A collaboration between AL_A and Anish Kapoor, Naples’ visually-striking metro station combines sculptural entrances with raw, elemental interiors to create an immersive public artwork.
Designed by AL_A and Anish Kapoor, Monte Sant’Angelo Subway Station in Naples has been developed over more than two decades and forms part of the wider regeneration of the Traiano district. The project forms part of Naples’ ‘Art Stations’ programme, which invites internationally-recognised artists and architects to collaborate on landmark infrastructure.
Conceived as a sculptural response to movement, matter, and mythology, the station incorporates a pair of contrasting entrances that act as portals between surface and subterranean worlds. At the university end of the site, a swelling, weathered steel structure rises from the ground as if from the volcanic terrain itself. By contrast, the Traiano entrance takes on a smoother, more tubular geometry; clean-edged and rim-like, evoking a descent shaped by light and surface rather than mass and matter. Together, the entrances propose an architectural duality of ascent and descent, inside and outside, drawing users into an immersive and tactile spatial experience.
Inside, there is a rough, elemental quality to the tunnel walls, reinforcing the continuity between exterior form and interior volume. Rather than finishing the space with polished architectural materials, the concrete surfaces express the station’s identity as both infrastructure and inhabitable sculpture.
The result is a porous, organism-like structure in which functional components, such as staircases and circulation spaces, are seamlessly integrated into the sculptural whole. This interplay of art and architecture is characteristic of Kapoor’s work, which often explores spatial inversion and material ambiguity at monumental scales.
Anish Kapoor commented, “In the city of Mount Vesuvius and Dante’s mythical entrance to the Inferno, “I found it important to try and deal with what it really means to go underground.”
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