new energy to
this re-generation.
I believe that the story of the coordination board can serve as a
model of valorization in public asset management, “which is important today to reverse the process of neglect of public work and start an
inter-institutional dialog which is open to active citizenry”. I would like
to move away from this specific story to make it easier to understand this approach. The logic that can bring about regeneration
must start from the very word regeneration that refers to generate,
to give birth to, to trust in life, thus to start from the perspective
of people to imagine how life can resume in a given place. This is
possible if one builds a context of learning that is open to people,
able to mediate their various needs, able to go beyond the dichotomy of profit/waste and able to get back a real exchange of views
with others so that they can become a support and complement, a
partner in the learning process. This process should provide a demanding cultural challenge that requires one to cultivate a greater understanding of history that transcends the different groups’
points of view. It is also important to remember that today, hegemonic culture is more interested in conflict than integration:
this gets more attention. The course, simple logic of competition
has gone beyond its limits and has entered into a social change
that cannot give space to the complexity of collective learning.
Beginning to be aware that going outside one’s own space and
listening to others’ points of view is a demanding process. Aside
from sparing us likely disappointments, it invites us to take up
a political language understood as the polis (people’s) ability to
speak to each other, treasuring the small steps we can make.
To sum up, the coordination board’s experience can provide a series of recommendations on how to valorize a public asset and
bring about its regeneration:
– Involve the different institutions and active citizenry to foster a
learning context that can reflect systemic thought and a space to be together.
– Keep the human dimension central to create a language that can accommodate different groups without excluding any and foster a synergy
that moves toward a regeneration of the public asset.
– Understand that in a learning endeavor, the network that will be
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The coordination of Quarto began after the Region of Liguria
sanctioned the securitization of a 19th century part of the complex, among other things, in order to fill a gap in the health budget.Then came the ASL3 resolutions of November 2011 to move the
health administration offices and the February 2012 resolutions
to hold a Dutch auction to move the remaining 80 patients from
the complex. This Dutch auction was “to furnish residential psychiatric services for ASL3, 4 lots.” The city, which had up until then been
rather quiet on the subject, began to react against this decision,
which betrayed and offended the dignity of the people put on
auction just as it betrayed and offended its own sense of democracy. The auction marked a cultural deviation that reopened the
door to the marginalization and institutionalization of mental
illness because of an inability to engage diversity in a way other than through the unfocused lens of economics. In these three
years of work we have been able to reverse these decisions. An
inter-institutional working group was organized that achieved a
schedule agreement in November 2013. The auction on patients
was revoked and the agreement stipulated that two thirds of the
19th century complex be returned to the health administration, a
health care home for the Levante to be established and to continue various services.
The ex-psychiatric hospital in Quarto took on various meanings
from superfluous – defined through a simple economic inquest, to a
public asset – defined at the discussion forum by the coordination
board wishing to drive toward cooperation among the Region
of Liguria, ARTE, ASL3, the City of Levante and the Coordination
board. “This experience highlighted how this asset became common only
through a process that saw the various forces in the field come together to
determine a different logic of recognition of that asset”. This logic recognizes it in the collective sense through the way various aspects
intertwine: life, history, usefulness, interrelationships and economic value. If all these are not considered, the asset tends to be
reduced to its mere economic value. The process the coordination
board went through showed that if the public asset was not dealt
with correctly, it would inevitably become superfluous, a burden
to cede. On the other hand, if this asset finds attention from the
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formed, has no center. Every part can make its own contribution to develop a valorizing mindset.
– Continue to reaffirm the pleasure of sociability, drawing a logical
connection between thought and action, between saying and doing,
which is often betrayed. This is a way to keep institutions from
veering toward predefined goals (today, the logic of the bottom
line) and rejecting the moral autonomy of the human spirit and compromising the congruity between ends and means.
CHERUBINO GAMBARDELLA
FOLLY’S FAILURE
As one can see, there is a lot of work left to do.
Diversity, surprise, dismay and confusion are conditions that detach human kind from the usual designed to reassure it every day.
Obsession, equality, repetition and the absence of surprise build
another dangerous side that is not only diversity but also alienation and closing.
Folly and architecture have always had a reclusive bond.
Architecture is the art of the threshold, of closing, of walling up
and opening. After all, in comparison to the open air, it seems a
simulation of imprisonment. However, while folly shows – up
to the revolutions of Franco Basaglia – the necessity not to have
an outside, to live segregated without rights in a boundless and
constrictive interieur, architecture benefits from the alternation
of the perimeter and the battle between an outside and an inside.
A provident battle happened to me recently – in the Genoa Summer
School of Architecture – in which I fought and guided an international group of five young designers.
We visited two abandoned mental asylums, one really urban, in
the district of Quarto, the other absorbed in the West Coast landscape in Pratozanino.
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In the abandoned asylums, there is decay and the patients’ writings but, above all, the inside uses the same expressive register as
the outside.
I had never experienced such thing: the outside is only simulated, folly must not be exhibited and it is not even worthy of the sky.
We immediately decide to make two outsides: Quarto becomes
like an open walled castle, used for shops, a suburb of well frequented bars that fly among the trees. We design a magic city
above and in the middle of the old insane asylum.
New spaces under the sky for wellness, sports and bodycare.
Pratozanino seems to be a bunker with buildings: huts and a grotesque, neo-Gothic church made of concrete. They are prisons
hidden in the forest.
Immediately, they transform into a collection of inhabited walls,
a city for sport and health that cuts, intersects and intercepts the
old architectures.
Over the sky, a city, takes the revenge of crumpling folly to her failure and ransom and instilling the peace of the horizon and the sea.
Above: Quarto, axonometry
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Previous page: Pratozanino, diagram
STEFANO GRAZIANI
A STORY TOLD BACKWARD:
AT SOME POINT I NOTICED THAT
BASAGLIA ALWAYS WORE A TIE
Some years ago, I started working on a project with the generic
title Museo per Franco Basaglia (The Soul, or Much Trouble in the
Transportation of Souls, Manifesta 7, Trento, 2008). I saw it as an
open-ended possibility, imagining a museum for something that
couldn’t be put in a museum.
I still don’t think of it as being completed or done, and in many
ways, it is part of many other things, often cropping up at different
times and in different forms, which is why I’m writing this now.
I no longer find it very interesting to try to describe what happened and how we arrived at the point of closing down mental institutions, or at least closing down the one in Trieste. The
Museum for Franco Basaglia currently takes the form of a portable museum, structured around various themes. It includes a
photographic archive with the work of unknown individuals
who were active on the grounds of San Giovanni, conveying the
spontaneous cultural climate that developed at the former asylum in the ‘80s and ‘90s; selected publications by Franco Basaglia
and his wife Franca Ongaro; texts that visitors could photocopy;
copies of 847, Foglio del manicomio aperto di Trieste, 16 Dicembre 1974,
conceived by Ugo Guarino and Danilo Sedmak, with drawings
by Ugo Guarino; a very accurate timeline written by Giovanna
Gallio; a drawing by Vittorio Basaglia of the storyteller on Marco Cavallo; photographs of the rose garden and the hospital after its construction in 1908; the transcription of conversations
with some of the people who took part in what has been called
Basaglia’s revolution.
It will be rather schizophrenic, but I’d like to describe my reflec-
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Dia Center for the Arts, n. 1, 1996, pp. 135-156).
I’d like to say a bit more about ideology and the mythology of contemporary culture, but I prefer to cite something Basaglia said in
a conversation with Sartre (Franco Basaglia, L’utopia della realtà,
ed. Franca Ongaro Basaglia, p. 241): “ideologies are freedom while they
are in development, oppression once they are formed”.
I think it’s interesting to think about the fact that Basaglia really
pulled off a huge victory, that Law 180, signed by the Andreotti
administration on 13 May, 1978, went far beyond all expectations;
that his experience played a fundamental role, that Basaglia succeeded in hammering out a law in the Italian Parliament that
up to then had seemed impossible to imagine or propose. At the
same time, one might reflect on the possibility that Law 180 and
the dismantlement of mental institutions was the last act that
derived from the antifascist resistance movement, and that these
initiatives entailed enormous savings for the healthcare system
in Italy, whose management in that period was being transferred
from the provincial to the regional governments. So non-productive individuals had to be made functional and restored to
society, with all the contradictions deriving from this, in both
practical and conceptual terms; here, it is important to remember the Mariotti Law passed on February 12, 1968 – predating 180
– which had already introduced voluntary psychiatric hospitalization. To continue, one could look at decentralization, the practical implementation by Franco Rotelli, who succeeded Basaglia
in 1979; along with others (first and foremost, Peppe dell’Acqua)
he carried out the process that had been initiated, i.e., a gradual
shift towards local management of mental health clinics, which
moved from the center – the mental hospital, the structure of institutionalization – into the city. Today there are five operative
mental health centers in Trieste. Moving out of the specifically
psychiatric environment, there is an idea that has now become
operative: the microarea, that is, a subdivision into districts, in
which several doctors serve all the potential patients who live in
a specific part of the city. Hospitalization is reduced to a minimum, patients are cared for at home, in their own area. This is an
active, practical approach that I see as implementing the idea of
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tions on the encounters and discussions I had during the period
when I was conceiving the structure of this project. One of the
things I thought about almost immediately was the use and prescription of psychiatric drugs, and how this was a determining
factor that made it possible to close down mental hospitals. Basaglia is often called an anti-psychiatrist, but it is interesting to
read how he himself stated that he had little in common with anti-psychiatry, and that he was pursuing a specific approach within the discipline of medical science. Basaglia talks about this,
writes about it in his “Brazilian Lectures” (Franco Basaglia, Conferenze Brasiliane, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2000), and specifically in
Silvano Agosti’s film Il volo, shot in 1975, which shows Basaglia
and several patients taking a plane trip over the city of Trieste
on an ATI flight. Basaglia himself talks about the implications
of power, control and dependency in the use of medication. The
same ideas can be found in the documentation related to a show
about psychiatric drugs, organized in 1977 for Réseau Internazionale
di Alternativa alla Psichiatria, when Franca Ongaro Basaglia introduces the exhibition. What has always sparked my curiosity the
most is the explicit possibility of going mad, which at the same
time, is a chance to understand the behavior connected to various
psychoses, neuroses, or forms of schizophrenia. I also think that
in a world driven by anxiety, a world that has essentially been
deprived of the chance to dream of a future (Castel), drugs can be
both an instrument of control and a frontier of exploration. I’ve
heard Robert Castel say that we live in a world with no future,
which I suppose implies that what Basaglia wanted most of all
would no longer seem possible or desirable today.
I won’t touch on art. I’ve always thought that it should be one
step ahead of events; of course, in a world with no future, this
anticipation turns into nostalgia, delay turns into prediction,
contradiction turns into a tool. Perhaps it would be a good idea
to open up a discourse on historically themed art, starting with
Liberty Leading the People, painted by Eugène Delacroix in 1830;
one useful essay is Monochrome and Photojournalism in On Kawara’s
Today Paintings, by Jeff Wall (published in Robert Lehman Lectures
on Contemporary Art, Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, ed., New York,
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decentralization, not just in the specific field of psychiatry, but in
the entire healthcare system. I have also reflected on why it has
only now become possible to try to compile an archive of deinstitutionalization, i.e., a place where one can trace a story, consult materials and laws, see what happened, and what has been done. I’ve
looked at various theories, but the one that seems most substantiated is structural impossibility. The subversion of power that took
place in the Trieste asylum started off with the destruction of an
archive that categorized the patients: the violent ones, the dirty
ones, the suicidal ones, the quiet ones, the men, the women; the
significance of this decision made it impossible to create a systematic archive of the revolution as it was taking place.
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A — [Still watching the match.] I don’t know yet. [Pause.] For now, I’m
studying the subject of Psychiatric Hospitals. [Looking at E.]
I’d like to know more about it.
E — Well, we could divide tasks. You could do a magical and nostalgic study and look for the souls of the buildings in their
past. [Smiling.] I could make a paranoiac-critical study and see
the unseen through the association of delirious phenomena.
There is so much to learn from Salvador Dalí!
[Flickering lights change into a Dalinian delirium of colors.]
A — All right. [Studiously thinking.] I really like this bipolar version
of the architectural disorder. It reminds me of something ...
[Pause. Looks at E.] Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More
wrote In Praise of Folly and Utopia side by side. One is the
reverse of the other.
[Flickering lights change into Slo-Mo, deep brown tones.]
ACT 1
BEGINNING
SCENE 1: Empire Diner
[Behind the glassless windows of a diner with live soccer TV. Unintelligible
background chatter. Flickering lights from the TV set fill the room. A and
E sit eye to eye on benches on two sides of a Formica table.]
E — [With contempt.] The football game...Spain-Chile, I couldn’t
care less! [Looking away from the TV set towards A. Indolently.]
We should start thinking about the Summer School in Genoa. [Pause.] How to organize the two weeks? [Pause. Looking
at A.] Are you coming for the final jury, by the way?
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E — [With contempt, low voice. Looking away from A.] Those two were
so boring, man! [Pause. Looks at A.] A psychiatric hospital is
ultimately a specialist hotel, you know. [Sounding admonitory.]
We should avoid too obvious associations with insanity as
the main theme. I thought of Dalí because he saw shapes and
stories in things that, before his vision, were neither forms
nor stories. This is the paranoiac-critical method. [Pause.]
But, to be honest, in this case I don’t really like the word
paranoia because it’s too connected with mental asylums.
[Looking away from A towards the window.] Although paranoia
is something different from madness, of course. [Pause. Looks
intensely at A’s eyes.] It’s a very contemporary condition, perhaps our main condition.
A — I quite agree with you on everything, actually. [Half-closing
eyes.] Dalí’s fine. In his works, he bordered reverse utopias
which then expanded into the places where he lived or sim-
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ANDREA GRITTI, ENRIC MASSIP BOSCH
TOWARDS NEW PERCEPTIONS:
A PLAY IN THREE ACTS AND FIVE ACTION
E — Yes, I saw Shutter Island. [Shrugging shoulders, shaking
head.] But I’m not quite sure I got it. Maybe I have to see
it again…
A — [Sounding scholarly, looking around.] You should. It’s a mental
and architectural thriller. It talks about role reversal, and
about the sense of space, and about the interior and exterior
enigma, and Di Caprio is great. [Looking at E.] Did you know
Brad Pitt is an architect?
in 1978. I’d like to translate Basaglia’s medical point of view
into an architectural point of view: his argument revolves
around the theme of power and violence and how they are
reflected in the spaces we inhabit. Bye,
A — Perfect! As for me, I want to discuss how the usual interpretation of Foucault’s theories about prisons, hospitals and
schools being instruments of power and architectures of violence, no longer holds true in the 21st century. This is the
analysis of Byung-Chul Han, the German philosopher I’ll
speak about in my lecture next Monday. This way, between
the two we can link the three moments of the buildings: their
origin, their demise, and their resurrection. Let me know how
everything goes in Genoa. Cheers,
E — [Last text dims into total darkness.]
[Flickering lights gradually dim into total darkness. Curtain.]
SCENE 2: Cyberpost
[Large text beamed on the waving curtain. Off-stage non-emotional, bureaucratic reading of the text. Two voices.]
A month later, by e-mail:
Hi. I’m working on my lesson for Genoa. I thought I’d do a triple
somersault and bring together Mercè Rodoreda, Byung-Chul Han
and Salvador Dalí. The purpose is to make clear the possibility of
‘seeing things where there’s nothing’, of thinking about our contemporary condition, and of understanding that there is hope.
How’s the course going so far? Call me when you can.
E — Here’s all right, we have the students assigned and tod we’ll
present the content of our different points of view on the
topic. I’m reading “L’istituzione negata” by Franco Basaglia,
the Italian psychiatrist who proposed closing all hospitals
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ACT 2
IN THE MEANTIME
SCENE 1: Before lunch
[Generic workshop classroom. Large windows on one side only, bright light
outside. High table, high stools. Some characters standing. A clock on the
wall shows 11:30.]
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ply observed. [Eyes wide open.] But let me remind you of something: in a psychiatric hospital everything has its origin in
the act of separation. It was a device that selected people’s
fate at the entrance. [Briskly.] Have you seen Scorsese’s film
Shutter Island? [Flickering lights change into a succession of white
flashes.] In that movie there is all the unequivocal contemporary paranoia you are talking about, and even a bit of Dalí.
O — That sounds great! Now the best thing to do is go and discuss
it over lunch!
A — My first impression is very basic. [Pause.] These are huge un
used complexes placed at fine locations. We have three initial conditions: size, function and site.
All [in loud voice] – Yeah![Courtain.]
E — [Looking at A.] What puzzles me is that there have been 40 plus years of continued failed attempts at using them. It never happened! [Pause.] And these complexes are increasingly
becoming an unsolvable paradox.
[Same generic workshop classroom. Dim light outside, dim artificial light
inside. High table, high stools. Some characters standing. A clock on the
wall shows 17:30.]
A — There are several possible reasons for this failure: [Pause.] per
sistent lack of dynamism in the region, and various public/private legal issues. It all adds up to an extremely unstable investment environment that keeps them from being transformed.
E — Yeah. [Pause.] But there is one important reason above all:
these complexes don’t exist in citizens’ minds. Or, if they do,
they are perceived as painful limbos to be avoided, or burnt
down. [Pause. Looking around the group.] Do we want that? Only
a change in this perception can lead towards a significant
reappropriation of these facilities for the city.
B — [Looking at E inquisitively.] And how can we do that?
E — [Looking at B.] Well, better begin with a starter operation spe cifically addressed to that change. [Pause. Looking around the
group.] We can use surprise, paradox, emotion to bring these
great buildings under a new light, to create interest and visibility. Then incremental changes can happen after that.
G — [Briskly.] To begin with, we should keep the still existing orig
inal function, this time with 21st century standards. [Looking
around the group.] And interfere it with a series of operations
that work as counterintuitive instruments to force a rereading of the original buildings.
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SCENE 2: After lunch
B — They are so huge, these buildings. [Raising questioning voice,
looking around the group.] Hey, why should we build even more
buildings there?
F — Hmmm. [Looking inquisitively at the group.] Do you really think
that they tried hard and good enough to transform them?
C — [Looking at F.] Don’t know, but listen, people here really want
to move forward and get back into the picture! [Pause. Looking at the group.] Genoa wants to regain importance, and this
could be an excellent opportunity to show an avant-garde attitude towards heritage.
F — And, to be honest, who wants yet another gentrifying scheme,
eh? Who? [With vivid contempt.] Another wellness center, really? You must be kidding, man!
G — [Hesitatingly.] So... this is our first mission, isn’t it? [Looking
around the group.] We help people to like this place!
C — [Briskly.] And we help other projects to happen!!
[Loud clapping in the hall. Lasting very long]
B — [Excitedly.] I got an idea!! Why don’t we propose a toolbox of
five actions that are capable of starting to change things?
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E — [Trying to sound encouraging. Looking around the group.] Well,
what do you think?
ACT 3
MUSICAL ENDING
B — Hey! This way each of us can propose an action. Good idea!
[For both scenes: All characters onstage in total darkness, placed in a grid
pattern at regular intervals facing the public. When each character starts
talking, a light beam towards the public illuminates him/her from behind,
blinding the audience. Bluish light for scene 1, yellowish for scene 2. Texts
are liturgically recited.]
F — Remember the crazy lesson about Byung-Chul Han and Dalí?
[Briskly.] Perhaps we can use that paranoiac-something to
create a new perception of the buildings! And…
C — [Interrupting.] There was also a writer, wasn’t there?
F — Yeah. And it’s also a good idea to work without a program,
right?
O — Right! [Excitedly.] Fuck the program!
[Cheering chorus joining the observation.
The audience is invited to join in by beamed messages.]
C — [Looking down. Almost hushing.] But then Scelsi and Pizzigoni
will be mad at us! [Looking up again. Pause.] If the program
is not important, [excitedly, looking around the group] why don’t
we just use the bloody brief and work with that??
O — Yeah, guys. [Briskly.] Let’s be strategic!
G — [Very emotional. Raising voice.] And please, please, let’s keep the
madmen, please! They deserve to see their building improve!
[Great applause and hoorays required from the audience,
some loud whistling too. Courtain.]
SCENE 1: Quarto’s Transformer
C — [At the background sound of Make up.] Confronted with the di
chotomy of interior/exterior, choose neither and propose a
simultaneous perception of an interior as an exterior and
viceversa. [Pause.] A selective cut through the building brings
together both realities to create a new, unified complex perception.
G — [At the background sound of Take a walk on the wild side.] Elim
inate any perimetral promenade around the building and
enter through a new way meant as a public space. [Pause.]
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G — [Briskly.] Yes!! Let’s do that!! It’s so boring to do a project in
August!
A narrow yellow brick road that is capable of reorienting relationships and give hope to the hopeless.
At night a new reality emerges by laser fields that create virtual carpets at random. And connect the ensemble veritably
together for the first time.
O — [At the background sound of Vicious.] Cycle in the clouds or swim
above the entrance. Run for your life and feel disoriented in
the never-ending track, either coming in or leaving without
knowing exactly why, just like in real sports centers. [Pause.]
And an homage to Dalí, the egg that brings life and holds inside a meditation room for this fatigue society.
G — [At the background sound of Bye bye blackbird.] Change the
access and enter through a new gate. Change the promenade
and create a path in which processions and choreographies
can happen. [Pause.] Exorcisation exercises to reappropriate
Cogoleto for everybody and say bye bye to black memories.
B — [At the background sound of Perfect Day.] Show the variety of
situations a simple act can produce. A perfect set of 25 spots
meant either as voids or volumes that punctuate a specific area. [Pause.] Show the potential of adding a new layer of
meaning to a building overcharged with memories.
O — [At the background sound of Dear Old Stockholm.] Or the possibi lity of a syndrome. Feel renewed by relaxing in this disconcerting spa where you can take showers almost in the outside and steam baths almost in the inside. [Pause.] A platonic
cave as an homage to De Chirico. [Pause.] Really?
[Lights gradually dimming to total darkness.]
All [Shouting. All lights beaming on characters. At the background sound
of All of you.] Place a grid that relates all the buildings in an unexpected way. [Pause.] But don’t be so sure that you have solved
anything. [Pause.] Don’t believe that order alone can solve everything. [Long pause.] Even the grid has personality problems and
can’t decide between above and beneath!
[Sudden courtain.]
SCENE 2: Cogoleto’s Miles
F — [At the background sound of ‘Round midnight.] Recompose a lost
communal order by enhancing individualities. [Pause.]
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Fig Act 1: Fodero Dining Car Company
– Empire Dinner – New York, 1946
Fig Act 3, scene 1: Hospital of Quarto,
Genoa
Fig Act 2: Picture taken during the
workshop
Fig Act 4, scene 2: Psychiatric hospital
of Cogoleto, Pratozanino
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The architecture of asylums, prisons, penitentiaries and hospitals is a repository of forms and plans for confinement that the
city itself is made of. At the same time these urban facts express a
content that Aldo Rossi pre-eminently described as a topological
quality that forms an architecturally concretized memory: “Visit
an asylum: pain there is something concrete. It is to be found in the courtyards, in the walls, in the rooms.”1
In Madness and Civilisation the idea of the great confinement is
central to Michel Foucault’s interpretation of the physical and
political development of dealing with madness. In the context of political absolutism and Enlightenment rationality,
confinement is a European phenomenon in the 17th and 18th
century that respond to existences that affronted bourgeois rationality. Beggars, petty criminals, layabouts, prostitutes, the
sick, the old, the lame and lunatic were identical and shared
inertia as their common denominator. The mad did not work.
The architectures of the Hôpital General, the Zuchthäuser, penitentiaries, prisons, poor and sick houses all confined those
who will gradually be categorized, segregated, differentiated
and institutionalized in the course of the 19th century along
with the rapid growth of populations and cities. The quintessentially modern and managerial desire to control a foreseeable tomorrow seemingly compels planning to lag behind the
endless changes, reforms and transformations of these disciplinary institutions in permanent crisis. We take a quick look
at two extreme ends that the history of confinements produced
architecturally – the solitary tower and the confined urban
landscape – and keep Rem Koolhaas in mind: “Changes in re-
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gime and ideology are more powerful than the most radical architecture – a conclusion both alarming and reassuring for the architect.”2
Under emperor Joseph II in 1783 the Narrenturm (Tower of Fools,
Architect Isidor Canevale / Josef Gerl) was erected in the course
of the extension of Vienna’s General Hospital as one of the first
institutions of continental Europe exclusively built for the “treatment” of the mentally ill. (Fig 1) Historians believe that the emperor’s personal interest in the care of the mentally ill here was
due in part to his membership in the Freemasons or Rosicrucians, as the composition of the tower surprisingly often reveals
some alchemical mysticism of numbers. The perfectly circular
building is five storeys high and has a circumference of 66 Viennese fathoms with 28 cells on each floor and an octagonal wooden roof structure. Initially, there were no doors on the cells and
peaceful patients could move freely in the tower, while violent
and unclean ones were chained to the walls of the cells.
Norman Johnston discusses the Narrenturm together with the famous Panopticon that was only three years later designed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham.3 Here, solitary confinement in prison
cells with a barred front arranged in a circle around an observation tower in the centre, should provide continuous observation
by a prison’s governor and his staff. But the cells of the Narrenturm go off a ring-shaped corridor that surrounds an open and
claustrophobic courtyard in the middle without any panoptical
regime. Although Bentham’s Panopticon was intended to be a universal principle of organization for situations in which a small
group of supervisors monitors a much larger group of supervised
– be it factory workers, hospital patients, prisoners or lunatics
– he never managed to build one. Other circular and polygonal
responses in the history of prison, hospital and asylum architecture were also concerned with observation, but it was the long
and straight cellblocks, radiating out from the central observation point of the Eastern State Penitentiary (Cherry Hill, Philadelphia 1836) that became the model for more than 300 central-plan
prisons worldwide. And for hospitals the circular plans with ra-
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andreas lechner
ANDREAS LECHNER
PROSPECTIVE ARCHAEOLOGIES
While Sigmund Freud explored the patient’s inner impulses and
dreams as they lay on his famous couch in the city center, Otto
Wagner designed the psychiatric hospital Am Steinhof that opened
in 1907 as the largest and most modern psychiatric institution in
Europe on the outskirts of Vienna (Fig 2). A complete garden city
made up of villas with individual loggias and gardens in a 1.47
square kilometre park that could house 2500 patients in a series
of 34 patients’ pavilions with clinic, nursing home, farm and a
sanatorium to the west for well off private patients. All buildings
are strictly and symmetrically subordinated to a central axis that
features the main entrance and administration, casino, kitchen
and Otto Wagner’s Jugendstil church on top – a whole utopian
city for the mentally ill, and a prominent place of Aktion T4, the
Nazi regime’s forced euthanasia programme, here on children.
The changing modes of power and exertion of control in late
capitalism result not only in the gradual de-institutionalization (e.g. Basaglia Law, 1978) of these confinements but confront architecture perhaps with the task of providing a prospective archaeology that might somehow counter capital’s
lobotomic surgeries. In a footnote to the work of Foucault, Gilles
Deleuze reckoned up this ambivalent task for our times of
self-control: “We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure – prison, hospital, factory, school, family… The
administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary
reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed
forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished,
Facing page: Fig 1 Narrenturm (Tower
of Fools), elevation and plan of ground
floor, Vienna 1783
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andreas lechner
andreas lechner
diating ward blocks were lastly rejected in favour of parallel layouts of the wards (light and ventilation), with the Lariboisiére
hospital in Paris (1846-54, Architect Martin-Pierre Gauthier) as
the most successful model for many pavilion hospitals connected
by arcades around courtyards.4
andreas lechner
whatever the length of their expiration periods. It‘s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies
of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies.”5
Maybe some more monuments to the beauty and horror of excessive rationality should be housed in these elastic typologies,
which are now being mercilessly conquered by real estate developments everywhere.
1 Aldo Rossi, L’Architettura della
città, Padua: Marsilio Editori 1966,
p. 130 (Translation taken from
Rafael Moneo, Aldo Rossi, The Idea of
Architecture and the Modena Cemetary,
Oppositions 5, in Oppositions Reader,
New York, Princeton Architectural
Press, 199, pp. 110).
3 Norman Johnston, Forms of
Constraint: A history of prison
architecture. University of Illinois,
Urbana and Chicago, 2000, pp.48-54.
2 Rem Koolhaas, Revision – Study for
the renovation of a Panopticon Prison, in
OMA, Rem Koolhaas & Bruce Mau, S,
M, L, XL, New York, Monacelli Press,
1995, pp. 235-253.
5 Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the
Societies of Control, October 59, 1992,
pp. 3-7.
4 Philip Steadman, Building Types and
Built Forms, Troubadour, Kibworth,
2014.
Fig 2: Am Steinhof Psychiatric
Hospital Vienna, situation plan and
aerial perspective by Erwin Pendel, 1907
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77
"All is imaginary, family, friends, the office, the street, all imaginary,
further away, closer, closest the woman, the truth that lies closest,
however, is only this, that you are beating your head against the wall
of a windowless and doorless cell."
Franz Kafka: Diary entry, 21.th of October 19211
It is a strange fact that the writer Franz Kafka, while staying in a
sanatorium, went on a small leisurely fieldtrip to the castle Oravský which is the setting for Murnau’s Nosferatu.2 Whether Kafka ever saw the film or if his inspiration for his novel The Castle
came from cinema or architecture, we will never know. Perhaps
it doesn´t really matter. Murnau himself would write about his
spatiotemporal ambitions in setting the camera free:
“A camera that outstrips present film technique and fulfils the cinemas’
ultimate artistic goal. Only with this essential instrument shall we be
able to realize new possibilities, including one of the most promising, the
“architectural” film. What I refer to is the architecture of bodies with
blood in their veins moving through mobile space; the interplay of lines
rising, falling, disappearing; the encounter of surfaces, stimulation and
its opposite, calm; construction and collapse; the formation and destruction of hitherto almost unsuspected life; all this adds up to a symphony
made up of the harmony of bodies and the rhythm of space; the play of
pure movement, vigorous and abundant. All this we shall be able to create
when the camera has at last been de-materialized.”3
78
It is true that one is able to identify a cinematic ontology in the
work of Kafka, for instance in the short story The Passenger
(1913), where the viewpoint of the narrator is slung around and
through space in the manner described by Murnau, while at
the same time being made unstable by the very movement of
the trolley car carrying the body of the spectator. However interesting, Murnau’s description of the architectural film and the
unchained camera, where no single element can be added or subtracted, falls short of the mark and the real radicality of Kafka’s
mode of operation. This mode is that of appropriation, which is
to create ruptures and new modes of expression by propelling a
host of heterogeneous elements together:
“Thus, the art (...) that Kafka tried to introduce is effectively no longer an
art that proposes to “express” (a meaning), to represent (a thing, a being),
or to imitate (a nature).”4
As Walter Benjamin noted5, there are two certain ways to misread Kafka, one being Spiritual and the other Oedipal. Kafka is
about charting an emergent new world, which transgresses orthodox modes of representation by being based on temporal, relational and transformative phenomena:
“The task of Kafka the writer was perhaps no different than that of “K.”
the land surveyor in The Castle and the accused in The Trial. It was, on
the one hand, to chart the topography of this peculiar emergent world, to
discover the laws of how things combine, and on the other, to trace by trial
and error the mysterious principle of its functioning.” But at the same
time no sketch or figure is anywhere offered up, unless it be one of these
deliberately scrambled and inscrutable images like the officers blueprints
for the inscription apparatus in the Penal Colony. For in Kafka, the
task is no longer to trace the visible form of the world by recourse to an
external schema or representational mode, but to somehow espouse its
very substance, to become of the world by becoming one with it.”6
As Sanford Kwinter notes in Architectures of Time, Kafka confronts
us with a new narrative order, that we might call Topological since
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morten meldgaard
MORTEN MELDGAARD
PARANOIA, APPROPRIATION AND
THE APPROPRIATENESS OF PARANOIA
morten meldgaard
morten meldgaard
81
80
carmen andriani
morten meldgaard
its foremost focus lies in problems of transmissibility, affiliation
and separation and “of the complex relations of physical parts to (metaphysical) wholes, rather than the traditional values of literature: meaning
psychology, truth”7. This new order of narration, which is basically
a narrative order aware of its own time-basedness, needs however a strategy of appropriating material, signs and power for its
range of heterogeneous counter-assemblages:
“Ultimately it is less a question of K as a general function taken up by
an individual, than of K as a functioning of a polyvalent assemblage of
which the solitary individual is only a part, the coming collectivity being
another part, another piece of the machine- without our knowing yet
what this assemblage will be: fascist? revolutionary? socialist? capitalist? Or even all these at the same time, connected in the most repugnant
or diabolical way? We don´t know, but we have ideas about all of these –
Kafka taught us to have them.”8
The drawings accompanying this text were done by Christoph
Walter Pirker (2014).
1 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz
Kafka: 1914-1923, Max Brod, New York,
1965, pp.197.
5 Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, On
the Tenth Anniversary of his Death (1934),
Illuminations, 1999, pp. 108.
2 Von Peter-André Alt, Die Burg des
Grauens, http://www.sueddeutsche de/
kultur/franz-kafka-und-murnausnosferatu-die-burg-desgrauens1.363222
6 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of
Time, 2001, p. 107.
3 Lotte H. Eisner, Murnau, 1973, pp.84.
8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 2006,
p. 85.
4 Réda Bensmaïa, The Kafka Effect,
in Gilles Deleuze , Félix Guattari,
Kafka- Toward a Minor Literature, 2006,
foreword, pp.XVII.
82
7 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of
Time, 2001, pp. 120-121.
83
Any building, private or public, makes a contribution to the public realm and should therefore have a public face.
We love facades that are full of ambition. We love facades that
overcome the simple necessities of the building program. We admire how the truly masterful facades have a character of their
own while at the same time have the capacity to integrate into
their surroundings.
The facades we love are not the result of a concept, a plan, a
structure or a method of construction. They are the result of a
design – autonomous, yet dependent on the inner structure of
every building.
Our main work is on the building’s Gestalt, the material and constructive logic come second. We like to think of our buildings in
terms of symmetry, rhythm, horizons, weight and surface. Yet
we do not believe in a normative grammar or syntax in architecture. Anything that works is good. We do not lament the increasing gap between how a building is built and what it looks like,
we embrace it. We like to see it as liberation of architecture from
the primacy of construction and function. Yet we are keenly interested in how architecture can materialise, how it can be built.
Facing page: Thomas Padmanabhan,
Binningen II, Apartment building,
Basel, Switzerland, 2014
84
Binningen
The house in Binningen, a five unit apartment building, responds to what we felt was an intrusion of a big building into a
quaint neighbourhood of single family houses. The problem for
us was to give a squat two-floor building a collective expression.
We introduced a composite two-storey window motif in which,
in the manner of Michelangelo, a smaller window is suspended
from an emphatically framed main window. This unifies the two
storeys and lifts the building’s centre of gravity. This motif structures the elevations, establishing symmetry on the street facade
and a loose rhythm on the garden facades.
The monochromatic relief of render planes and elements made
out of folded metal give the building an origami like volumetric presence. The house has an irregular plan concealed behind
precisely articulated facades. The facade of the building provides
order to the exterior spaces and the interior spaces.
When designing the facade, we discovered that it is increasingly
difficult to create a seamless unity between the facade and the
structure of the interior spaces.
The relationship between the building as an urban figure and the
apartment plans has become loose.
85
oliver lütjens, thomas padmanabhan
OLIVER LÜTJENS, THOMAS PADMANABHAN
ARCHITECTURE’S PUBLIC FACE
The building’s skin is a ventilated construction of cast fibre cement plates. Its rustication and the narrow spacing of the window mullions make the facade dense and delicate. It gives the
building a festive presence that does not lament its solitude but
engages with it, positive and proud. The lightness of the ventilated facade and the thinness of the plates unite a monumental
facade with a non monumental program.
86
Waldmeisterweg
In this house, a twenty unit low rent apartment building set in
the remains of a garden city, the shape of the building and its
plan are strangely at odds with each other. The building’s polygonal shape consists of a series of planes that create a kind of
demarcation line, enforcing and responding to different spatial
qualities of the site. Its plan resembles a rectangular city map
that has been cut out to fit into the shape of the building. It shows
the impossibility of an organic relationship between facade and
the texture of the interior spaces.
The facade is a cladding of lapping Eternit boards embedded in
thin wooden posts. A central frieze divides the elevations in to
two halves. It is the point of origin of a free rhythm of vertical pillars that structure and strain the skin of the building. The delicacy of the facade’s tectonics has its precedent in early Renaissance
architecture. Its Material and colour recall the cheerfulness and
dignity of anonymous beach house architecture.
Previous page: Lütjens
Padmanabhan Architekten,
Herdernstrasse, Apartment building,
Zurich, model
Above: Lütjens Padmanabhan
Architekten, Waldmeisterweg,
Apartment building, Zurich, model
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oliver lütjens, thomas padmanabhan
oliver lütjens, thomas padmanabhan
Herdernstrasse
Set at the end of a uniform row of humble apartment buildings
from the 1930’s the ten unit apartment building works as a sort
of book-end to an incomplete urban block. Its setting is rather
dramatic, as it demarcates the end of Zurich’s nineteenth century block structure giving way to the sprawl of the Limmat valley.
Serious and lonely, it acknowledges the proximity of two heroic
elements of the modern city, the soccer stadium and the slaughter
house. The building’s volume is balanced between a central bay
window on the street facade and a volumetric extension in the
garden addition. Together, they form an autonomous volumetric
figure that emphasizes the building’s self contained isolation, the
impossibility of a seamless insertion into the fabric of the city.
The facade is strictly symmetrical with a few casually placed
exceptions on street level. In the plan, symmetry and seriality
compete with each other for dominance. It reminds us of the disposition of the organs in the human body: symmetrical in principle with a number of carefully balanced elements.
Introduction
This paper is a contribution to the Genoa Summer School organized by the DSA in 2014, in support of the project work on two
former psychiatric hospitals, Pratozanino (Cogoleto) and Genova
Quarto:
1 it explains the special, characterizing elements of the two sites
2 it summarizes the activities on these two sites of SSBAP
and MARSC
Gino Grimaldi, drawing detail S. Maria
Addolorata Church, Pratozanino
88
Pratozanino
Brief history
The construction of the hospital began in 1907, the inauguration
was in 1910, with more than 500 patients and ten pavilions completed, more pavilions were added in the following years to accommodate up to 2.000 patients.
The whole complex was designed with a logic of complete self-sufficiency, everything was produced within, from food to energy,
a small town totally autonomous and separated from external
world. The site was a primary center of psychiatric care until
1978, when the Basaglia law started to dismiss psychiatric hospitals.
Its most distinguishing elements
– The access portal, gate between inside and outside worlds,
a Modern Movement artifact, architect Nardi Greco.
– The fences, boundary elements, the original and the most
recent ones.
– The signs that make us understand the construction’s ev lution
and stratification.
– The whole complex is harmoniously integrated in the woods of
the Cogoleto hills
– S. Maria Addolorata church, with a Gino Grimaldi painting
– The patients’ crib
S. Maria Addolorata
This church was built in 1933 inside the asylum. Gino Grimaldi was an artist with a troubled life, a patient of the asylum, he
found his own actualization when he was allowed to decorate the
church with wonderful artwork. This was a prime and very successful example of art therapy.
The church, made of reinforced concrete, has arches without columns, a strange, special feature required for security reasons to
facilitate supervisor control on the large number of patients of
both sexes who jointly participated in the Mess.
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daniela pittaluga
DANIELA PITTALUGA
PROTOZAINO AND QUARTO.
VALUES FROM HISTORY AND ELEMENTS
FOR RESTORATION
daniela pittaluga
Patients’ crib
A very special 500 m2 crib was initiated by a male nurse, the
patients themselves contributed to it over the years, guided by
the artist Bruno Galati. Beside a Nativity section, with life-sized
statues, there is a hospital everyday life section, with scenes like
the electro-shock room, the mess, the canteen. A third patients
memories sections has representations of Genoa, full of their desire to go back to the normal life outside the asylum. This may
be seen as an example of Art Brut, as it was conceived by Jean
Dubuffet in 1945 to refer to artistic production by non-professionals or patients of the psychiatric hospital that operate outside of conventional aesthetic standards (self-taught, psychotic
prisoners, people completely ignorant of artistic culture). Indeed
this is another example of art therapy. Unfortunately the crib is
now impossible to visit.
SSBAP activities on Pratozanino
The main ongoing project is Percorsi tra le storie di Cogoleto, led by
the Municipality of Cogoleto, with a grant from Compagnia di
San Paolo, part of the In Itiner@ 2014 program. DSA (with SSBAP)
is the main partner for scientific and technological issues, and
it manages a project section named from construction yard to construction yard, with two activities in S. Maria Addolorata:
– Monitoring and diagnostics
– Preliminary interventions to consolidate Gino Grimaldi paintings, that are now in danger because of the this abandoned
church’s state of deteroration.
This project links Pratozanino to two other elements of Cogoleto
heritage, S. Maria Maggiore parish church, with S. Lorenzo oratory containing some Grimaldi paintings, and Fornace Bianchi,
an ancient lime kiln, subject to recent restoration. A large number of local non-profit organizations is involved in this project, in
the usage and promotion of this heritage, including online broadcasting of restoration operations.
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daniela pittaluga
Genova-Quarto
Brief history
The hospital construction began in 1895 by architect Vincenzo
Cannetti, for 700 patients, some of whom were relocated to Pratozanino in 1912. In 1942-45 the structure was used by German
and then American soldiers. The asylum was closed in 1999.
MARSC activities in Quarto
MARSC is working on the project Studies and research on the architectural complex of the Genova Quarto ex-asylum on a request from
the ASL 3 public healthcare institution, owner of part of the
structure, as a contribution to its re-use.
The project produced a photographic survey of the whole building, integrated with a complete image-rectification process. On
this basis MARSC creates thematic maps for conservation states,
with a distinction between localized and widespread deteroration phenomena, diagnostic record cards and notes and suggestions for the restoration action.
Previous page: Ex Psychiatric
Hospital, Quarto, Genoa buildings’
conservation map
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VITTORIO PIZZIGONI
THE LACKING FORM OF THE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
Psychiatric hospitals, as separate buildings, have existed for
nearly two centuries. They spread across Europe in the late
18th– early 19th century along with the welfare and hospital reforms launched by the Enlightenment. At the end of the 20th
century the contradictions inherent in this system of imprisonment-treatment brought about their closure. In Italy this occurred after Basaglia’s Law was passed in 1978, after which other
European countries followed.
Certainly in the 16th century some institutions specialized in
treating the insane: the hospitals of fools or Pazzarelli as they were
called at the time. In fact the idea of ​​reserving some specific areas to mentally deranged people was not new in the 18th century.
It was, however, only during the age of Enlightenment that this
idea circulated so widely in every European town that psychiatric
hospitals became typical institutions of the new national states.
During their two-hundred-year lifetime, psychiatric hospitals
evolved following the spatial typologies used by traditional hospitals and slowly transformed from a courtyard plan, an example of which is the Psychiatric Hospital of Genoa in Quarto dei
Mille (1894), to a pavilion plan, exemplified by the Psychiatric
Hospital of Pratozanino in Cogoleto (1908). In the short time, between the late 18th and the early 19th century, psychiatric hospitals seemed to adopt a form that differentiated them from common civilian hospitals through their use of circular shapes and
a radial distribution. In fact in the 18th century, the 16th century
model of the cross-shaped hospital was still stylish, following
the archetype of the Ospedale Maggiore of Milan designed by
Filarete in 1456 or the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Saxia of Rome
dated 1475 (Fig 1).
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vittorio pizzigoni
vittorio pizzigoni
Fig 1: Santo Spirito in Sassia,
Rome 1649, inner view
Fig 2: Hospital Real, Granada 1511, plan
The cross-shaped hospital featured long rectangular rooms,
or the arms of the crosses, where the patients’ accomodations
were, and by the intersections, often housing altars or providing a place for religious services. The courtyards, surrounded by
arcades, supplied light and air, and were also used for outdoor
activities. The arms that converged in a single altar allowed all
patients to address their gaze at the place of worship and salvation: a system which was often applied in different European
health care institutions1 (Fig 2).
It is almost a reversed forerunner of the Panopticon principle: in
this case all the patients direct their gaze towards the sole centre, or to the place of salvation, whilst in the prison imagined by
Jeremy Bentham in 1971 – namely the Panopticon – the direction
of the look is contrary and consists of a single central eye that
overlooks all the prisoners. This system of looks that converge towards a place of worship was exploited masterfully by Ferdinando Fuga in the Albergo dei Poveri of Naples in 1750, as he designed a
church composed of six arms, one of which was dedicated to the
choir while the other five to the poor who attended Mass.2
In 1774 Antoine Petit published Mémoire sur la meilleure manière de
construire a hôpital de malades, there envisaging a psychiatric hospital with six lanes of patients arranged radially around a central
place of worship, but the real novelty was the circular shape that
he conferred to the entire complex rather than adopting the Panopticon-like system which was partly deceived by the section (Fig 3).
The idea of segregating the fools inside round buildings met with
immediate success. In 1783-84 the so-called Narrenturm, i.e.Tower of Fools, was built inside the Josephinum of Vienna. It was a
building dedicated to the mentally ill and circular as well despite
not having a radial structure. Bernard Poyet gave a circular plan
to his first project for the reconstruction of the 1785 Hôtel-Dieux
of Paris and in the wake of these experiences Carlo Barabino and
Domenico Cervetto also designed the psychiatric hospital in the
gardens of Abrara in Genoa in 1930.
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95
vittorio pizzigoni
vittorio pizzigoni
Fig 3: Antoine Petit, project of a
psychiatric hospital, 1774 (from
Mémoire sur la meilleure manière
de construire a hôpital de malades)
Fig 4: Christopher Wren, Greenwich
Naval Hospital, 1698, plan
The identification between circular tower and psychiatric hospital may have been favored by the memory of the tower for excellence, the tower of Babel, and its popular meaning of foolish
work, or by the isolation and the exceptional nature that a circular shape indicates inside a town. Despite the possible cross-references, in this case the union between form and function fails.
For some time after some psychiatric hospitals were constructed on a circular plan but most of them started again to be built
according to the forms of the most common civilian hospitals.
Meanwhile a model that enjoyed great success from the 19th
century until the first half of the 20th century3, the pavilion hospital, bacame popular. It is composed of a series of independent
buildings enclosed within a single fence and optionally linked
by a portico. The first example of this new type, which seems to
respond to some settlement principles of military camps, can be
considered the unfulfilled project of 1698 by Christopher Wren
for the Greenwich Naval Hospital. A more mature example is
the Royal Naval Hospital of Plymouth designed in 1756 by the
little-known Alexander Rowehead (Fig 4). The latter was soon
quoted as a model of wholesome and healthy disposition. In 1777
John Howard, in the first survey on the status of English prisons, specified that Plymouth’s ward blocks were “detached from
each other, for the purpose of admitting freeer circulation of air, also of
classing the several disorders, in such a manner, as may best prevent
the spread of contagion”4. In 1788 Jacques Tenon also marked this
hospital as paradigmatic in the Mémoire sur les Hôpitaux de Paris5
and later, in 1801, Jean Nicolas Louis Durand included it in the
Recueil Parallèle et des edifices de tout genre... underlining the excel-
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97
1 AA. VV., Les machines à guerir: aux
origines de l'hôpital moderne, Paris 1976;
Lisa Roscioni, Il governo della follia…,
Milano-Torino 2003.
2 Also note the projects for hospitals
by Leonhard Christoph Sturm and
by Antoine Desgodets, both of which
have an octagonal radial space in the
center.
3 J. D. Thompson, G. Goldin, The
Hospital: A Social and Architectural
History, New Haven 1975, pp. 170205; Carla Yanni, The Architecture of
Madness: Insane Asylums in the United
States, Minnesota 2007.
4 John Howard, The State of the Prisons
in England and Wales..., Warrington
1784, p. 389.
98
vittorio pizzigoni
vittorio pizzigoni
lent distribution of spaces and defining it “much better than the
Ospedale Maggiore in Milan”.6
Hence the Naval Hospital in Plymouth almost immediately became the first of a new type of hospital pavilion. It was the model of Bernard Poyet’s second project for the reconstruction of the
Hôtel-Dieux in Paris in 1786-῾88, and even for Jean Baptiste Leroy’s 1787 design for the same building, but above all this hospital
was taken as a model in 1825 by Thomas Jefferson for the project
of the University of Virginia.7
Later, in the 20th century, this type of hospital developed as the
arcades were eliminated and the pavilions were isolated from
each other completely. The recovery blocks that repeat according
to a regular grid form a system so compatible with the modern
town as to be confused with it.
5 JacquesTenon, Mémoire sur les
hôpitaux de Paris, Paris 1788 pp. 386-394.
6 Jean Nicolas Louis Durand, Recueil et
parallèle des édifices de tout genre…, Paris,
1801, p. 69. See also: J.N.L. Durand,
Précis des leçons d’architecture données à
l’École Polytechnique, Paris 1809, tav. 29.
7 Jean-Baptiste Leroy, Précis d’un
ouvrage sur les hôpitaux…, Paris 1789;
André Corboz, Les précédents du
plan de Jefferson pour l’Université de
Virginie, «Artibus et Historiae», vol.
26, n. 51, (2005), pp. 173-194; Louis S.
Greenbaum, Thomas Jefferson, The
Paris Hospitals, and the University of
Virginia, Eighteenth-Century Studies,
vol. 26, n. 4, (1993) pp. 607-626: Dumas
Malone, The Sage of Monticello, Boston
1981, p.258.
Carlo Barabino e Domenico Cervetto,
Psychiatric Hospital in Abrara, Genova
1930, plan
99
1 In Asylums (1961) Erving Goffman
criticizes mental institutions. He
focuses on the role of the patients
and their institutionalization within
mental hospitals. While analysing
the concept of total institution, he
defines it: “… a place of residence and
work where a large number of likesituated individuals cut off from the
wider society for an appreciable period of
time together lead an enclosed formally
administered round of life (Goffman 1961,
p. XIII)”.
2 Total institutions have great
relevance in Michel Foucault’s
research on space as a form of
control: In Discipline and Punish (1975)
he emphasises how the framework/
function of the institution affects the
relationship among people, and the
architecture of these places. There
are precise rules according to which
people have to behave, especially in
terms of use of time and space.
3 In his conference Of Other Spaces
(1967) Foucault defines heterotopias
as places that actually exist, kinds of
effectively enacted utopias in which
100
the real sites “… are simultaneously
represented, contested, and inverted”
(p. 22). In heterotopias like asylums,
prisons and hospices, the set of
relations that are common in
everyday spaces is overturned.
According to Foucault, there are six
principles that describe heterotopias:
– 1 They are developed by any society
in the world. There are heterotopias
of crisis (boarding schools, military
service, summer camps, etc.) and
heterotopias of deviation (hospices,
asylums, prisons), where deviant
individuals are placed.
– 2 A society makes heterotopias with
a precise and determined function
according to the needs of the time.
– 3 Heterotopias can juxtapose several
spaces that might be incompatible
(i.e. at the cinema the screen shows
a different reality or in a prison staff
and prisoners co-exist) in a single
real place.
– 4 They are most often linked to slices
in time – heterocronies. Heterotopias
function at full capacity when people
break with their traditional time;
there are places like museums and
libraries where time accumulates.
anna positano
ANNA POSITANO
HETEROTOPIA AFTER FUNCTION.
FOOTNOTES
– 5 Heterotopias always presuppose
a system of opening and closing
that isolate them or make them
permeable. Heterotopias are not
freely accessible to the public. We
might need permission or might be
forced to enter, and have to submit to
rituals and purifications.
– 6 They work and make sense only if
they are related to other forms of space.
4 While Goffman’s Asylums
influenced the politics of psychiatry
in the USA, Franco Basaglia’s
work contributed to revising the
traditional approach to mental
health in Italy, which was founded
on total institution. The psychiatry
reform that started in 1978 with
Basaglia’s Law gradually dismantled
these institutions; consequently
many buildings that hosted them
were converted or left abandoned.
5 Vitruvius in De Architectura (15 BC)
asserts that in Architecture the triad
firmitas-utilitas-venustas (strength utility - beauty) is the set of qualities
that a structure must have.
6 Function became popular in
Architecture at the end of the XIX
Century, when Louis Sullivan issued
The Tall Office Building Artistically
Considered (1896).
“Form ever follows function, and this is the
law. Where function does not change, form
does not change (p. 406)”.
When we apply his words to
abandoned heterotopias the function
moves to something different, which
does not relate to dwelling or mere
use. Yet, the shape of the building
tends to remain the same, except for
the decay that follows abandon.
This contradiction can be closer to the
thought of Friedrich Schelling who,
in The Philosophy of Art (1802, p.111),
thinks of Architecture as an allegory
of the organic that can never achieve
an absolute identity between idea
and matter; in other words, form must
contradict the function (Hendrix, 2013,
The Contradiction Between Form and
Function in Architecture, p. 54).
7 In Being and Time (1927) and Das
Ding (1950), Heidegger explains that
our knowledge of the world relies on
giving names and meanings to the
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VALTER SCELSI
THE ROUND WALL
things around us. It is within their
function and representation that
things can be explained. Through this
action we nullify things and we make
them of our own. However reality and
things exist even without their being
utilitarian to us. “When and what way
do things appear as things? They do not
appear by means of human making. But
neither they appear without the vigilance
of mortals. The first step toward such
vigilance is the step back from the thinking
that merely represents – that is, explains –
to the thinking that responds and recalls”
(Heidegger 1950, p. 179).
8 According to Foucault’s principles,
function is necessary for a heterotopia
to exist (1950, p. 25). Thus, asylums
that have been abandoned represent
a paradox: They still exist but are
devoid of the function for which
they were built. Since the lack of
function contradicts one of Foucault’s
principles, asylums, when abandoned,
are not heterotopias anymore. In this
sense, the nature of Architecture can
change according to its function.
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The first genoese Psychiatric Hospital was based upon the plan
and construction of a clear model, Antoine Petit’s Hotel-dieu in
Paris. It was just a circular wall containing inside it the six-arms
that made up the house for lunatics.
Italian Psychiatry dawned when Europe was attempting to organize specialized structures for particular groups of people
(prisons, civil and psychiatric Hospitals, orphanages) from the
consolidation of the hegemony of the bourgeois class. As yet
psychiatry remained a field somewhat isolated from other specialties of medical science, mainly because of the difficulty of
sharing objective methods of investigation, resting on anatomical, physiological and pathological elements. Because of the etiological nature of psychic phenomena, however, the systematic
study and scientific of symptoms of mental illness can be considered sufficiently framed in the general field of medicine.
The modern era for the care of the mentally ill began in the Italian countries in the early 19th century with the attempt to develop, disseminate and regulate the new buildings (asylums) combining the scientific method and social rules.
In 1826 Marquis Antonio Brignole Sale council president of the
Medical Institutes of Genoa, strives for the creation of a lunatic
asylum.
Once the area is identified in 1830, he gives a contract to design
the new mental hospital of Cavalletto district to Carlo Barabino,
architect of the civic administration, and Domenico Cervetto,
architect of the two hospitals. The construction began in 1834
based on a circular building, which had different wards, radiating from a central point, inspired by Antoine Petit’s plan of Hotel-dieu in Paris (1774) The project for a new Hôtel-Dieu by Antoine
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valter scelsi
Petit in 1774 was probably the first clear idea to build a hospital
along radial lines.
The old Hôtel-Dieu burned down in 1772 and a study was launched
to either rebuild the hospital or transfer the Hôtel-Dieu to four different hospitals in Paris. The rebuilding was eventually delayed
by several decades due to the French Revolution. In his Mémoire
sur la meilleure manière de construire un hôpital de malades, Antoine
Petit proposed a circular hospital lay-out with six spokes. Around
the perimeter is a colonnade, through which the wind can flow,
with accommodation above for the nurses, priests and medical
staff. They open into a central chapel whose roof is supported on
columns so the view of the altar remains unobstructed, in a rhetorical composition that identified it with the real centre of the
building. Inevitably, the new circular model generated its own
following of similar works of architecture.
In short, the design must reconcile two different interests: not
only illuministic social instances, but also the fascination for the
form and its role in the planimetric drawing of the town. Usually
the critics say that Barabino’s clearest building reference is the
Panopticon, the type of institutional building designed by the
English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the
late 18th century. To tell the truth, Bentham’s model was very
different from Barabino’s building. For the psychiatric role the
Panopticon model enjoys meagre success in Europe. Few Asylums were based upon his construction plan, like the pavilion
Conolly (1875) in the Psychiatric Hospital San Niccolò in Siena,
a trefoil base building, not by chance built after 1843 when the
philosophical, radical and political reformer John Bowring edited an eleven volume collection of the works of Jeremy Bentham.
In England and Wales after 1835 many workhouses for paupers were
constructed with the central volume surrounded by work and
exercise yards enclosed behind brick walls. A common layout resembled Petit’s plan of Hotel-dieu, a radial design enclosed by a
wall. Each workhouse, designed by the British architect Sampson Kempthorne, featured a central supervisory tower which radiated accommodation wings for the different classes of inmate:
infirm males, infirm females, able-bodied males, able-bodied
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sur la meilleure maniere de construire un
hôpital de malades, Paris, 1774
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valter scelsi
females, boys, girls, and children under seven. The ground between the wings was used to provide segregated exercise yards.
The first new workhouse to be erected was the hexagonal workhouse at Abingdon-on-Thames, Berkshire, for which Kempthorne
himself was the architect. The construction began in 1834, at the
same time as Barabino’s Hospital. Some critics noted the similarities between Kempthorne’s plans and model prisons, and doubted
that they were merely coincidental. Augustus Pugin compared
Kempthorne’s plan with the ancient house poor. By the 1840s some
of the enthusiasm for Kempthorne’ s designs had just waned.
In Britain as in Italy, the strength of the central plant has never
suited the city environments in which it so often finds itself. The
workhouse was demolished in 1932.
The Variante al Piano Regolatore (Variance Zoning), 24th of July
1905, is one of the last planimetric representations of Barabino’s
building on a general map of Genova. In 1914 the Asylum of Via
Galata is demolished.
In November 1908 the County Council approved the general
plan of the provincial asylum in Pratozanino, near Cogoleto. It
can accommodate 2,400 people. The national law (1904) states
that people affected by mental pathology must be kept in custody and treated in mental hospitals when they are dangerous to
themselves or others, or create public scandal and a new era for
construction of large settlements begins. In 1933 the new master plan for Pratozanino is approved. An expansion is expected
bringing its accommodation capacity up to 3,600 units with the
construction of seven new halls for male patients and six for female patients, and involves the construction of an industrial colony, a bakery, a pasta factory, a warehouse, and other buildings
by the architect Filippo Nardi Greco. No more round walls, but
an entire walled hill whose main axis terminates with a small
propylaeum, a modernist portal.
Facing page: Zoning plan of Cavaletto,
variance approved by decree on May
4th, 1911
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“This growing dark is slow and brings no pain;
It flows along an easy slope
And is akin to eternity”
Borges, J.L., In Praise of Darkness
Therapeutic Architecture
In therapy places, the expression of suffering and pain is immediate in the sense that many mediations that normally take place in socially accepted communication do not occur. Suffering
and pain can only elicit identification, sharing and compassion
up to a certain level of tolerance. Over this level, we witness an
evacuation into the interlocutor’s mind that is unable to contain
all the suffering and pain. As a consequence, certain defence
mechanisms take place, such as emotional detachment, physical avoidance, and an extreme technicalization and sanitization
of the meeting with the suffering person. Anxiety is experienced as overflowing and intolerable. Thus, the first response to
it can be the constitution of enclaves in which care givers indulge
in order to protect and defend themselves and to constrain and
curb their empathy.
Space partitioning in mental institutions was thoroughly
planned. On one side there were the mentally ill and on the
other, the psychiatrists who at most stayed in their rooms and
discussed the ill among themselves. Doctors and patients did not
meet except in medical facilities but never in the pavilions where
the patients lived. There, the nurses attended to them for as short
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a time as was absolutely necessary, otherwise they would take refuge in their own separated and protected areas to avoid contact
with, or rather contagion from psychiatric illness.
In the 15th century Leon Battista Alberti discusses architecture
with a therapeutic capacity in the introduction to De re aedificatoria. The same idea is taken up during the Enlightenment where
concepts of physical and moral hygiene were valued and health
architecture was attributed a therapeutic role. For Esquirol, the
psychiatric hospital, together with other instruments, is not a
therapeutic defense per se but as a geographical and relational
space, it constitutes just that, as does the therapy.
Spaces conceived according to this view follow a therapeutic logic that does not consider a possible integration between a disease to be eradicated and the person to be cared for. According
to this logic, the emotional distance from the patient and his or
her disease is a consequence. We can even say that emotional
neutrality is a prescription or a necessary condition of the therapeutic organization.
Asylum architecture
The Panopticon of English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) was the first model of the architecture of surveillance, its most lucid Enlightenment period creation. The Panopticon, prototype for the modern prison, was a building with
a semi-circular layout constructed thusly: “at the periphery, an
annular building; at the center, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide
windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building
is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building
they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows
of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell
from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a
condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting,
one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light
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cosimo schinaia
COSIMO SCHINAIA
THERAPY PLACES
Francesco Azzurri (1877), an architect who studied insane asylum
construction types in-depth in the 1870s underlined the need
to overcome construction with “geometric and monumental forms”
that “highlight that aspect of hospitals, that are reminiscent of a prison”. He tried to create the type of institution in which “calm, order
and family life, directed by medical science” would constitute the guidelines of the treatment process. The model he proposed was a
diffuse system, like a village with pavilions equally distant from
each other, laid out along tree-lined streets that would give one
the unexpected impression of walking along an elegant village.
This model was intended to create a micro-community, a small,
independent and self-sufficient city, conceived along the parameters of an ideal healthy society (De Peri, 1984).
The asylums in Quarto and Cogoleto
In the mid-1800s it became necessary to reduce the patient population in the via Galata building. This building was planned and
designated to provide official residential care to more than 400
maniacs. The via Galata Asylum was deemed insufficiently large,
its phalansterian structure and its downtown location, inappropriate. A 100 hectare plot in the area of Pratozanino in Cogoleto
was deemed favorable and could be bought at a low price. Since
this plot was far, its construction was delayed twice, so in 1895
the city of Genoa provided the psychiatric hospital of Quarto.
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It was built on the Riviera to the east of Genoa, which today forms
part of the city itself. The project entailed the construction of a
group of distinct but very close buildings all connected by porticos. The whole complex was surrounded by a basically octagonal
structure and the inside was like a chess board with buildings alternating with courtyards and gardens. The offices and services
such as the administration building, kitchens, laundries, supplies warehouse, and church were built in a line along the main
road of the complex. This road separated the women’s section on
the right side from the men’s section on the left. The separation
was typical and resulted from criteria established to regulate behavior and the general difficulty in managing patients (Maura
Peloso, 1999). In a short time, the asylum in Quarto proved too
small to satisfy the growing demand for residential psychiatric
care. In 1908 the demolition of the old via Galata asylum and the
sale of the land led to the approval of the Cogoleto Asylum project. To help the construction process, the limits of the Province
of Genoa were moved to include the city of Cogoleto, and with it,
the Asylum.
Projected to accommodate 2400 patients, the asylum is inaugurated in 1912. Ten pavilions are ready at the inauguration and
three more are added in 1913, yet another three are added from
1921 to 1922 and a final three in 1933. It is thought of as a branch
of the Quarto hospital that houses the administration offices. It
is also where patients are observed and selected. Those least tolerable and most disturbing, including brain damaged children,
the mentally deficient and tuberculosis patients are sent to Cogoleto. Geographically and culturally isolated, the Cogoleto Asylum
quickly develops a self-sufficient economic system that follows
the closed economy of a medieval castle. Farming colonies are
established along with a bakery, a pasta shop, laundries, a printing house, and carpentry and blacksmith’s workshops for ergotherapy. The patients living quarters are neglected. Water stains
and peeling paint on the walls are visible in the foul-smelling
pavilions. The facades, the parts of the complex that are visible
from the outside, however, are often well taken care of with fres-
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cosimo schinaia
the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery […].The panoptic
mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately” (Bentham, 1786; Foucault, 1975,
p. 218). The principle of the dungeon is inverted here; to optimize
surveillance, light is more effective than darkness. Later on, the
obsession with universal transparency, total visual control and
inspectionability as well as the most segregatiing aspects of the
asylum were replaced. They took the form of an asylum architecture that suggested and planned ordinary spaces that could act
educationally and authoritatively over the emotional and affective disorder of the mentally ill.
cosimo schinaia
coes and beautiful decorations on the vaults and walls. As of the
mid-1970s, these complexes and the care given within them are
thrown into crisis and there emerges a deceptive humanization
plan for these inhumane institutions (Schinaia, 1997).
In 1978, the famous Law 180 was passed due to the theories and
practices enacted by Franco Basaglia, who questioned the worth
of the asylums’ very existence. Law 180 was absorbed into Health Reform Law 833. This law definitively closed the asylums,
placed psychiatric services for diagnosis and care in regular hospitals and decentralized mental health services. Decentralized
services were meant to promote prevention of the social and relational aspects of mental illness and treatment of the greatest
crises in mental suffering. The difficulties in building new, local
psychiatric services caused the Region of Liguria to allow previously institutionalized patients to be readmitted into residential
psychiatric hospitals in 1983. These hospitals assumed the new
name of Health and Social Services Unit for Mental Wellness. It was
only in 1993 that readmissions stopped. The Cogoleto Psychiatric
Hospital closed in 2008, the one in Quarto, in 2009.
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ANDREA ZANDERIGO
THE GRID AND THE ARCHIPELAGO
A mere dozen years divides the inception of the lunatic asylum in
Quarto from the one in Pratozanino; nevertheless there couldn’t
be any less difference in their respective morphologies. Indeed,
despite them being both possible answers to the idea of a truly
collective form, they stand at the opposite extremes of a wide
spectrum. Apparently, vastly diverse contexts played a decisive
role in shaping their differences, i.e. the urban complex versus
the Arcadian one (the truth is that Quarto was not so urban at
the time). Nevertheless, when considered together, it’s hard not
to trace some hints of a possible schizophrenia in their respective
approaches to design. Certainly – and maybe unconsciously – they
point out two very different understandings of the possible role of
the perception of the outside cosmos in treating mental disorders
inside of the then necessarily confined universe of the asylum.
Conveniently, let’s mention Quarto as the grid and Pratozanino as
the archipelago.
The built grid is the perfect embodiment of the very idea of seclusion in its unmatched ability to automatically create a set of
detached universes, potentially as many as one for each court.
It does not need a perimeter wall, the total extension of the grid
ultimately coinciding with the outer perimeter itself. It’s fundamentally an excluding architecture, only the sky being able to
penetrate its premises and to report perceptual bits from the outside world. It easily allows inner separations, quickly becoming a
handy tool for fragmenting the masses and fostering practices of
in-lab social engineering. It’s urban and anti-urban at the same
time, being a condensed version of the city itself and as such being perfectly able to survive without the city, El Escorial like. It
aims to reproduce city life in a perfectly controlled environment,
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andrea zanderigo
as an eternally postponed promise of going back to reality. Moreover, the basic module of the grid, the court, still echoes the archetypal idea of the cloister, of voluntary imprisonment and of
possible happiness through self-seclusion.
Without a doubt, the Quarto lunatic asylum is a more hybrid architecture than its gridded nature would drive us to think, adding complexity and nuances to the starting topological scheme
(think Jussieu Campus by Édouard Albert, if you fancy a much
higher degree of abstraction, coupled with a lot of asbestos and
social failure). First, it stands on a continuous socle, half tool to
morph the terrain into a necessary tabula rasa, half device to
augment the possibility for inner connections. Furthermore, the
socle allows for opening up the side courtyards to the far landscape without decreasing the level of security. Secondly, a minimum degree of architectural composition is introduced in the
abstraction of the grid, allowing not only some changes in the
heights of the buildings but even stressing the semi-autonomous
status of some of them, like highlights in the overall complex, as
such producing a certain variety.
More difficult to grasp and to define is the other collective figure, what we previously mentioned as the archipelago. Its relation with physical seclusion is far more ambiguous, relying on
the possible remoteness of the site or needing an added perimeter of some sort to properly work as an architectural device of
containment. Banally, the true nature of the archipelago would
be that of a group form just floating on a much wider surface.
When aptly designed, its inner capability is to tighten together nature, landscape and sporadic built matter while producing
distant relations and perceptible tensions among the islands/
buildings, which substantiate the archipelago itself. The perhaps
abused metaphor of the distortions caused by scattered masses
in an otherwise isotropous gravitational field provides a decent
enough image of how it might perform. Unluckily the rules of
archipelago composition are virtually non-existent or in the best
case at least unspeakable. Indeed the group form of the archipelago relies entirely on a delicate, almost ineffable act of balancing
loose figures on a given terrain while pondering positions, sizes,
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Edouard Albert, Jussieu Campus,
Paris, 1964-72
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Zenghelis, Sixteen Villas on the
Island of Antiparos, Antiparos, Greece,
Conceptual plan, 1981
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reciprocal distances, accumulation and dispersion. In the end,
after the ability to produce a true group form, the only quality-check of the archipelago is its inner consistency if not the
beauty of its composition, as blurry as it might sound. Obviously,
in the field of asylum design (or indeed that of touristic resorts),
the archipelago relies heavily on the overpowering archetype
of the Arcadia, with all its alleged promises of a simpler, problem-free life, which is only possible in complete detachment
from the rest of the world. Here precisely lies the duplicitous nature of the archipelago, as the ultimate fata morgana of an unattainable condition.
Unluckily the design quality of Pratozanino is nowhere near the
best cases, despite the indubitable beauty of the landscape. It
looks more like an opportunistic accumulation of random decisions, vaguely tied together by a weak Beaux-Arts composition
along the entrance axis. The provincial architecture of the single
events does not help either. For more convincing propositions,
look elsewhere, like the Suprematist design for sixteen villas in
Antiparos by Elia Zenghelis, obviously unbuilt.
TESTI IN ITALIANO
CARMEN ANDRIANI
IN–OUT. ARCHITETTURA E FOLLIA
“Forse, un giorno, non sapremo più
esattamente che cosa ha potuto essere la follia.
La sua figura si sarà racchiusa su se stessa
non permettendo di decifrare più le tracce che
ha lasciato”.
La follia, secondo il ragionamento di Foucault, è quanto sia ritenuto non più sopportabile. È ciò che supera il limite del
Conosciuto divenendo Estraneo.
La follia ha a che fare con l’enigma di questa esteriorità e si manifesta con l’affiorare di uno stato di ansia e di straniamento.
È ciò che affligge la classe borghese emergente alla fine del XVIII secolo.
È il disturbo che si rende manifesto
nell’inquietudine coltivata fra le pareti
domestiche (le case stregate di inizio ottocento), poi passata al vaglio della psicoanalisi freudiana. È lo spaesamento in un
territorio che cambia più rapidamente
di quanto possa essere conosciuto (per
Benjamin la nascita della metropoli). È il
disagio procurato da spazi urbani dilatati
a dismisura e da una moltitudine di individui vaganti che si assommano in una
folla mai vista prima.
Il concetto del perturbante, ripreso sul finire del secolo scorso dal noto saggio di
Anthony Vidler, riconsidera lo stato di
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insicurezza e di paura che ad esso si accompagna e lo spazio entro cui questa
condizione si genera.
L’irrompere del nuovo e la velocità con cui
questo avviene obbligano a essere flessibili a un cambiamento repentino e non
sempre previsto. Se questo adeguamento
non avviene, il prezzo è un disadattamento temporale e spaziale. Ciò che è stato rimosso, in questo caso tutto ciò che precedeva – il passato e il nostro noto – riaffiora
come elemento disturbante.
Questo concetto riguarda la mutazione
del familiare in estraneo, l’emergere di
un lato oscuro, di un resto che si alimenta
nel suo stesso stato di separatezza e di alterità sdoppiata.
Gli ospedali psichiatrici sono stati a lungo i luoghi di questa separazione. Un
mondo a se stante, tenuto al riparo dalle
relazioni interpersonali, considerate in
questo contesto un elemento di disturbo. Il folle fluttua nella sua bolla privata
come in un acquario: da qui scaturiscono
parole scambiate per gemiti o per invettive furiose.
L’ospedale psichiatrico ha rappresentato
il luogo del divieto, ha esercitato il potere
della imposizione e della coercizione. Ha
legittimato una rimozione del diverso
che era già stato riconosciuto come tale
in seno alla famiglia, nella dimensione
pubblica, in quella sociale.
È naturale il confronto con lo spazio
delle carceri. Ugualmente l’architettura dell’ospedale psichiatrico deve farsi
partecipe di molti divieti. Nella distri-
buzione, nella tipologia, nella articolazione dei suoi spazi e della loro forma,
l’architettura rende possibile il divieto
di comunicare, di stabilire relazioni con
l’esterno e di avere un ‘fuori’. Non si può
sfuggire ad un controllo costante, non si
possono trasgredire regole indiscutibili.
Dal chiuso al chiuso, da un interno ad
un altro interno. “Stazionare in un cortile
chiuso e recintato senza alcuna finalità, controllati da un infermiere che assume l’atteggiamento di massima sorveglianza” (Schinaia 1997).
La nascita del manicomio coincide con
il presunto riconoscimento dello stato
di follia così descritto: una condizione
di difformità “trattata come una verità davanti alla quale si era restati troppo a lungo
ciechi”.
Non più colpa, bensì malattia, come sosterrà per la prima volta lo psichiatra
francese Philippe Pinel. Come tale bisognosa di un luogo di cura o di reclusione: in entrambi i casi è un luogo di separazione, quasi mai di redenzione. È il
comportamento contraddittorio della
società conforme: riconoscere la difformità, separarla per tenerla fuori e al tempo
stesso curarla senza una prospettiva di
riscatto.
Le descrizioni che la storia della psichiatria ci restituisce riguardo ai luoghi di
cura sono lacunose e contraddittorie.
Dalla casa nei pressi di York, voluta in
Inghilterra dalla assistenziale Società
dei Quaccheri, “una fattoria rustica, senza sbarre né grate alle finestre, ove si placano
lentamente le passioni del cuore e i disordini dello spirito”; al celebre racconto degli
alienati di Bicetre, incatenati per decenni in celle oscure e considerati animali
furiosi. Solo il rivoluzionario Pinel, chiederà di poterli assistere uno ad uno con
la parola ed un solo gesto: la liberazione
dalle catene.
Come influisce lo spazio in queste pratiche di segregazione? Come può un luogo
nato per separare, diventare poi, quando
viene dismessa la sua funzione, un mezzo di relazione? In che modo lo stesso
edificio può nel corso del tempo rispondere a necessità opposte e tradurle efficacemente in luogo dello scambio e della
condivisione? Quanto conta la luce, l’ampiezza degli ambienti, la loro articolazione, il succedersi degli interni, il rapporto
alterato fra il dentro e il fuori, la capacità
di orientarsi…?
Pinel era stato dissuaso dall’entrare in
quelle celle buie, a contatto con quegli
uomini furiosi legati come bestie in spazi angusti, da più anni, alcuni da decenni, senza mai uscirne. Entrò lo stesso e le
sue teorie si rivelarono giuste, convinto,
come ebbe a dire, che quegli alienati fossero così intrattabili proprio perché privati di aria e di luce.
È evidente che il rapporto con lo spazio
è centrale nella comprensione di questo
passaggio. Il corpo abita lo spazio e lo
conforma muovendosi in esso, attivamente, consapevolmente, criticamente.
La mancata percezione del confine fra il
proprio spazio interiore e lo spazio ester-
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no, genera un disorientamento indifeso
e la frantumazione di un io non più riconosciuto come tale.
D’altra parte la capacità di orientarsi ogni
volta in uno spazio che cambia all’intorno, condizione prevalente nel contemporaneo e frequente nelle migrazioni,
significa essere permeabili ad accogliere
la pluralità delle differenze e goderne i
vantaggi di una infinita ricchezza.
L’oscillazione continua fra il perdersi ed il
sapersi orientare di nuovo, e “l’intimo senso di spaesamento che ne deriva”, può mettere in moto ed alimentare, come scrive
Sennet, “pratiche concrete di cambiamento”.
Il viaggio ha, in questo migrare fra il
dentro e il fuori della mente, un valore
simbolico ed al tempo stesso effettuale.
“Quando ti metterai in viaggio per Itaca / devi
augurarti che la strada sia lunga/ fertile in avventure ed in esperienze…” Nei versi di Constantinos Kavafis il viaggio è una condizione della mente ed Itaca una meta che
non è importante raggiungere, quanto è
importante viceversa il pensiero costante di poterci arrivare.
All’idea di viaggio si associa quella
dell’inquietudine. È uno dei temi dominanti dei Canti Orfici di Dino Campana,
canti che il poeta riscrisse in manicomio
dopo che il manoscritto dei suoi versi
andò perduto.
Il tema del viaggio, quello della notte
(madre di tutte le forme di esistenza) e quello
del ritorno, si avvicendano nella scrittura onirica e straziante del folle di Marradi. Genova è uno di questi luoghi cantati
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dal poeta, (“Vasto, dentro un odor tenue vanito/ Di catrame, vegliato da le lune/ Elettriche,
sul mare appena vivo/ Il vasto porto s’addorme…”), città amata per il suo porto e per i
suoi notturni.
Il tema del viaggio, affrontato da un io lirico ed errante, rimanda all’inquietudine
del viaggiatore solitario quale fu Bruce
Chatwin, viaggiatore perenne, in evasione da nulla e in fuga verso qualsiasi cosa.
“I migliori viaggiatori sono illetterati; non ci
annoiano con le reminiscenze” scrive nella
prima pagina di un libro, il Libro nomade, che non scriverà mai. Nel movimento
continuo di un uomo perennemente in
fuga, c’è anche una assillante questione
sulle proprie radici “nessuna casa fissa fino
all’età di cinque anni, dopodiché lotte, tentativi disperati da parte mia di fuggire, se non
fisicamente, almeno mediante l’invenzione di
paradisi mistici”.
Torna di nuovo lo spazio domestico come
luogo del disagio e primo luogo del disorientamento spaziale.
“La casa non è un idillio”, scrive Magris in
Infinito viaggiare, “è lo spazio della esistenza
concreta e quindi esposta al conflitto, al malinteso, all’errore, alla sopraffazione, al naufragio…” Riaffiora il concetto di unheimlich
ovvero del familiare divenuto estraneo,
del perturbante non rimosso, di ciò che
ciclicamente ritorna come materia inconscia e destabilizzante.
dalla funzione per la quale erano stati
costruiti. La loro forma è svuotata della
funzione originaria.
Gli schemi a croce, a ferro di cavallo, ad H,
i lunghi corridoi di distribuzione, i cortili chiusi perdono la loro originaria ragion d’essere. Ritorna la domanda: come
può lo spazio della separazione diventare
lo spazio della relazione? In questi casi
l’architettura non basta a se stessa. Non
basta modificare, distruggere, aprire, relazionare. Non basta far fluire all’improvviso l’esterno dentro l’interno, accelerare
uno scambio vietato per troppo tempo,
far fuggire l’interno verso un fuori mai
conosciuto. Non basta alterare la forma
con il bisturi dell’architetto per cambiare
fisionomia e carattere. Bisogna intaccare
la memoria, il simbolo, l’unheimlich che
l’architettura porta con sé. È un processo
di riconciliazione lento, che lavora attraverso nuove pratiche d’uso dello spazio,
attraverso azioni ludiche di condivisione
collettiva, attraverso forme di rappresentazione della realtà mirate ad esorcizzarla. Di solito l’arte, in ogni sua accezione
performativa, è la prima ad entrare e a
porre il primo rimedio efficace: mettere
in scena il rimosso ed accettarlo di nuovo, dare nuovo senso allo spazio e riscriverlo, lavorando sul difficile e quanto mai
controverso crinale fra ragione e follia.
Con l’entrata in vigore della Legge Basaglia, a cavallo degli anni ottanta, gli
ospedali psichiatrici sono stati dismessi
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SILVIA CAPURRO,
MAURIZIO SINIGAGLIA
CRONACHE DI ORDINARIA FOLLIA.
IL PROCESSO DI “VALORIZZAZIONE”
COMPENDIO IMMOBILIARE DELL’EX
OSPEDALE PSICHIATRICO DI QUARTO
La localizzazione
Il complesso immobiliare dell’ex Ospedale Psichiatrico di Quarto nel levante di
Genova, occupa la sommità della collina
che da corso Europa degrada a mare, con
agevole accesso da nord attraverso C.so
Europa e da sud, dalla via Aurelia, condizione di accessibilità eccezionale nella
tormentata struttura urbana genovese.
L’insieme degli edifici monumentali neoclassici, la cui costruzione risale a fine
‘800 a seguito dell’insufficienza della
quasi coeva struttura urbana di via Galata, è organizzato su pianta quadrata, simmetricamente suddivisa in nove parti
anch’esse quadrate. Ciascuna delle parti
è composta da un ampio cortile piantumato delimitato da edifici su ogni lato, in
modo che ogni edificio risulti affacciato
su due cortili adiacenti.
Il criterio è quello del castrum romano
dove i due percorsi trasversali (est-ovest),
sempre porticati, e quelli longitudinali
(interni di distribuzione) sono rigorosamente ortogonali tra loro.
Gli edifici che compongono il complesso,
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suddivisi in ventidue padiglioni, si estendono in prevalenza su due piani fuori
terra con copertura a falde in tegole marsigliesi, mentre gli edifici ad un solo piano sono a copertura piana accessibile dai
corpi di fabbrica contigui.
Due soli edifici (padiglioni 16 e 22) si
sviluppano su tre piani fuori terra ed in
qualche edificio sono presenti locali al
piano seminterrato.
Il complesso è quasi completamente circondato da una strada veicolare di accesso, mentre all’interno della cittadella la
distribuzione è esclusivamente pedonale
attraverso ampi porticati al piano terra
ed i terrazzi ai piani superiori.
Le condizioni generali sono discrete, e
si notano interventi manutentivi anche
recenti sui prospetti esterni di alcuni dei
padiglioni.
Cenni storici
La costruzione risale al 1892, anno durante il quale fu indetto l’appalto per un grande manicomio a Quarto, e in poco meno di
due anni la Provincia trasferì in questo
luogo gli alienati di sedi e succursali fondate in precedenza.1
Il nuovo edificio doveva rispondere agli
ultimi requisiti della tecnica manicomiale, senza tuttavia venir meno, secondo il
progetto, a quella larghezza e nobiltà di
struttura architettonica, alle quali si erano ispirati, nei tempi precedenti, gli istituti genovesi di assistenza e beneficenza.
Ne fu ideatore l’architetto Vincenzo Canetti, allora trentottenne.
Il programma dell’appalto stabiliva che
“i servizi fra i diversi padiglioni si dovevano
fare a mezzo di una galleria coperta che ponesse in comunicazione i padiglioni stessi fra loro
tanto al pianterreno quanto al superiore, e che
dovea il manicomio essere costituito da due
grandi scomparti di eguale capacità per i due
sessi, separati fra loro dagli edifizi assegnati
ai servizi generali”.2
Costruito sul luogo in cui sorgeva in precedenza una villa appartenente alla famiglia
Spinola, veniva ad aggiungersi al precedente ospedale per infermi di mente nella
zona di Abrara (oggi via Cesarea) che, per
l’espansione del centro urbano, fu demolito nel 1913. La villa, in un primo tempo incorporata al manicomio, verrà demolita
nel 1926 per consentire l’ingrandimento
dell’area manicomiale (Nuovo Istituto).
Il Vecchio Istituto si sviluppa essenzialmente lungo l’asse centrale individuando,
specularmente, le due sezioni, maschili e
femminili. I malati psichici erano suddivisi in base al comportamento e alla laboriosità della gestione. Essi dovevano, secondo il programma, dividersi in cinque
distinte sezioni: Tranquilli e tranquille 280,
Epilettici e misti 140, Semi-agitati e semi-agitate 140, Agitati ed agitate 70, Infermi ed inferme 70, per un totale di 700 posti letto.
“L’edificio stava crescendo quando non tardò a
farsi innanzi, o meglio a ripresentarsi, un problema la cui gravità pesava da anni sulla Provincia. Settecento o settecentocinquanta alienati, al massimo, avrebbero trovato tetto e cura
nel nuovo manicomio. Ma gli altri? Il presidente della deputazione provinciale, opinava e insi-
steva perché il manicomio fosse ingrandito, e
dava incarico al medesimo architetto Canetti di
presentare un progetto per cui l’edificio in costruzione (si era nel febbraio del 1894) potesse
ospitare, invece che 700, 1300 infermi. Non un
ampliamento edilizio vero e proprio, ma un’aggiunta o un’appendice che gli si allacciasse in
modo armonico”.3
Pertanto negli anni ‘30 si compie il definitivo assestamento di Quarto: il 28 ottobre
1933, con rito fascista, ha luogo l’inaugurazione delle nuove strutture (attuale padiglione a forma di emiesagono lato nordest del complesso) che portano, a duplicare la superficie e la capienza dell’OP.
La vita nell’ospedale psichiatrico continua fino al secondo dopouguerra secondo
i modelli sanitari consolidati, anzi connotandosi sempre più come luogo di
emarginazione sociale in un periodo di
forte e convulsa trasformazione socio-economica: la popolazione dei manicomi
diventa infatti sempre meno psichiatrica
ed il numero dei ricoverati delle strutture
provinciali di Quarto e Cogoleto sale vertiginosamente.4
La riforma Basaglia
Come in molte altre analoghe strutture,
la svolta nella gestione dell’ospedale psichiatrico va fatta coincidere con l’arrivo a
Genova di un allievo e collaboratore di
Franco Basaglia: Antonio Slavich.
Basaglia e Slavich collaborarono a Padova,
a Gorizia e a Parma; insieme avviarono la
prima esperienza anti-istituzionale nella
cura dei malati di mente dando inizio ad
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una riflessione socio-politica sulla trasformazione dell’ospedale psichiatrico e
di ulteriori esperienze alternative e di rinnovamento nel trattamento della follia.
La sua azione lo ha visto attivo anche nel
movimento di psichiatria democratica,
promuovendo attivamente l’applicazione
della legge n. 180 del 1978 sulla soppressione dei manicomi, legge nata dall’esperienza italiana che, a distanza di 30 anni, si è
diffusa in varie parti del mondo e viene
ancora considerata come la più avanzata.
A Genova, città nella quale visse tra il 1978
e il 1993, Slavich venne chiamato per dirigere l’ospedale psichiatrico di Quarto fortemente voluto dagli amministratori di
sinistra e dall’Assessore provinciale all’igiene e sanità Lamberto Cavallin anche
se la sua azione non mancò di produrre
divisioni anche nel PCI.
Ma il suo progetto riformatore alla fine
vinse. Subito dopo la legge 180 Antonio
realizzò 4 SPDC e 9 Servizi territoriali.
Molti dei suoi colleghi scelsero il territorio e lui si trovò solo. Ebbe difficoltà nel
collegare la costruzione dei nuovi servizi
e la decostruzione dell’ospedale psichiatrico. Però restò e si battè. Crea il museo
delle forme incosapevoli, fa politica come
consigliere comunale. Diventa il primo
direttore del primo Dipartimento di Salute Mentale. Decide che per primo va chiuso l’OP di Cogoleto.
L’OP di Quarto sarà chiuso formalmente
parecchi anni dopo. Nel ‘93 ha un infarto
devastante, con intervento cardiaco massivo che lo costringe e ritirarsi dall’attivi-
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tà scegliendo infine di trasferirsi a Bolzano dove morì nel 2009.
Durante la sua direzione nacque l’idea di
ubicare nella parte ormai già smobilitata
dell’ospedale psichiatrico di Quarto, la
più antica, a fianco del Centro Culturale
del Levante struttura già funzionale che
raccoglieva gruppi teatrali tra cui quello
di Ugo Dighero, Mario Jorio, Attilio Caffarena, il laboratorio di Architettura, composto dagli architetti Edoardo Praino, Lucio Rocco, Filippo Icardi, Elio Marengo,
grafico Rocco Antonucci, dal fotografo
Giorgio Tagliafico e da Paolo Gastaldo.
“All’inizio fu entusiasmante, la struttura era
ancora parzialmente occupata dai malati, alcuni che vivevano all’ospedale da oltre vent’anni, era emozionante vedere fragili esseri umani
fino a poco tempo prima senza speranza, acquistare di nuovo la consapevolezza di essere
persone e non numeri. Finalmente potevano
uscire dal lager, partecipare alle assemblee, vivere una vita che per molto tempo gli era stata
negata. I membri del laboratorio erano compagni d’università che avevano precedentemente
partecipato al lavoro di ricerca sull’ospedale nel
‘75, a parte il grafico e il fotografo”.5
Dopo costosi lavori di sistemazione di
una corsia dell’ex ottava divisione, tra discussioni e incomprensioni anche con la
direzione dell’ospedale, l’esperienza si
esaurì ben presto. Nel 1986 ciò che rimase
del Laboratorio fu una proposta di riconversione della struttura da presidio sanitario a complesso scolastico. Il progetto,
sulla base dei nuovi orientamenti didattici, voleva essere una sorta di campus
all’interno della città, offrendo agli studenti, oltre ad una gradevole collocazione
nel verde delle strutture, anche servizi
all’avanguardia dal punto di vista informatico, si prevedeva già la videoteca, con
spazi di consultazione innovativi, tra l’uso di normali videocassette, e i videodischi che erano apparsi sulla scena, (che
poi si chiamarono CD-ROM), idea affascinante ma non conseguì risultati anche se
sulla carta il Ministero prevedesse finanziamenti in tal senso, poi anche differenze di vedute dal punto di vista degli Enti
Locali circa la destinazione d’uso del
complesso, in quanto vi erano reparti che
ospitavano a quel tempo ancora malati
anziani, fece arenare la proposta.
decisa dalla Giunta Biasotti prima della
scelta per il ponente cittadino, che oggi
giace desolatamente abbandonata.
In questo contesto di progressiva rimozione del luogo dagli interessi della città, parte il primo stralcio della cartolarizzazione
dei beni ASL decisa dalla Regione, quello
del 2008, che porta alla vendita del corpo
degli anni ‘30 e della parte più recente
dell’ex ospedale psichiatrico, ovvero alcune palazzine tra cui quelle che un tempo
erano le sedi rispettivamente del corso per
infermiere, del direttore e dell’economo a
Valcomp due, società partecipata da Fintecna Immobiliare, a sua volta un’emanazione del colosso parastatale Fintecna.
Il complesso ottocentesco resta ancora di
proprietà ASL e conserva le funzioni saniLa cronaca recente: la vendita dell’ex tarie ed alcune delle attività socio-cultuOspedale Pschiatrico
rali attivate dalla riforma Basaglia, ancorDopo la chiusura del manicomio il com- ché in progressiva marginalizzazione.7
plesso continua ad ospitare usi sanitari, La prima privatizzazione non provoca
fra cui uffici ed ambulatori della locale particolari reazioni in città, fatte salve le
ASL, oltre al mantenimento delle funzio- prime isolate proteste dei parenti dei mani di accoglienza e cura dei malati psi- lati psichiatrici ancora residenti o curati
chiatrici che non riescono a reinserirsi, e a Quarto che denunciavano come la venla contaminazione tra le funzioni pro- dita dissennata a Fintecna avesse riguarpriamente “sanitarie” e le attività di ca- dato anche i principali accessi al comrattere sociale e culturale si inaridisce in plesso, paventando un processo di proun contesto sempre più autoreferenziale. gressivo isolamento, anche fisico, delle
Nei primi anni 2000 si affaccia l’ipotesi di strutture sanitaria ancora presenti.
collocare nell’ex OP l’Istituto Italiano di Ma i problemi relativi al bilancio sanitaTecnologie, successivamente insediatosi rio regionale si fanno sempre più acuti e
a Morego, nel ponente della città. Del pro- Regione Liguria, con L.R. 24 dicembre
getto resta la completa ristrutturazione 2010, n. 22, al fine del contenimento e deldella cosiddetta ex Casa delle infermiere, la razionalizzazione della spesa regionacon una spesa di circa 5 milioni di euro le e del reperimento di risorse aggiuntive
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da destinare alla realizzazione degli
obiettivi regionali in diversi settori di intervento tra cui la sanità, istituisce un
fondo da alimentare con gli introiti della
vendita del patrimonio immobiliare degli enti del settore regionale allargato,
non impiegato in via diretta per lo svolgimento delle attività istituzionali enti
ovvero per il quale sia prevista la destinazione ad altro utilizzo.
A fronte di ciò con deliberazione 1265 del
22/11/2011 ASL 3 ha conferito alla Regione un mandato di vendita del rimanente
patrimonio immobiliare sottoutilizzato,
elenco all’interno del quale sono inclusi i
cosiddetti padiglioni storici dell’ex Ospedale
Psichiatrico di Quarto, corrispondenti al
nucleo ottocentesco della struttura.
Come innanzi accennato, l’ipotesi di dismissione e conseguente vendita, seguiva quella già effettuata nel 2006 completando il processo di completa alienazione
del complesso dell’ex OP.
Con atto del 30.12.2011 Regione Liguria ha
venduto ad ARTE Genova8 i padiglioni ottocenteschi dell’ex OP di Quarto, per un
corrispettivo di circa 27,730 milioni di Euro.
A tal proposito va evidenziato che al fine
di agevolere le varianti urbanistiche finalizzate alla valorizzazioni del patrimonio pubblico, la Regione, all’articolo 29
della L.R. 27.12.2011 n. 37, ha previsto che
gli immobili non strumentali di proprietà della Regione, degli enti appartenenti al settore regionale allargato e degli enti strumentali, delle province e dei
comuni, possano essere inseriti nel Pro-
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gramma delle alienazioni e valorizzazioni, approvato ogni anno dalla Giunta regionale sentita la Commissione consiliare competente.
A corredo del Programma viene allegata
una scheda recante l’ubicazione degli
immobili, i dati catastali, il relativo valore, la disciplina urbanistico-edilizia, paesistica e territoriale vigente nella relativa area e la nuova destinazione d’uso urbanistica richiesta. Il provvedimento di
approvazione del Programma, analogamente alla disciplina in materia statale,
prevede che la percentuale del 10 per
cento dell’incremento di valore da ricavarsi dall’alienazione degli immobili
venga devoluta al Comune interessato.
La deliberazione di approvazione del programma delle alienazioni e valorizzazioni di cui al comma 1 è comunicata al comune interessato, il quale, con deliberazione del Consiglio comunale da assumere entro il perentorio termine di quarantacinque giorni dalla data di ricevimento: a) esprime l’assenso sul programma, avente valore di adozione di variante
al piano urbanistico comunale, ovvero b)
dispone per l’indizione di una Conferenza di Servizi ai sensi degli articoli 14 e seguenti della legge 7 agosto 1990, n. 241
(Nuove norme in materia di procedimento amministrativo e di accesso ai documenti amministrativi) e successive modificazioni e integrazioni per definire la
disciplina urbanistica dei relativi immobili ed approvare la necessaria variante
al piano urbanistico comunale.
Con Deliberazione n. 280 del 13.3.2012, ad
oggetto Programma delle alienazioni e valorizzazioni ai sensi dell’art. 29 – L.R. 37/2011 –
primo stralcio, la Giunta regionale ha approvato il Programma sulla base di richiesta formulata da ARTE Genova, ai
sensi del soprarichiamato art. 29 della l.r.
n. 37/2011.
ARTE Genova, nel settembre 2012 ha ribadito alla Regione la richiesta di inserimento nel Programma delle alienazioni e
valorizzazioni di un lotto di beni, che include, per quanto riguarda il Comune di
Genova il complesso immobiliare sito in Genova Quarto denominato “Ex Ospedale Psichiatrico” e il complesso immobiliare sito in Genova
Pegli denominato “Ex Ospedale Martinez”.
Con Deliberazione n. 24 del 18.09.2012 la
Giunta regionale ha sottoposto al parere
delle competenti Commissioni l’approvazione del sesto stralcio delle alienazioni e
valorizzazioni. In seguito, sulla base del
parere espresso dalle Commissioni ed in
conseguenza di approfondimenti svolti
tra Regione, Comune, ASL 3 ed ARTE, con
DGR n. 1307 del 31.10.2012 la Regione ha
approvato la sola scheda di valorizzazione dell’ex Ospedale Martinez, sospendendo le determinazioni sull’ex OP di Quarto.
Le reazioni ed il percorso in atto
Anche se la vendita anche dei padiglioni
800eschi passò quasi inosservata, le attività di ASL necessarie per la completa dismissione delle funzioni sanitarie attirò
finalmente l’attenzione della città su
quello che stava accadendo.
In particolare un episodio suscitò sdegno
unanime, un’asta al massimo ribasso per
smistare gli 80 pazienti ancora residenti
nell’ex manicomio di Quarto. Infatti
nell’aprile scorso l’Asl 3 pubblicò un bando (poi congelato) per trovare strutture di
accoglienza per gli ultimi ospiti dell’ex
ospedale psichiatrico.
Non di meno suscitarono perplessità i
costi e la redistribuzione delle funzioni
ancora site nell’ospedale programmati
dal ASL.9
In questo periodo si consolida e si amplia
la visibilità del Coordinamento per Quarto, che riunisce le varie associazioni ed i
soggetti attivi nel sito, che ha avvitato
una serie di attività di animazione artistica e culturale in Quarto.10
Lo stesso seminario genovese nell’ambito
della biennale per lo Spazio Pubblico, su
iniziativa di INU Liguria, Ordine degli Architetti, Comune e Provincia di Genova
vengono svolti nell’ex OP attirando un
folto numero di partecipanti.
Assunta consapevolezza collettiva del
Programma di integrale dismissione dalle funzioni sanitarie e privatizzazione del
complesso dell’ex Ospedale psichiatrico
di Quarto, l’allora neoinsediata Amministrazione comunale,11 si fece parte attiva
presso Regione, ASL, ARTE per la promozione di un percorso di rivalutazione del
programma di valorizzazione.
Ciò portò la Regione a congelare la proposta di variante urbanistica adottata che
prevedeva, ai sensi della speciale disciplina di valorizzazione dei beni immobi-
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liari della Regione, l’integrale destinazione a funzioni private dell’ex O.P. ad esclusione di un nucleo di padiglioni verso la
parte interna del complesso da mantenere a funzioni sanitarie (padiglioni 4, 5, 6, 7,
8, 9, 10 e 16).
Tale percorso, coordinato dal Comune, ha
visto anche la partecipazione del Municipio IX Levante e del Coordinamento dei
Comitati che si sono fatti carico del problema dell’ex Ospedale psichiatico e dei
suoi abitanti, al fine di conciliare le diverse esigenze che venivano rappresentate
dalla società civile e culturale e condivise
dall’Amministrazione.
Nel corso di riunioni che sono intervenute da luglio 2012 a febbraio 2013, si è quindi addivenuti ad un’ipotesi di progetto di
rigenerazione del sito, tenuto conto delle
numerose condizioni determinate, in primis, dal programma di riorganizzazione
dei servizi sanitari ed amministrativi di
ASL 3, strettamente connesso alle note
politiche di contrazione della spesa imposte alle Regioni particolarmente in
materia di Sanità, dalle conseguenti politiche di cartolarizzazione già assunte dalla Regione Liguria nel corso del 2011 finanziate da ARTE, attraverso il credito
bancario, in qualità di Ente strumentale
per le valorizzazioni regionali.
Nella specifico, la proposta di variante in
esame traduce in termini urbanistici ed
amministrativi, un più articolato programma, i cui punti salienti sono:
– attribuire al compendio storico il ruolo
di polarità urbana nell’ambito del levante
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cittadino, promuovendone la valorizzazione sotto i profili della memoria storica,
delle qualità architettonica ed ambientale dei luoghi, delle funzioni socio-sanitarie ivi presenti;
– potenziare le relazioni del compendio
storico col contesto urbano, individuando
e favorendo più agevoli modalità di accesso, percorribilità e fruibilità della struttura e ampliando, con un adeguato mix di
funzioni pubbliche, anche attraverso
l’impegno diretto del Comune, e private, i
possibili fruitori della struttura;
– conservare in forma attiva il valore storico e testimoniale del luogo, attraverso il
riconoscimento e la valorizzazione oltre
che della sua notoria qualità storico-monumentale e paesaggistica, anche della
memoria e della presenza della rete di attività socio-sanitarie, e dei relativi fruitori, attraverso l’individuazione di un adeguato mix funzionale che favorisca la sinergia tra funzioni presenti e di progetto,
sia pubbliche che private, evitando processi di emarginazione e di decadenza di
luoghi ed attività.
Consci della parzialità dei contenuti di
una variante urbanistica rispetto all’articolata complessità degli impegni che i
vari attori della vicenda devono assumersi, il programma di rigenerazione è
stato tradotto anche in un Accordo, per
l’appunto, di Programma, presupposto
alla variante stessa.
Obiettivi della variante
La variante relativa propone essenzialmente di mantenere la destinazione d’uso
a servizi pubblici di gran parte degli immobili trasferiti ad A.R.T.E. e nel contempo, attraverso il percorso di concertazione
innanzi accennato, con la Regione, ASL,
Municipio e Comitato e Coordinamento
per Quarto si è delineata una programmazione socio-sanitaria, urbanistica economica in forma integrata e sinergica con
l’obiettivo, tra gli altri, di realizzare un
polo urbano adeguatamente attrezzato e
atto a divenire una polarità urbana garantendo nel contempo la conservazione degli aspetti architettonici ed ambientali
salienti del complesso valorizzando la
funzione paesaggistico-ambientale.
Rispetto alla proposta regionale, che prevedeva un ambito di intervento relativo al
solo edificato ottocentesco, e destinava a
servizi di interesse comune i padiglioni 7,
8 e 10 e a servizi sanitari regionali i padiglioni 4, 5 e 6, la variante in argomento include anche l’edificio a Servizi (Palazzina
C) e un ampio appezzamento di terreno, di
proprietà ASL, posto a nord-ovest del complesso. La proposta emersa dal tavolo di
lavoro, di fatto, ribalta le ipotesi regionali,
che inserivano le funzioni pubbliche verso l’esterno del comparto, riportando le
funzioni pubbliche a contatto con il contesto urbano, di fronte all’attuale sede della Provincia di Genova, e destinando la
maggior parte dei padiglioni a servizi
pubblici, sia di quartiere che sanitari. L’attuale proposta, inoltre, valorizza i beni di
ASL consentendo circa 10.000 mq di nuova costruzione all’interno della fascia verde che circonda l’ex OP, evento che ha provocate alcune polemiche all’interno dello
stesso CoordinamentoXQuarto.
La Variante urbanistica di valorizzazione
parziale dei beni ed il relativo Accordo di
Programma, su proposta del Comune,
dopo una lunga fase di definizione da
parte di Regione, ASL ed ARTE, è al momento (luglio 2013) in fasi di esame da
parte del Consiglio Comunale.
Considerazioni
Il racconto della vicenda evidenzia la distanza tra gli astratti strumenti tecnico-legislativi (che in questo caso possono
assumere propriamente il termine ormai
dispregiativo di burocratici) con la complessità della vicenda e la consistenza storica, sociale, urbanistica, del luogo e della
sua storia.
La distanza tra strumenti e tutela dei valori dovrebbe essere coperta dalla politica, nel senso nobile del termine, in caso
contrario si producono azioni forse formalmente corrette ma aberranti (la gara
al massimo ribasso per la ricollocazione
degli ospiti di Quarto).
Per fortuna in questo caso l’ottusità dell’azione burocratica sugli abitanti
dell’ex OP ha prodotto esposizione mediatica e conseguente consapevolezza
collettiva che si sono estesi anche gli altri valori del sito, ancorché temporanea e
labile come tutto ciò che nasce dall’emozione indotta dal caso, che ha convinto gli
131
Enti interessati alla condivisione di un
percorso di complessiva analisi, sintesi e,
ci auguriamo, l’adozione di conseguenti
azioni sinergiche, delle varie problematiche relative al caso.
Ma ciò è avvenuto quasi fuori tempo massimo, quindi in condizioni (vedi esposizione economica di ARTE che detta un
giornaliero timing di maturazione di interessi sui mutui accesi per l’acquisto degli immobili) che hanno portato ad una
necessaria contrazione dei tempi del lavoro comune con conseguente semplificazione dei contenuti.
Ci auguriamo che tale impegno continui,
affinché l’ex OP di Quarto possa essere valorizzato quale memoria materiale ma divenga anche parte viva della nostra città.
1 Quali l'Istituto di
Bolzaneto, fondato come
ricovero femminile nel
1885, e l'Istituto
S. Raffaele di Coronata,
istituito nel 1887;
successivamente Quarto
assorbì anche gran
parte dei pazienti degli
Istituti di La Spezia
(1910) e Mondonuovo
a S. Francesco d'Albaro
(1904).
2–3 I santuari della
follia. Le istituzioni
manicomiali genovesi
dall’800 ad oggi
Pubblicazione edita
132
dalla Provincia di
Genova nel luglio 1980.
4 Da 1.919 che erano
nei 1945, diventano
2.689 nei 1951, 2.818 nel
1952,2.904 nel 1953, 2.995
nel 1954, 3.304 nel 1955.
5 Dal sito:
spazioinwind.libero.it/
ilsogno/genova/quarto/
6 Organizzazione
scientifica statale,
governata da una
fondazione di diritto
privato, creata per
promuovere la ricerca
scientifica in Italia.
La sede scientifica
collocata a Genova
Bolzaneto, Via
Morego 30.
7 Attualmente i
padiglioni 800eschi
sono così utilizzati:
per circa 2.700 mq. di
SA per servizi ai disabili
(residenziali e non);
per circa 4.400 mq.
di SA per servizi agli
anziani: RSA e centro
Alzhaimer;
per circa 10.400 mq.
di SA per vari servizi
socio-assistenziali:
Salute mentale,
Comunità terapeutica,
casa Michelini,
Centro di-sturbi
comportamenti
alimentari, biblioteca,
centro Basaglia e
Museo; per circa mq.
5.300 di SA servizi
generali quali cucine,
mensa, tesoreri tutto
ciò a fronte di una
superficie agibile (SA)
di circa 23.140 (al netto
quindi delle superfici a
giardino esterne).
8 Azienda Regionale
Territoriale per
l’Edilizia della Provincia
di Genova.
9 ASL 3 Genovese,
Deliberazione n. 1265
del 22 novembre 2011.
10 In particolare il 21,
22, 23 Settembre 2012
vengono organizzate
“Quarto Pianeta,
dalla memoria al
futuro possibile: tre
gior-nate di incontro,
idee, arte, protezione,
salute, stare bene,
riscoperta, spazi verdi,
gioco, testimonianza”
particolarmente ricche
di iniziative e con
successo di pubblico.
11 Mozione approvata
all’unanimità dal
Consiglio Comunale
di Genova nella seduta
dell’ 11 settembre
2012 per la tutela del
complesso ex Ospedale
Psichiatrico di Quarto.
NERIO FARINELLI
LA RIGENERAZIONE DELL’EX
OSPEDALE PSICHIATRICO DI QUARTO
COME MODELLO DI UNA NUOVA
POLITICA
del verde e della compatibilità viaria con
l’esterno, sia creato un tavolo di programmazione con la partecipazione del Comune di Genova, della Regione Liguria,
della Provincia di Genova, del Municipio
Levante, dell’ASL 3 e di A.R.T.E.
Il tavolo tecnico si costituisce nell’autunno, è coordinato dall’Assessorato all’Urbanistica e, all’inizio, fatica a decollare. Ci
sono contrasti tra le parti, si manifesta
Per anni ci siamo tutti dimenticati dell’ex una visione ragionieristica dei problemi,
Ospedale Psichiatrico di Quarto: nel 2012, priva di una visione d’insieme dove la paimprovvisamente, il risveglio!
rola d’ordine é quella di far cassa. Poi, piaUn fatto burocratico quale l’emissione di no piano, il disgelo con l’attenta regia del
un bando fa da detonatore alla protesta: Comune e il progetto prende forma.
l’ASL 3 decide di trasferire i pazienti per- A novembre 2013 si arriva alla sottoscriché la struttura, per far fronte ai buchi di zione dell’accordo di programma che
bilancio della Sanità, dovrà essere vendu- accoglie le richieste del Municipio Leta dalla Regione Liguria.
vante, frutto di un dialogo costante con il
Il bando fa una scelta contraria alla di- gruppo delle associazioni raccolto sotto il
gnità della persona: è un’asta al massimo nome di Coordinamento per Quarto.
ribasso che equipara le persone alle cose. Alla fine del gennaio 2014, il Municipio
Il Consiglio del Municipio Levante, all’i- Levante costituisce un gruppo di lavoro
nizio dell’attuale ciclo amministrativo, temporaneo per evitare che le parti, una
condivide l’opposizione a tale disegno e volta sottoscritto l’accordo, procedano
approva una mozione all’unanimità.
per conto proprio perdendo di vista il diChiede al Sindaco e alla Giunta Comuna- segno complessivo della riqualificazione.
le di attivarsi presso la Regione e l’ASL 3 L’obiettivo è quello di convincere le parti
affinché siano revocati i trasferimenti dei a sottoscrivere un protocollo d’intesa sul
pazienti, sia mantenuta in mano pubbli- coordinamento delle rispettive funzioni.
ca l’assistenza socio-sanitaria, sia realiz- Non meno importante è il metodo seguizata la Casa della Salute non residenziale to che punta ad attivare reali processi di
(con servizi quali i consultori, la preven- democrazia partecipativa con i cittadini e
zione delle dipendenze, l’assistenza agli con le associazioni sulla base di un’inforanziani e ai disabili), siano salvaguardati mazione ampia, trasparente e paritaria.
i servizi esistenti quali quelli psichiatri- Lo stage, ideato da Genoa Summer School
ci, sia avviato un programma di recupero e riservato a studenti europei, con l’obiet-
133
tivo di studiare la rigenerazione degli ex
Ospedali Psichiatrici di Quarto e di Prato
Zanino, è parso al Municipio Levante una
grande occasione per far conoscere all’estero la storia di un sito che per anni è stato un luogo di sofferenza e di esclusione
e che sta per cambiare pelle diventando
una cittadella della salute e del benessere.
C’è anche un altro aspetto che non va sottovalutato: invitare i giovani a cimentarsi nella riqualificazione di Quarto è un segno di lungimiranza nei confronti di chi,
per ovvi motivi anagrafici, è in grado di
proporre idee più innovative.
Genova è non da oggi una città in crisi
che si manifesta soprattutto nella mancanza di idee sul proprio futuro.
Dalla crisi si deve uscire ricercando in
ogni occasione il contributo di tutti e
recuperando il senso della politica che è
quello di pensare soprattutto alle future
generazioni.
Un detto degli indiani d’America ammonisce sui limiti del potere perchè “non
abbiamo ricevuto la terra in eredità dai nostri
padri ma in prestito dai nostri nipoti”.
Nerio Farinelli
Presidente del Municipio IX, Genova - Levante
134
AMEDEO GAGLIARDI
SULLA RI-GENERAZIONE URBANA,
PER IL RICONOSCIMENTO DEL
BENE COMUNE
L'esperienza del Coordinamento
per Quarto a Genova.
L'esperienza del Coordinamento per
Quarto a Genova, a tre anni dalla sua nascita, continua ad essere ricca di spunti
sia sul fronte culturale che politico. Fin
dai suoi primi sviluppi ha rappresentato
uno spaccato interessante di “come il processo di riconoscimento del Bene Comune, nei
confronti di un luogo, di un manufatto, di un
complesso architettonico può prendere traiettorie opposte”, identificando un bene come
superfluo o necessario per la sua funzione pubblica. Cercherò di raccontare questa vicenda facendo emergere le diverse
logiche ed evidenziando alcuni punti
utili per l’avviamento di un processo di
ri-generazione urbana.
La questione degli Ospedali Psichiatrici
parte da lontano ma è utile ricordare brevemente che le cose sono iniziate a cambiare quando la legge 180 del 1978 sancì
la chiusura di questi luoghi, avviando
la pratica per la salute mentale verso il
territorio. Da quel momento l’Ospedale
di Genova Quarto, come altri nel nostro
Paese, si avviò verso una graduale decadenza, quasi a conferma della voglia
di disfarsi di una storia di grande dolore collettivo, che poteva essere superata
semplicemente attraverso la sua chiusura e il suo abbandono. Anche la storia
dell’assetto proprietario conferma quello
che dicevo sopra: una proprietà che negli anni passa diverse mani senza che
nessuno sviluppi una visione per il suo
complessivo utilizzo, sino al 1978 della
Provincia di Genova, dopo della USL, in
seguito ASL3, per cominciare ad essere
frazionata nel 2007 con la prima cartolarizzazione, a favore di Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, oggi divisa tra CDP, ARTE,
ASL 3 e Comune di Genova. In più di 35
anni, nonostante diversi progetti, (negli
anni ‘80 viene immaginata come sede
del CNR, nel 2006 come sede dell’IIT, e
nonostante sia stata sede di molti servizi
di ASL3, compresa la Direzione e alcuni
servizi residenziali), il complesso continua a vivere il suo stato di separazione e
abbandono. A prova di ciò la persistenza
di mura perimetrali che continuano a segnare una non dichiarata incapacità di
metabolizzare la storia di quel luogo per
provarla seriamente a superare.
La storia del coordinamento per Quarto
nasce dopo che alla fine del 2011 la Regione Liguria, per colmare un buco di bilancio della sanità, sancisce la cartolarizzazione anche della parte ottocentesca del
complesso. Da quel momento vengono
emanate le delibere di ASL 3 del novembre 2011 di trasloco delle funzioni sanita-
135
rie presenti e quelle del febbraio 2012 dove
si dispone una gara al massimo ribasso
per traslocare gli ultimi 80 pazienti presenti nel complesso, una gara d'appalto
al ribasso: “per la fornitura di prestazioni di
residenzialità psichiatrica a favore dell’ASL 3,
4 lotti.” La città rimasta in un moderato
silenzio fino a quel punto, cominciò a reagire per una decisione che oltre a tradire
e offendere la dignità delle persone messe
all’asta, tradiva e offendeva la sua stessa
vita democratica. La gara segnava una
deriva culturale che aveva nuovamente
spalancato la porta alla marginalizzazione del disagio e alla sua istituzionalizzazione, perchè incapace di affrontare la diversità se non attraverso la lente sfuocata
dell’economia. In questi tre anni di lavoro si è riusciti a tornare sulle decisioni
prese: è stato avviato un tavolo di lavoro
inter-istituzionale che si è concluso con
un Accordo di Programma sottoscritto
dalle parti nel novembre del 2013. La gara
di appalto sui pazienti è stata revocata e
l’accordo ha previsto il ritorno di due terzi del complesso ottocentesco a funzione
pubblica, programmando l’insediamento
di una Casa della Salute per il Levante e il
mantenimento dei diversi servizi.
Ma veniamo alle considerazioni su questo percorso dove, l’ex OP di Quarto, ha
assunto diverse accezioni passando da
superfluo, definito attraverso una semplice ricognizione economica, a Bene Comune, definito così attraverso la spinta
del Coordinamento verso un lavoro comune tra le diverse Istituzioni, (Regione,
136
Comune, Arte, ASL3, Municipio Levante
e Coordinamento), in un tavolo tecnico di
confronto. “L’esperienza ha evidenziato come
il Bene sia diventato Comune, solo attraverso un processo che ha visto le diverse forze in
campo confrontarsi per determinare un diverso senso di riconoscimento del Bene stesso”.
Un senso capace di riconoscerlo nella
dimensione collettiva attraverso la complessità dell’intreccio di diversi aspetti:
vita, storia, funzioni, interrelazioni e valore economico; se questo non avviene, si
tende a ridurre il Bene secondo l'esclusiva visione economica che combina il suo
utilizzo secondo uno schema semplicistico. Il percorso del Coordinamento ha
dimostrato che il Bene Pubblico, se non
correttamente trattato, diventa inevitabilmente superfluo, un onere da alienare;
per contro, se tale bene trova invece attenzione nella dimensione collettiva, si
avvia un processo virtuoso capace di rilasciare energie nuove che creano valore
per la stessa ri-generazione.
La vicenda del Coordinamento credo
possa costituire un modello da valorizzare se si comprende come nella gestione del bene pubblico “sia oggi importante,
per invertire un processo di abbandono della
funzione pubblica, avviare un dialogo inter-istituzionale aperto alla partecipazione della
cittadinanza attiva”. Vorrei astrarmi per
un attimo dalla vicenda specifica per
cercare di rendere più comprensibile
tale approccio: la logica che può portare ad una ri-generazione ha bisogno di
partire proprio dalla parola ri-generazione che rimanda all’idea di generare, di
far nascere, di affidarsi alla vita, quindi
di ripartire dalle persone per immaginare come la vita possa riprendere in
un determinato spazio. Uno sforzo che
è possibile se si “costruisce un contesto di
apprendimento, aperto alle persone e capace
di mediare le diverse istanze”, capace di andare oltre la logica dicotomica dell’utile
e dello scarto, capace di ricercare un reale confronto con l’altro, affinchè possa
diventare sponda, incastro, partner nel
processo di apprendimento. Un processo
che apre una sfida culturale impegnativa ponendo la necessità di coltivare una
maggiore coscienza della storia: una
storia che si spiega trascendendo le posizioni delle diverse parti. È importante
inoltre tenere presente che oggi la cultura egemone è più interessata al conflitto
tra le parti che all’integrazione: questo fa
più audience.
La semplice e rozza logica della concorrenza ha travalicato i suoi confini e s’insinua in un divenire sociale incapace di
dare spazio alla complessità dell’apprendimento collettivo. Cominciare ad avere
consapevolezza che andare oltre la propria parte, ascoltare le ragioni dell’altro,
è un processo impegnativo, oltre a metterci al riparo da facili delusioni, invita a
riprendere un linguaggio della politica,
intesa come la capacità della polis di parlarsi, facendo tesoro dei piccoli passi che
si riescono a fare.
Riepilogando, l’esperienza del Coordinamento può suggerire una serie di indicazioni su come ri-conoscere il Bene Comune e avviarne una ri-generazione:
– Avviare un contesto di apprendimento
che sappia riflettere un pensiero sistemico e uno spazio di inter-essere tra le
diverse Istituzioni coinvolte e la cittadinanza attiva.
– Tenere al centro la dimensione della
persona per far nascere un linguaggio
che sappia accogliere la diversità delle
parti, senza escluderne nessuna, cercando di far emergere una sintesi che tenda
alla ri-generazione del bene comune.
– Tenere presente che in un lavoro di apprendimento la rete che si va a formare
non ha un centro, ogni parte può avanzare il proprio contributo per formare un
pensiero di valorizzazione.
– Continuare a riaffermare il piacere della socialità, tracciando una linea di coerenza tra pensiero e azione, tra il dire e il
fare, spesso tradita: un modo per evitare
che le Istituzioni vadano verso la deriva
di scopi predefiniti, (oggi la ragione economica), negando l'autonomia morale
dello spirito umano e compromettendo
la congruità tra mezzi e fini.
Come si vede c’è ancora molto lavoro
da fare.
137
CHERUBINO GAMBARDELLA
IL FALLIMENTO DELLA FOLLIA
Nei manicomi dismessi c’è il degrado, le
scritte dei degenti ma, soprattutto, l’interno usa lo stesso registro espressivo
dell’esterno. Non mi era mai capitata una
cosa simile, l’esterno viene solo simulato,
la follia non deve essere esibita e non è
degna neanche del cielo.
Diversità, sorpresa, smarrimento, confu- Decidiamo subito di fare due esterni:
sione sono condizioni che staccano il ge- Quarto diventa come un castello dal
nere umano dalle consuetudini pensate muro aperto, e utilizzato per i negozi,un
affinchè, ogni giorno, sia rassicurato.
borgo di barre abitate che volano tra gli
Ossessione, uguaglianza, ripetizione, as- alberi. Disegnamo una città magica sopra
senza di sorpresa, costruiscono un‘altro e in mezzo al vecchio manicomio.
lato temibile che non è solo diversità ma Nuovi spazi sotto il cielo per il benessere,
alienazione e chiusura.
lo sport e la cura del corpo.
La follia e l’architettura hanno sempre Prato Zanino sembra un lager con edifici:
avuto un legame reclusivo.
capannucce e una grottesca chiesa neoArchitettura è arte del limitare, del chiu- gotica in cemento armato. Sono reclusori
dere, del murare e dell’aprire.
nascosti nella foresta. Allora, subito una
In fondo, rispetto all’aria aperta, sem- collezione di muri abitati, una città per
bra una parafrasi della carcerazione ma, lo sport e la salute che taglia, interseca e
mentre la follia dimostra, fino alle rivo- intercetta le vecchie architetture.
luzioni di Franco Basaglia, la necessità Una città che oltre al cielo si prende la ridi non avere un esterno, di vivere segre- vincita di piegare la follia al suo fallimengata senza diritti in uno sterminato e co- to e al suo riscatto: la pace dell’orizzonte
strittivo interieur, l’architettura si giova e del mare.
dell’alternanza del perimetro e della battaglia tra un fuori e un dentro.
Una battaglia provvida che mi è capitato
di recente di combattere guidando, nella Genoa Summer School, un gruppo internazionale di cinque giovani progettisti.
Abbiamo visitato due manicomi abbandonati, uno molto urbano nel quartiere
di Quarto, l’altro immerso nel paesaggio
sulla Riviera di Ponente a Pratozanino.
138
COSIMO SCHINAIA
I LUOGHI DELLA CURA
“Questa penombra è lenta e non fa male;
scorre per un mite pendio e assomiglia
all'eternità”
da Elogio dell’ombra di Borges, J. L.
L’architettura terapeutica
I luoghi di cura sono luoghi dove l’espressione della sofferenza e del dolore è immediata, nel senso che non prevede molte di quelle mediazioni che normalmente
negli scambi comunicativi socialmente
accettati vengono messe in atto. La sofferenza e il dolore generano identificazione, compartecipazione, compassione solo
fino a una certa soglia di tolleranza, oltre
la quale, quando si ha una vera e propria
evacuazione nella mente dell’interlocutore, che non riesce a contenerli, prevalgono imponenti meccanismi difensivi quali, il distacco emotivo, l’allontanamento
fisico, la tecnicizzazione esasperata, la
sanitarizzazione dell’incontro con la persona malata. L’angoscia avvertita come
debordante, intollerabile trova una prima
risposta nella costituzione di enclaves, al
cui interno i curanti indulgono per proteggersi, difendersi, tenere a bada, raffreddare la compartecipazione affettiva.
Nei manicomi la partizione degli spazi
era nettamente disegnata. Da una parte
vi erano i matti, dall’altra gli psichiatri
che al massimo nelle loro stanze discettavano tra loro dei matti. Non vi era incontro e, se vi era, avveniva negli spazi medici, mai nei padiglioni, dove risiedevano i
ricoverati a cui accedevano, ma solo per il
tempo ritenuto strettamente necessario,
gli infermieri che a loro volta si rifugiavano in altri spazi interstiziali separati e
protetti, onde evitare il contatto, il contagio direi, con la malattia psichiatrica.
Già Leon Battista Alberti, nel XV secolo,
parla di architettura con funzione terapeutica nell’introduzione del De re aedificatoria. Lo stesso pensiero viene ripreso
nel periodo illuminista con la valorizzazione dei concetti di igiene fisica e morale, che attribuisce una funzione terapeutica allo spazio dell’architettura sanitaria.
Per Esquirol, l’ospedale psichiatrico non è
un presidio terapeutico insieme agli atri
strumenti, ma si costituisce, in quanto
spazio geografico e relazionale, esso stesso come la cura.
L’architettura manicomiale
Il Panopticon di Jeremy Bentham (1748 –
1832), filosofo inglese teorico dell’utilitarismo, fu il primo modello architettonico,
la più lucida trattazione illuministica
dell’architettura di sorveglianza. Il Panopticon, prototipo del carcere moderno,
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era una struttura a pianta semicircolare
costituita in questi termini: “Alla periferia
una costruzione ad anello; al centro una torre
tagliata da larghe finestre che si aprono verso la faccia interna dell’anello; la costruzione
periferica è divisa in celle, che occupano ciascuna tutto lo spessore della costruzione; esse
hanno due finestre, una verso l’interno, corrispondente alla finestra della torre; l’altra verso l’esterno, permette alla luce di attraversare
la cella da parte a parte. Basta allora mettere
un sorvegliante nella torre centrale, e in ogni
cella rinchiudere un pazzo, un ammalato, un
condannato, uno scolaro. Per effetto del contro
luce, si possono cogliere dalla torre, stagliantisi esattamente, le piccole silhouettes prigioniere nelle celle di periferia […]. Il dispositivo
panoptico predispone unità spaziali che permettono di vedere senza interruzione e di riconoscere immediatamente” (Bentham, 1786;
Foucault, 1975, p. 218).
Viene invertito il principio della segreta:
per l’ottimizzazione della sorveglianza
la piena luce è più efficace dell’ombra.
Successivamente la sostituzione dell’ossessione della trasparenza universale e
del controllo visivo assoluto, della totale
ispezionabilità, nonché degli aspetti manicomiali più marcatamente segreganti,
prese la forma di un’architettura asilare
che suggerisse e progettasse spazi ordinati che potessero agire educativamente
ed autoritariamente sul disordine emotivo e affettivo del malato mentale. Francesco Azzurri (1877), un architetto al quale si
deve, attorno agli anni ‘70 dell’ottocento,
uno studio approfondito dei tipi edilizi
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manicomiali, sottolineava la necessità di
superamento delle costruzioni a “forme
geometriche e monumentali”, che “evidenziano quell’aspetto di ospedale, insomma quel
complesso che ti richiama alla mente un luogo
di reclusione”. Egli intendeva dare forma a
un tipo di istituto nel quale “la calma, l’ordine e la vita di famiglia, diretta dalla scienza
medica” costituissero le direttrici del processo di cura. Il modello prospettato fu il
sistema disseminato a forma di villaggio,
con padiglioni equamente distanziati,
disposti lungo viali alberati che dessero la non attesa impressione di aggirarsi in mezzo a un villaggio signorile. Tale
modello doveva servire alla creazione di
una microcomunità, una piccola città autonoma e autosufficiente, concepita secondo i parametri di una società ideale di
normali (De Peri, 1984).
I manicomi di Quarto e di Cogoleto
Intorno alla metà dell’800, viene avvertita
la necessità di ridurre la popolazione dei
ricoverati nell’edificio di via Galata, fino
a quel periodo adibito ad unico ricovero
psichiatrico ufficiale e che ospita ben più
dei 400 maniaci per i quali era stato progettato. Il Manicomio di via Galata veniva
giudicato insufficiente per la sua capienza, per l’inadeguata struttura falansteriale e soprattutto per la sua collocazione in
posizione centrale e urbana. Viene allora
indicata come propizia un’area di 100 ettari nella zona di Pratozanino a Cogoleto,
ottenibile a basso prezzo. La lontananza
del luogo prescelto determina per due
volte la sospensione del progetto di costruzione, per cui nel frattempo nel 1895,
Genova si dota dell’Ospedale Psichiatrico di Quarto che sorge in una località
rivierasca immediatamente a levante di
Genova, oggi completamente inserita
nel tessuto urbano. Il progetto prevedeva la costruzione di un gruppo di edifici
distinti ma molto ravvicinati, collegati
tra loro da porticati. L’intero complesso
era inscritto in un contorno all’ingrosso
ottagonale e, all’interno, gli edifici si alternavano ai cortili e ai giardini secondo
una disposizione a scacchiera, Gli uffici e
i servizi – palazzo dell’amministrazione,
cucine, lavatoi, magazzino viveri, chiesa –
erano allineati lungo l’asse mediano del
complesso, lasciando a destra le sezioni
femminili e a sinistra, simmetricamente, quelle maschili, suddivise secondo gli
abituali criteri fondati sui comportamenti e le difficoltà di gestione dei pazienti
(Maura, Peloso, 1999). Anche il Manicomio di Quarto in breve tempo risulterà
anch’esso inadeguato a soddisfare le crescenti richieste di ricovero manicomiale.
Fu la demolizione del vecchio istituto di
via Galata e la successiva vendita delle
aree a favorire nel 1908 l’approvazione
del progetto del Manicomio di Cogoleto
e per favorirne la costruzione fu spostato
il confine della provincia di Genova, onde
includervi il comune di Cogoleto e con
esso il Manicomio.
Il Manicomio, capace nei progetti di ri-
coverare 2400 pazienti, viene inaugurato
nel 1912. All’inaugurazione sono pronti
dieci padiglioni; se ne aggiungono ancora tre nel 1913, quindi altri tre negli anni
1921-1922; infine gli ultimi tre vengono
costruiti nel 1933. Viene pensato come
una succursale di Quarto, dove ha sede
la direzione unica e dove avvengono le
operazioni di osservazione e di selezione
dei pazienti da inviare a Cogoleto, in cui
vengono scaricati i degenti considerati
meno tollerabili e più disturbanti, tra cui
i bambini cerebropatici, gli insufficienti
mentali, gli affetti da tubercolosi. Isolato
geograficamente culturalmente, il Manicomio di Cogoleto sviluppa ben presto
un sistema economico autarchico che
ricalca il modello curtense del Castello
medioevale. Sorgono la colonia agricola, l’allevamento di animali, il panificio,
il pastificio, la lavanderia, la tipografia, i
laboratori di falegnameria e di lavorazione del ferro per le pratiche ergoterapiche.
In contrapposizione all’abbandono in cui
i degenti vengono in realtà lasciati, alle
macchie di umidità e alle scrostature degli intonaci che fanno bella mostra negli
interni dei maleodoranti padiglioni, gli
esterni e, in generale, i luoghi di rappresentanza sono spesso molto curati nelle
volte e sulle pareti con affreschi e decori
molto belli. Queste strutture e le relative
modalità assistenziali entreranno in crisi a partire dalla seconda metà degli anni
sessanta e appariranno un’ingannevole
umanizzazione di un’istituzione antiumana (Schinaia, 1997).
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Nel 1978, sulla spinta della teorizzazione
e delle pratiche messe in atto da Franco
Basaglia, che contesta l’esistenza stessa
dei manicomi, viene promulgata la famosa legge 180, inglobata poi nella legge 833
di Riforma Sanitaria che sancisce la chiusura definitiva dei manicomi e la nascita
dei sevizi psichiatrici di diagnosi e cura
negli ospedali civili e i Servizi di Salute
Mentale sul territorio, dando maggiore
spazio al tentativo di prevenzione del disagio psichico, ai suoi aspetti relazionali
e sociali e alla cura dei momenti più acuti
della sofferenza mentale. La difficoltà di
costruzione dei nuovi servizi psichiatrici territoriali fa si che nel 1983 la regione
Liguria stabilisca la possibilità di rientro
negli ospedali psichiatrici che assumono la nuova denominazione di “Presidio
sociale e sanitario per la tutela della salute mentale”, per coloro che siano stati
precedentemente ricoverati almeno una
volta. Soltanto nel 1993 verranno bloccate
le riammissioni. L’Ospedale psichiatrico
di Cogoleto verrà chiuso nel 2008 e quello
di Quarto nel 2009.
Facing page: the Bisagno’s plain from
the hill of Carignano, late XIX century