Naples opens landmark subway station designed by Anish Kapoor

9 September 2025

On 11 September, President of Campania Vincenzo De Luca, accompanied by EAV President Umberto De Gregorio, will formally open artist Anish Kapoor’s Monte Sant’Angelo Subway Station in Naples. In 2003, Anish Kapoor was invited to create a station for the new underground metro system that would be a part of the urban and cultural regeneration of the Traiano district in the city of Naples. Work began on a project that was to span the next two decades in the creation of Monte Sant’Angelo Station and its comprising Traiano entrance.

The station is a remarkable symbiosis of sculpture and architecture, a dynamic that has always been a central force in Kapoor’s work. From his earliest pigment works that rose from the floor, biomorphic and architectural, completely formed yet comprised of material that’s fragility rendered it on the brink of formlessness; to his monumental public works such as Cloud Gate in Chicago, a seamless mirrored form, absorbing and reflecting all that surrounds it, Kapoor’s work both holds and creates the new space in which it is experienced.

At Monte Sant’Angelo station three integral themes of Kapoor’s practice have coalesced in more potent form than ever; the mythological object, the body and the void. The university entrance to the station is made from weathering steel and swells from the ground, archetypal, raw and labial, it appears to offer a descent into the underworld as much as an entrance to a train-station to take you on your daily journey. The Traiano entrance presents the inverse to this absorbing descent; here its aperture in steel is rendered smooth, tubular, rim-like and clean. As in so much of Kapoor’s work, interior space is turned inside out, he reverses upwards and downwards in a sculptural work that is not an object in the landscape, but rather is joined, rooted and part of the landscape. The two entrances/exits of Kapoor’ Monte Sant’Angelo station take the form of objects as openings – sculpture and architecture as bodily organism.

Kapoor’s unique topography of continuous and undistinguished interior and exterior has been adhered to within the station as well, where working with Jan Kaplický and Amanda Levete from Future Systems, tunnel walls have been kept rough and elemental, keeping a singular integrity to the entirety of the work. This is an architecture embodied with the porosity of the body – a collision of the functional and formal with the aesthetic and the mythic. It is art as architecture as never seen before.

Anish Kapoor said: “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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