Overview
The Ex Mercato Ittico is one of the most architecturally significant buildings on the Naples waterfront — the first major work of Luigi Cosenza, designed in 1929 and completed in the following decade. The reinforced concrete market hall, sitting at Piazza Duca degli Abruzzi beside the port, is a restrained and technically precise example of Italian rationalism: long clear spans, a disciplined structural grid, and a direct relationship with the working life of the city’s harbour. For decades it stood unused, its hall dark and its structure quietly deteriorating while the seafront around it was redeveloped.
The Comune di Napoli’s strategic decision to restore and repurpose the building — as a new public institution serving the city — is the framework for this project: an integrated package of heritage restoration, normative compliance, and full MEP upgrade, classified under Og2 (restoration works) and Og11 (plant and systems), delivered through an executive design and construction management contract awarded to GPA as lead of a specialist RTP.
The Building
Luigi Cosenza (1905–1984) is one of the central figures of Italian modernism and the defining architectural voice of twentieth-century Naples. The Mercato Ittico was his first built work of significance: a building that solved a practical problem — a centralized wholesale fish market for the port — with a structural logic that has aged better than most of its contemporaries. The concrete frame, the disciplined fenestration, the clear separation of structure and enclosure: these are not stylistic choices but engineering decisions that give the building its quiet authority.
Heritage status and Soprintendenza oversight govern all interventions. Every structural element to be touched — every repair, every consolidation, every new penetration — requires documented approval from the fine arts authority before work proceeds. The BIM model serves here as the primary evidence base: a georeferenced record of existing conditions that the Soprintendenza can interrogate before authorizing changes, and a documentation archive that survives the project team.
BIM Coordination Scope
The federated model covers three disciplines — Architecture (AR), Structural Engineering (ST), and MEP (IM) — each maintained as separate Revit 2024 models that are combined for coordination and clash detection. Rhino 8 handles any complex geometry that exceeds Revit’s native modelling capability; PRO_SAP and CDS carry the structural analysis; TerMus BIM manages the energy performance calculations required for normative compliance certification.
Object classification follows UNI 8290-1’s four-level technological system (Classi di Unità Tecnologica → Unità Tecnologiche → Classi di Elementi Tecnici → Elementi Tecnici), providing a consistent WBS that links every model element to both the construction programme and the cost schedule. The building is georeferenced in UTM84-33N at its exact site coordinates, ensuring that all models, survey overlays, and utility records share a common reference frame.
The pGI (Piano di Gestione Informativa) authored for this project defines the full information management protocol: CDE structure, file naming convention, LOD matrix per discipline and phase, verification levels (V1 internal check → V2 coordination review → V3 client validation), and the IFC 2x3 exchange format for all formal deliverables.
Phased Delivery — Stralci
The construction scope is divided into four sub-lots (Stralci), each representing a phase of the work and progressing from the most urgent structural interventions to the full fit-out and systems installation:
Stralcio 1 — the first phase of structural and architectural consolidation. Completed, with SAL (Stato di Avanzamento Lavori) stages documented and verified against the BIM model.
Stralcio 2.1 — main structural intervention phase. Mid-execution as of 2026, with an additional variant (Risanamento Travi) identified during construction following detailed structural investigation of the existing concrete beams.
Stralcio 2.2 — foundation and excavation works. Active. Ground intervention in a dense urban waterfront context, with monitoring requirements tied to the proximity of the historic port infrastructure.
Stralcio 2.3 — final MEP and fit-out phase. Planned.
Construction management (Direzione dei Lavori) is carried out in BIM mode across all phases: SAL stages are defined and verified against the model, as-built conditions are recorded directly in Revit, and site deviations from the executive design trigger formal model updates before the next phase begins. The construction site generates a continuous photographic record — over nine thousand site photographs across twenty-five months — organized by date and location and linked to the phase structure in the project management system.
Structural Assessment — Risanamento Travi
During Stralcio 2.1, detailed structural investigation of the Cosenza concrete frame — including core sampling, reinforcement tracing, and carbonation testing — revealed a pattern of beam degradation that required a formal variant to the executive design. The Risanamento Travi (beam renovation) variant expanded the scope of structural interventions to address corrosion of reinforcement at beam soffits and at column-beam junctions, requiring revised structural calculations and an updated BIM model before construction could proceed.
Drone photogrammetry was used to document the beam condition at height — producing a photographic record of every beam in the hall that was registered against the model geometry and attached to the structural elements as linked documentation. The variant was submitted to and approved by both the client and the Soprintendenza, with the BIM model serving as the primary geometric reference for the scope change.
Clash Detection and MEP Coordination
Introducing new MEP systems — HVAC, electrical distribution, fire protection, plumbing — into a rationalist concrete building designed without them presents a coordination challenge that is simultaneously geometric and architectural: every service route must be threaded through a structure that was never intended to accommodate it, while the heritage constraint means that penetrations through primary structural members require Soprintendenza approval.
The Navisworks coordination model combines all three disciplinary models for systematic clash detection. Hard clashes between new service runs and the existing structural frame are identified and resolved before any installation work begins. The close tolerances of the Cosenza structure — where the depth of a concrete beam soffit may leave only centimetres of clearance for a duct — make automated clash detection at 20mm and 50mm thresholds a production requirement, not an optional quality check.
Soft clashes, where service routes violate minimum maintenance access clearances or conflict with architectural finishes, are reviewed in coordination meetings using the federated model as the shared reference. All resolved clashes are logged and the resolution documented in the CDE before the relevant construction package is issued.