|
entry
Mar 2009
 There are other entries
about the general life and career of architect Lamont Young. (See
this link and this one.) You
will gather that none of Young’s grandiose plans from the 1880s—not the
metropolitana, not the
Venice Quarter, not the grand seaside resort in
Bagnoli—none of that came to fruition. It all shattered against the risanamento,
the great and drastic urban renewal of the city in the face of the
terrible cholera epidemics of the 1880s. At best, we have handed down
from Lamont Young, a few individual buildings, the most impressive of
which is the Aselmeyer Castle on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele (C.VE), in
these photos. Young had to give up on
his sweeping plans to rebuild entire sections of the city once it
became clear that the city council was going ahead with the risanamento. He, thus, concentrated
his efforts on putting up some individual buildings that still stand
today. In 1895, Young acquired the rights to build on sections of the
C.VE. (At the time, that street was almost bucolic and nothing like the
mass of buildings you see today.) Even then, his plans reached well
beyond what actually wound up being done. For example, he had come into
possession of the Villa Lucia in the Floridiana park in the Vomero section,
high above the C.VE. He proposed joining that property to the C.VE with
an elevator: you would have his Villa Santa Lucia at the top and a new
hotel, which he proposed to build, at the bottom.  After all was said and
done, he had to give up his plans for the new hotel (although
construction was partially completed and even today serves as a
conference and reception hall. (It is named for one “Bertolini,” who
acquired the building from Young in the early 1900s.) Young had to
settle for simply putting up as his own residence on the C.VE, the
building seen in these photos. It was built in 1902 and sold two years
later to banker, Carlo Aselmeyer, whose name the building still bears.
(More correctly, the name of the building is Castello Grifeo dei Principi di Partanna.)
Young moved away to the small isle of Gaiola
on the Posillipo coast. Architecturally, the
building is, quite simply, English Gothic (“Dracula Victorian,” as they
say) as are most of Young’s other works. (An exception is the
Neo-Renaissance Grenoble Institute on via Crispi.) That was the
greatest criticism levelled against him—his buildings don't look as if
they belong in Naples. (Well, that was the second greatest criticism;
the big one was that his sense of “city” was not Neapolitan; it
involved the
new concept of “urbanization” —moving people out of the center of town
(using his never-to-be-built metropolitans as the primary people
mover).
That may not have been Neapolitan, but that is, however, what
eventually happened, anyway, with the invention
of the automobile, with or without Lamont Young.) A fair criticism
would be that he thought Naples could eventually live from tourism. New
20th-century industry played no role in his thinking. In any event, the Aselmeyer Castle
still exists, but has been kept up only marginally at times. It has
long since been sub-divided into many different apartments and suffers
from the same problem that all condominiums do in Naples: you can’t get
everyone to agree on major repairs. The building has also been
architecturally defaced by the addition of two additions on either side
of the main entrance: cream-colored, smooth blocks of junk, not in
keeping with the rough-hewn stone of the rest of the building. back to alphabetical index to portal index for architecture and urban planning |