Ships on the shore. Taranto: naval industrialisation as compositional principle

When on June 29, 1882 the Italian Parliament decided to build in Taranto one of the largest arsenals in Italy, no one would have expected the profound modification to which this would have led. The city pressed on a strip of land compressed between two seas, the Mar Piccolo in the north and the Mar Grande in the south, became the scenography for the construction of an alternative landscape to the bucolic one inherited from the drawings of Ottone di Berger, in which the signs of an imposing architecture sanctioned the beginning of a naval industrialization. A real "sacrifice" (Ferrajolo, 1912) capable of generating an undisputed role in the composition of the architecture of the city by demonstrating the passage to a further step of scale. It is therefore the "public" construction of the whole city on the sea that marks the time, where a necessary structural reason brings the traces and the measure of a new time to the ground. It is the case of the "Edgardo Ferrati" basin (1916), the largest in the Mediterranean Sea, to determine the change and to lead the images of the city towards its foundation on the sea, as Francesco di Giorgio might have deduced, producing a series of elements and conditions as design praxis. The excavation generated by the basin, 250 meters long and 40.80 wide, is a necessary reinvention of the courtyard typology, a postmodern irreverence played on the obligatory value of the form producing a measure that materializes in the modern city. The elements of architecture become the expression of a muscular effort capable of describing the path taken by urban expansion through the representation of the monument and the use of the monumental. As in the collages of Hans Hollein (1964) the character of these architectures reasons around the theme of industry in a dual vision system where on one hand there is the representation and on the other the concept of measure, of scale. A precise relationship that the land affirms through the construction of the basins, with respect to the presence of the sea as it had been in the fifteenth century in the construction of the Aragonese Castle. The naval basins are the offspring of 'bad' industrial architectures often overlooked by historiography and specific literature; but that can write an alternative chapter of the urban design narrative and about the function of monuments contained in it during the 20th and 21st centuries (Cfr. BETASOM, Bordeaux). The article intends to investigate the prominent role of this image that has conditioned the construction of the architectures of the city throughout the twentieth century, up until the construction of the steel plant, starting from the undisputed role of the Arsenal and its masonry basins as substance of shape, mass and rhythm of the composition.