Let’s paint the stairs!

Coloriamo le Scale!

Laboratorio di architettura partecipata, Napoli

At the beginning of the 20th century the Cervati Stairs where part of a network of itineraries which connected villages, villas and farmhouses throughout the hills that surrounded the city of Napoli.

With the building expansion that followed World War II, this area became a central neighborhood that connects the central areas of Chiaia, Centro Storico and Vomero, with the districts of Posillipo, Fuorigrotta and Soccavo.

Despite the high population density, this neighborhood has no public spaces. The old paths are mostly pedestrian and connect various schools in the area. They are underused, dirty and degraded, but have the potential to become a meeting place for children and young people in the neighborhood. To make this happen it is important to make the stairs aesthetically more attractive.

The project involved pupils of the G. Nevio middle school in a participatory design experience, a real landscape architecture workshop that has re-proposed the same methodologies used by architects for the restoration of artistic heritage and the regeneration of abandoned places, clearly adapting them to the age of the students and the formative aspect of the project.

The goal was to awaken in the pupils the sense of belonging to a place through a series of collective practical activities that would allow them to understand the truest meaning of the expression “public space”.

To strengthen the educational quality of the laboratory, we worked together with EaS lab, a cutting edge association with years of experience in creating educational tools to encourage the active participation of local communities in sustainable development processes.

Scrolling down the page you can find a journal made with the pupils of the school to describe the various phases of this participatory architecture process.

Year:

2019

Client:

Istituto Comprensivo G. Nevio

Collaboration:

EaS lab

Journal

Team building

In the first few meetings we started to know each other and to form a team. We wrote the “Group pact”, a set of rules that all of us have learned to respect in order to work together. We have learned to sit in circle, to talk by looking into each other’s eyes and to listen to each other as we do so.

Creazione dell'immaginario

At first the stairs were just something we used to go up and down, to go to school and to return.

Sitting in a circle we brainstormed, that is, we started saying everything that came to mind about stairs and we saw that a staircase is not just a series of gray steps, but can be something more.

To find out what can happen on a ladder, we drew comics: stories, even the simplest ones, allow you to think about things in a more creative way, to imagine funny, sad, fantastic worlds.

Rilievo geometrico

When the sun finally came out, we went out and ran up the stairs.

First we measured them, because in order to work on a space you must first understand it. We counted the steps, divided into groups and, using our feet as a unit of measurement, noted the length, depth and height, then we redrew them.

At first our drawings were just sketches surrounded by numbers, over the weeks they became very precise schemes, which we used to prepare our project.

Rilievo materico

Using the drawings from the geometric relief, we noted the elements of decay that transform the stairs of Torre Cervati into a space that is not pleasant to cross and in which it is not pleasant to stop.

The presence of waste, animal excrement, broken bottles, damaged surfaces was noted and for each type of degradation we collectively reasoned about actions to be taken to improve the quality of the public space.

Beyond the dirt, we thought that people would become more attached to the stairs of Torre Cervati if the space were more welcoming and cheerful and that coloring the steps is the design action that best meets these needs.

Scelta dei colori

The 6 colors of paint used in the project were chosen through a participatory design laboratory, with the aim of identifying colors that arouse feelings of happiness and well-being.

Sitting in a circle, each of us said what his favorite color was, which one made him/her feel happy and also which one he/she liked the least. We marked them on a sheet of paper and saw which colors matched the tastes of the whole team. To do this we transformed the colors we didn’t like into their complementaries using the color wheel, in order to transform a negative feeling into a constructive suggestion.

Cantiere

First we fenced off the construction site and prepared billboards to communicate to the inhabitants of the neighborhood what we were doing, then we numbered the steps and chose which stones to color.

Each stone was first brushed and then fenced with paper tape so to paint it in a precise way, then we divided into pairs and finally we began to color the staircase!

It was complicated, sometimes tiring, but we did it! The Stairs of Torre Cervati are no longer an abandoned place, but have become a space full of color and joy!