Behind the railway station of Napoli Centrale (Naples Central, at Piazza Garibaldi), in the district of Poggioreale, it is located the Centro Direzionale (Business Centre) of Naples, a modern urbanistic complex planned by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange in 1982. The skyscrapers of the Centre, even if they are not among the tallest ones, stand out very much from the fabric of the city (mainly horizontal) and are perfectly visible from each point in Naples.

The area of the Centre was previously almost deserted and marshy, crossed by the small river Volla. The Town Council of Naples assigned already in 1964 this area for building here the Directional Centre, designed for relieving traffic congestion from the city centre, where there was an abnormal concentration of public and private offices. Many projects had been prepared by the most important architects in Italy, but none of them were definitively approved until 1980, when the Town Council and the Construction Firms asked Kenzo Tange to prepare a volumetric plan that could coordinate into an unitary vision all the planning work done till that moment. On November 1982 Tange introduced the final plan and in 1985, after that all the administrative procedures had been completed, the work finally started.

Kenzo Tange has been one of the major architects and urbanists in the international postwar panorama, and the maximum exponent of the contemporary Japanese architecture. His most important works have been the city planning of Tokio in 1960 and the sports facilities for the Olympic Games of Tokio in 1964. In Italy, before Naples, he had already coordinated the projects for the Business Centre and the Trade Fair area of Bologna in 1975. His main cultural reference was the late work by Le Corbusier, by whom he continued the expressive research on the use of architectural bodies in an opposing and clashing way, then evolved to a very personal style, characterized by a plastic expressionism of strong impact.  [ More...]