Days of Future Past

The Seasons of Oblivion of the former Naples Fish Market

The emergence of architectural heritage is determined by selective processes of memory and oblivion, which dictate what is narrated, and transmitted. Modern public infrastructures occupy an unstable position in urban memory, where architectural significance does not guarantee civic presence or collective remembrance. The former Fish Market of Naples (1929-1935), designed by the Neapolitan engineer Luigi Cosenza, exemplifies this condition. The building is regarded as one of the most significant works of Neapolitan Rationalism, and yet it has been marked by progressive marginalization.

The Fish Market, closed in June 2013, is here reconstructed as a case study in the architectural management of memory and forgetting. The building’s biography, here, is articulated across five distinct seasons of oblivion: its modernist construction as an erasure of the eclectic 19th century city; the post-war reconstruction which restored the volume but stripped its light and severed it from the urban fabric; three unrealised renovation proposals; the decades of progressive abandonment and occupation that followed its heritage listing; and the current restoration project aimed at returning the building to its original configuration. Reading this trajectory, the essay argues that the current intervention defended at the level of civic display yet detached from any active role in the contemporary city. In contrast to the idea of wholeness, oblivion is presented as a possible tool for selecting which inherited claims should be allowed to fade, enabling the building’s spatial intelligence to guide it towards a future that is not a repetition of its origins.

In the sanctuary of Trophonios in Boeotia, two springs flowed side by side. Pilgrims seeking the oracle were required to drink from both waters in sequence: first Lethe, the spring of forgetfulness, and then Mnemosyne, the spring of memory¹. The order was not a coincidence because this act was identified as the prerequisite for the possibility of remembrance, on the basis that “remembering is possible only on that of forgetting, and not vice versa”². Literature has long cultivated their own tutelary deity of memory and oblivion – from Proust to Borges – but architectural practice has rarely assumed forgetting as an explicit design tool, clinging instead to the memory of the building at all costs, even when that memory no longer corresponds to any living practice³ (fig. 1). 

The discourse on heritage can become paralysed when it insists on preserving every layer indiscriminately and treats the obligation to remember as unquestionable, viewing the ability to forget as a failure. This text uses the former Naples Fish Market as a case study to examine the consequences of valorisation through purification rather than acknowledgement.

Oblivion is here treated as an analytical category: the five seasons reconstructed below identify five different ways in which it has worked through the same physical envelope – erasure, suspension, failed return, intermittent visibility, and restoration – and through them the essay tests whether forgetting can be made operative as a project tool.

Luigi Cosenza designed the Fish Market between 1929 and 1931, and it was built along the edge of Naples waterfront between 1934 and 1935. It opened in 1935 and remained active until its closure in June 2013. Over its lifespan, the market underwent five distinct periods of oblivion. The first of these was the building itself: an austere, rationalist structure erected on a reclaimed coastal strip between the historic city and the port. The second period began with the Allied bombing in 1943 and ended with urban planning decisions in 1949 that isolated the building from the rest of the city. The third period runs from 1955 to 1978, a time of repeated renovation proposals that were never realised. The fourth period extends from the building’s listing in 1991 to its closure in 2013 and involves cosmetic restoration, a single night of contemporary art, and a decade of abandonment. The fifth period is the current restoration project led by the Municipality of the city, financed with approximately ten million euros of PNRR⁴ funding, aimed at returning the building to its original configuration (fig. 2).

The historical reconstruction offered here draws on both secondary literature and primary sources consulted directly by the author, including the 1949 ministerial decree that approved the post-war reconstruction plan for the Porto, Mercato and Pendino districts. The discussion of the current intervention rests on the author's direct involvement in the restoration process: the analysis was developed within the collaboration agreement (accordo quadro) between the Municipality of Naples and the Department of Architecture of the University of Naples "Federico II" for the technical and economic feasibility project (PFTE) of the Fish Market. This position allowed the historical seasons and the ongoing intervention to be read as a single trajectory rather than as separate objects of study. 

However, even after this intervention, the building will still need to address the question that the restoration itself defers: what will the Fish Market be able to offer to the city once it has recovered its original form?

The inauguration of the Naples Fish Market was officially signed by Luigi Cosenza in October 1935, with a building within a reclaimed coastal strip between the eastern edge of the historic city and the infrastructure of the port (fig. 3). Its spatial programme was concentrated in a single large hall with a half-cylindrical iron barrel vault and approximately 1,200 square metres of unobstructed wholesale floor space⁵. 

The hall was lit by two longitudinal glazed slits cut into the ceiling and glazed with Termolux, as well as by two thermal windows at the heads. An inner suspended ceiling concealed the metallic ribs and presented the vault shell as a continuous cylinder of light. The front on the square carried a cantilevered canopy and organised an interior square for the wholesale exchange of fish, the rear articulated loading bays and service connections to the port (fig. 4).

In an urban context characterised by the episodic, discontinuous and often unannounced introduction of architectural rationalism within the inner periphery, the Fish Market emerged as “the first true example of modern architecture in Naples”⁶. Pagano’s 1936 review attributed the designer’s work to a deliberate architectural intention and a sustained inquiry into aesthetic and constructive problems that had only been addressed in a cursory manner in academic exercises⁷. He had built a rational market as someone with no contact with European rationalism might have done⁸.

The construction was performed with the resources of a young engineer trained in a faculty of engineering, working without precedent in the city. 

The result was a building whose surfaces erased the eclectic-historicist project of late 19th century “drawn up by the Municipal Technical Department and described by Cosenza as a ‘university for fish’ because of its ashlar-clad solemn appearance and Ionic order"⁹.

The building inscribed itself within a longer lineage of covered market architecture – with references to Beurs van Berlage and from the market halls catalogued by Hilberseimer¹⁰ – while cancelling the immediate eclectic vocabulary through which Naples had previously translated that lineage 

(fig. 5).

This is the first operation of forgetting as architectural practice. The separation from immediate context, the connection to an abstracted and longer lineage. The Fish Market’s first oblivion season was simultaneously the season of its construction and the season of a deliberate act of damnatio memoriae performed on the city’s recent architectural period.

Allied air raids damaged the building between 1943 and the end of the war. 

The postwar reconstruction restored the volume but stripped it of its light. The vault was rebuilt without the two longitudinal glazed slits, and their closure was “one of the most serious alterations the Market has undergone to this day”¹¹.  The inner suspended ceiling was not rebuilt, and the metallic arches were left visible from below betraying the idea of Cosenza’s design for a vault shell as a continuous cylinder of enclosed light. However, if the post-war works did not modify the building in terms of its geometry and dimensions, in terms of construction they substituted the iron halfshell and sealed the two elements that had given the 1935 interior its distinctive character (fig. 6).

The same period brought a further substitution at urban scale. The post-war reconstruction planning for the Porto, Mercato and Pendino districts was definitively approved by ministerial decree on 4 April 1949: “the new via Marittima was traced behind the Caserma Bianchini, and the Fish Market ended up being relegated to the port’s infrastructural system alone, in denial of the original idea of its designer”¹². The wartime destruction of the lower districts had prompted a chain of urban consequences: “the massive destructions of the Second World War that affected the lower quarters of the city would lead to the cession of the destroyed areas and of the lots near the shoreline to port infrastructure, to which the destiny of the city’s industrial development would in part be entrusted”¹³. 

The same severance was restated as fact in the planning record: “by tracing Via Marina upstream of Caserma Bianchini, Cosenza seals the fate of his first project, the Fish Market, definitively linking it to the port’s infrastructure and separating it from the city”¹⁴. The interior square conceived as the eastern hinge between sea and city became the operational floor of a port enclave.

The building in this period took on the figure of suspense, “whose first ambition is to find the present by provisionally cutting it off from the past and the future and, more precisely, by forgetting the future inasmuch as the latter is identified with the return of the past”¹⁵. The wholesale function continued in the post-war envelope. The spatial and urban ambition was suspended indefinitely, and the suspension would last seventy years. A consequence of infrastructure decisions made by its author.

In 1955, a programme of extraordinary maintenance was drawn up for the building, but it was never carried out; a second project followed in 1963, reinterpreting the formal contents of the original work; a third, in 1978, proposed two new blocks at the heads intended to “revise the formal choices of the original project”¹⁶. Over twenty-three years the building received three different readings of what it needed and what it might become, from the same hand that had built it, each failing to reach construction.

The three proposals were drafted against the grain of the building’s actual trajectory. The 1955 maintenance addressed the post-war fabric in its existing condition; the 1963 reinterpretation introduced a formal critique of that same fabric; the 1978 extension presupposed a functional growth that the wholesale market had ceased to require, with the 1972 master plan already foreseeing the displacement of the general markets and the reassignment of the lot to the eastward expansion of the port¹⁷. In place of any of these revisions, the building received a different transformation through the spontaneous creation of iron canopies along the square front, assembled by the market operators to extend their working surfaces under cover, producing the only effective physical change of the period¹⁸.

The building at the close of this phase lay in a state of complete abandonment, its function displaced by planning, its material form shaped by use rather than by any of the authorial revisions that had failed to reach it.

In 1991 the attempt by the Ente Autonomo Porto to acquire the land and demolish the building was averted by a broad mobilisation of Neapolitan civil society, which led to the imposition of a heritage protection order under Law 1089/39¹⁹. Through the 2000s, a maintenance intervention cleaned the surfaces and produced, for the first time since the war, a presentation of the fabric as an object of attention. What had appeared as a dirty shed offered the dazzling image of the work’s primitive whiteness²⁰. The interior remained in a state of operational compromise, and the wholesale market continued to operate within the post-war envelope until February 2010. On that occasion, the sales hall became the setting for VB66, the sixty-sixth performance of Vanessa Beecroft. Forty girls painted in black occupied the tables alongside plaster fragments recalling the recovery of bodies in the ancient city of Pompeii²¹. The tables built to receive fish at dawn now held painted bodies arranged for a single night of photography. The work reactivated the building’s spatial proposition in a mode its history had neither prepared for nor precluded.

Despite the concerted efforts of local residents and the repeated protests organised by traders operating within the market, the closure of the Fish Market in June 2013 marked its final operational event (fig. 7). In accordance with the relocation programme of the Municipality of Naples, wholesale fish trading was transferred to the Agro-Food Centre at Volla, a town near Naples. After the closure the hall became a shelter occupied at intervals by homeless people.

In the architectural reading of the unhomely, this records: “the return of the suppressed programme: the eruption of uses that the building was not designed to host and that its architecture cannot absorb without transformation”²² (fig. 8). The rationalist silhouette remained in opposition to Vesuvius, encircled by the accumulations of junkspace that characterise this urban landscape on the periphery of the port. These accumulations were further exacerbated by the prevailing social hardship that the city elected to overlook. If the Fish Market had once been a herald of modernisation “junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout”²³. 

The rhythm of this prolonged suspension belongs to what has been described as the “industrialization of forgetting”²⁴. An acceleration through which events lose their duration and collapse into brief moments of mediated visibility. Each intervention in this period – the restoration of the 2000s, the single VB66 night, the closure of 2013 – was a moment of visibility followed by renewed invisibility. After June 2013 the building was no longer operational. The situation would change again after 2024.

Since 2024, the building has been undergoing a restoration and valorisation project²⁵, after the entire façade was charred by a fire two years earlier. 

This project – still in course – will ensure its physical recovery – without yet having identified a new function for it (fig. 9). This additional state of suspension continues to define it as a vague²⁶ space: a structure that is present but inactive, preserved but uninhabited, well protected yet meaningless in the contemporary city. The intervention, described by its authors as a “philological restoration”²⁷ aims at the recovery of the original spatiality by imposing the reopening of the longitudinal slit in the ceiling, the reinstatement of the inner false ceiling, the removal of post-war closures and incongruous additions, in addition to the reopening of the skylights in the sales room floor, which had only been in existence for a few years after the opening of the building²⁸. The philological approach adopted by the intervention represents a rigorous engagement with the demands of conserving a modernist envelope subjected to decades of alteration, and its explicit acknowledgment of the constraints imposed by available funding is itself a form of methodological transparency.

The project also faces constructional limits acknowledged by its authors. Available funding will cover the restoration of only part of the longitudinal section; once completed, this fragment will serve as a demonstration of what the entire building could look like, should further resources be secured. 

In the meantime, the remainder of the structure will be left in its current state of disrepair²⁹.

A paradox that the author himself had predicted. In his writing on the architecture of markets, Luigi Cosenza stated that “one factor, however, governs every type of market: its sizing must in no case be calibrated to present demand; rather, its volumes must be capable of future expansion. 

It is therefore necessary to anticipate both the possibility and the spatial provision for appropriate enlargements, to conceive an original module, complete with services and installations, and to plan its extension in area and volume across an entire cycle of economic development of the district or territory”³⁰. This principle could therefore reverse the current restoration’s logic. By way of contrast, his design theory presupposes growth in modules calibrated to the economic cycle of the surrounding area. The choice of a small contemporary addition, conceived as the initial module of a renewed cycle, could act as a financial  and civic catalyst. This would attract the further resources needed to complete the building’s restoration, revitalising abandoned urban fringe in the process.

The current project – through the decisions taken by the administration – ignores the building’s civic role. While the Fish Market will physically re-emerge from the works partially restored, its function will remain suspended without a clear definition of its future role in the city once the scaffolding has been dismantled.

However, the renewed meaning that could be given to that form cannot be sought elsewhere, with the risk of finding “a lost past again by forgetting the present, as well as the immediate past with which it tends to be confused, in order to reestablish a continuity with the older past, to eliminate the ‘compound’ past to the advantage of a ‘simple’ past”³¹. The Fish Market’s “compound” past requires to consider all its ups and downs, from the 1935 building and the reconstruction of 1943-1949 to the unrealised plans of 1955, 1963 and 1978; the makeshift canopies of 1978; the renovation works of the 2000s; and the VB66 event of 2010, right up to its closure in 2013. The “simple” past the project proposes to recover, is the 1935 building.

Before any intervention, we must ask ourselves: what do we wish to preserve of the city, and why?³²

The Market has already begun to function as a civic banner, the visible sign that the administration is taking care of it. In this guise it risks becoming a monument hybridised by memories of the past – or a sign victim of its own hybris³³. Accepting oblivion means refusing the demand for a single, purified image. It does not entail erasing the building’s contradictions but recognising that they cannot be resolved within a single, purified image which only supports historical memory. This is also because memory and oblivion are not opposed and “praise oblivion is not to revile memory; even less is it to neglect remembrance, but rather to recognize the work of oblivion in the first one and to spot it in the second. Memory and oblivion in some way have the same relationship as life and death"³⁴. The more precise formulation could be that “oblivion is the life force of memory”³⁵.

The five seasons traced so far – construction, reconstruction and severance, unrealised returns, abandonment, partial restoration – have left the Fish Market saturated with incompatible claims. Even assuming that restoration work will be completed in the future for the entire building – partially averting the renewed risk of neglect that once again looms over it – a sixth season that limited itself to perfecting the philological image would only freeze that saturation, confirming what hauntological analysis identifies as a “failure of the future”³⁵  oriented toward “a tomorrow based on a non-existent past”³⁷.

If oblivion has continually animated the life of the Fish Market across its five seasons, then it seems consequential to adopt it as the project’s tool of choice for the purpose of restoring the building’s role within the city. Oblivion, used methodologically, is the operation that decides which of those inherited claims must be allowed to recede so that others can orient the building toward a future that is not the repetition of its origins. It is a process of care and selection akin to that of a gardener, since “memories are like plants: there are those that need to be quickly eliminated in order to help the others burgeon, transform, flower”³⁸.

Every intervention on a historic building performs this precise selective work. It determines what should be preserved, what can be permitted to fade and what must be removed to make way for something new. The rhetoric of fidelity to the original usually conceals this process; a more honest approach would recognise its similarity to gardening and the necessity of pruning.

Such an operation is not neutral, and the Tschumian formulation makes its stakes explicit: “there is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no architecture without program. By extension, there is no architecture without violence”³⁹. The necessary violence involves suspending the obligation to honour every modernist and innovative promise that the building once embodied. Instead, it should be treated as a contemporary urban device whose value depends on what it can still offer the city. In this sense, forgetting is the condition for remembering it differently, as an infrastructure that can still shape civic life.

By choosing what to forget and what to remember, we let the spatial intelligence of the Fish Market become the real object of memory, and oblivion becomes the instrument that clears the ground around it. The through-running plan between city and port, the interior square, the threshold position on the ancient coastal road – these are the elements to be carried forward (fig. 10). The modernising rhetoric that once framed it as an emblem of progress, the paralysing aura of a canonical work and the ambition of restoring the building as it was, are, by contrast, what must be allowed to fade.

Treated as a project tool, oblivion does not lead to a single reuse scenario for the Fish Market; it opens several: as a civic hybrid, the building could house public functions together with light programmes tied to the daily life of the surrounding districts. As a cultural infrastructure, it could host scheduled events of the kind VB66 briefly demonstrated in 2010. As a hinge between the historic city and the Marinella waterfront regeneration, it could reactivate the through-running plan through contemporary uses of space. Each direction preserves the building's spatial identity and releases it from the wholesale function the city has abandoned. This building must embody the third figure of oblivion: the beginning or better, the re-beginning that “aspires to find the future again by forgetting the past, to create the conditions for a new birth that, by definition, opens up into every possible future without favouring a single one”⁴⁰.

To drink from Lethe, in this case, means letting go what the building once was – a wholesale fish market and the historical legacy attached to that function – so that it may assume an active role in the contemporary city. It also means accepting that certain conditions – or configuration – cannot and should not be recovered. To drink from Mnemosyne means carrying forward, into whatever programme of reuse is eventually defined, the “a-typological"⁴¹ spatial intelligence of the through-running plan, the civic ambition of an infrastructure conceived as a modern square, and the recognition that the building has always hosted events it did not anticipate. “Memory and oblivion stand together, both are necessary for the full use of time”⁴²; and the full use of the Fish Market’s time requires choosing what to forget as carefully as what to retain.

Working with oblivion in this way means viewing the five seasons as a projective threshold where the task is no longer to save it from the ravages of time, but to choose, consciously, what to forget in order for it to be remembered differently – as part of the modern heritage that must not be lost again, nor simply musealised without a purpose. A sixth transitional phase is therefore proposed: drinking from the springs.