STEMpark at Masseria Ferraioli
A school without walls in the largest confiscated property in the Metropolitan City of Naples
We all, more or less, have a clear idea of what it means to walk through one of our city centers, where hotels and restaurants occupy much of the scene. Encountering instead a rural context, even if close to the city, is an exceptional experience: in these spaces one feels a particular sense of quiet, visual, olfactory, acoustic.
Moving away from the center, where the tourist crowd thins out, this sudden encounter with the countryside finds in peripheral cities a social fabric of great interest. It is here that the threshold spaces between urban and rural gain depth, and the word "periphery" acquires a less pale hue. In these places, whose residual use is typically agricultural, the range of people one interacts with expands and the countryside ceases to be a simple place of contemplation: it becomes a place of action, where anthropological experiences take shape, evolve, and generate a unique social fabric. "Periphery" thus takes on a new meaning, a border territory where everything is still to be explored.
To live the countryside for as long as possible, because "growing your own food is a revolutionary act." Masseria Ferraioli is the largest property confiscated from organized crime in the Metropolitan City of Naples: twelve hectares of nature and social life, where amateur and professional growers, school groups, and associations promote the reappropriation of the confiscated space through participation.
Salvatore Scandurra, Architect, AIDNA
Although childhood is only a distant memory, as children we dreamed of an open-air school, without walls. Let us now imagine a place devoted to the pleasure of learning and to escape into the boundless countryside, rejecting the solid school walls of classrooms and the dreary benches of faded wood.
The stempark at Masseria Ferraioli is a sequence of freely accessible rooms whose only visible boundary is the sky and the surrounding vegetation.
Our team of workers is mostly made up of ordinary people, former prisoners, in paths of social reintegration, and a couple of kittens, who, despite having no experience in construction, show an innate manual and organizational ability in carrying out our space, using basic tools and materials recovered on site. Dry-laid tufa bricks act as a trace, drawing on the ground the simplest of layouts, a square 12 meters per side; in the same way we outline six internal rooms, three on one side and three on the other, while in the center a wide corridor will not only serve as access to them, but will also allow everyone to meet, as during a cheerful break time. At the suggestion of some mothers, there will be no grass in the classrooms, but a layer of white gravel to avoid getting dirty, and the only limit will be the 300 boxwood plants that will protect the lessons once grown. Inside, scientific experiments will be carried out, there will be strange objects to play with and interact with while learning the laws of nature, and a small table to play scopa with Neapolitan cards. At times, it will be possible to see a rooster escaping the noise of the nearby coop in search of some peace.
Antonio Soreca, Architect, AIDNA
