Terramia, meaning “my land” in Italian, explores the relationship between people, place and belonging in Bagnoli, Naples. Rather than treating the former industrial area as an empty site for redevelopment, the project reads it as a territory shaped by social, economic and political histories, and asks how architecture can support its reconnection with place and identity. Building on Bagnoli’s existing structures, local knowledge and productive heritage, Terramia proposes a circular system in which agricultural waste is transformed into bio-based building materials, including mycelium panels. Material production becomes both an architectural strategy and a means of creating local employment. Spaces for making, learning and gathering form the basis of a new productive landscape, allowing inhabitants to participate in the transformation of their surroundings. Rather than erasing Bagnoli’s industrial past, the project reinterprets its productive character through a more circular, adaptable and collective future.
Design idea
Bagnoli is a former industrial territory shaped by environmental damage, economic decline, and decades of unfinished regeneration. As the transformation of the area has often been driven by institutional and top down decisions, local communities have organised to defend the territory and demand a voice in its future. Terramia responds to this condition through a community based design approach, giving the community an active role in deciding, producing, and transforming the spaces they seek to reclaim. Rather than proposing a fixed plan, the project sees architecture as an open ended process, transforming resistance into participation, and participation into reclamation.
Panel Architecture - Temporality
Fungi Architecture
Bagnoli’s transformation begins with its existing resources. Once a predominantly agricultural and coastal territory, the area was later transformed by heavy industry and left with a fragmented and unfinished landscape.
Terramia reconnects the site to a local cycle of production by transforming agricultural waste into a resource for mycelium-based panels. Fungi becomes both a material and a productive process, linking local waste to new forms of architectural production.
The project reuses the existing industrial areas as spaces for this new production, allowing the former infrastructure to support a flexible and temporary architectural system.
The result is a circular and temporal system in which waste becomes material, production becomes architecture, and architecture can adapt to the changing needs of the community.
Site Organisation
The main production spaces remain as permanent structures, while the surrounding fungi based spaces are open to change and adaptation. The site plan is designed as an evolving system that can grow, expand, and accommodate new structures and activities over time, responding to changing production processes and community needs. Rather than creating a fixed masterplan, Terramia proposes a flexible landscape where architecture can be continuously added, transformed, and reconfigured.
Old Hangar Structure
10 Years Later
The existing red building, formerly a steel hangar and now a landmark of the site, is transformed into a Community House, preserving its identity while giving it a new social function. Its internal scenarios remain open to change, allowing different activities and uses to evolve over time. Fungi based structures are introduced within and around the Community House, creating adaptable spaces that can be added, transformed, and reconfigured according to changing community needs.
Construction Technique
The construction system is organised into three temporal spans: long-term (5–10 years), medium-term (2–5 years), and short-term or seasonal (3–6 months). Each span uses a different level of adaptability, from more permanent timber and mycelium structures to lightweight, removable, and reusable elements. This allows the architecture to grow, change, and adapt over time while reducing material waste.
Community House
