Albergo
The 'Real Albergo dei Poveri' (Royal Hotel for the poor) was built by Carlos III, the bourbon King of Naples and Sicily, to lock up 8,000 destitute citizens and clear the streets of Naples. Carlos's alms house complex was never completed; the extraordinary panopticon church at its centre - with its five naves to provide Mass simultaneously to five segregated populations was never finished. Then as now the Albergo was out of sync with, and set apart from, the city. Even today when stepping out from a silent Albergo room onto a balcony above Naples, the noise, fumes and humidity of the frenetic World Heritage Site comes as a shock.
Built some years before Jeremy Bentham conceived of a panopticon prison, the church was the only place where Carlos's inmates could come together. While it allowed the celebrants to see all, it also reinforced the regime's and the church's view of a God that is all seeing and knowing, and attempted to control the inmates psyches as well as their bodies.
The five segregated sectors were for boys, girls, men and women - with a fifth for the public and administrators. Families were split up on arrival. Many would spend their lives in the 'hotel' from youth or even birth. When three of the five wings were complete the Albergo boasted a 300 metre long façade and 750,000 cubic metres of space making it, apparently, the second largest public building in Europe to this day. In 1980 an earthquake killed some elderly residents and revealed that, in the rush to build, many of the arches weren't connected to the walls. The painstaking reconstruction of these arches using tufa stone and traditional techniques is now underway. Five hundred million euros have been spent on this restoration, without resolving circulation, services or parking, or first securing a new use or client.