Architecture as Infrastructure for Archaeology: A Design Strategy for Crapolla’s Abbey in the Sorrento Peninsula Landscape

Abstract

The contribution aims at investigating the relationship between invisible archaeology, coastal landscapes and architectural design through the case of St. Peter’s Abbey archaeological site, in the Fjord of Crapolla, Massa Lubrense, in the Sorrento Peninsula, that has been the subject of an interdisciplinary research held at the University of Naples Federico II. In these particular situations, architectural design works on an interpretative condition where the intersection between reciprocal learnings takes on great importance in order to define articulated design strategies for the valorization of the weaker ancient traces still present in the contemporary territory. The Crapolla’s Abbey is an emblematic case, where the achieved results by different studies, from archaeological excavations to surveys, from studies on ancient materials and construction techniques to those on the spolia architecture, from landscape studies to geological ones, inevitably become the basis of architectural design, which has to be constantly updated, taking the connotations of an “open work” and becoming a sort of “building site of knowledge” in progress, where the new architecture becomes an “infrastructure” for archaeology.