British sculptor Anish Kapoor has designed a smooth and rim-like entrance for a subway station in Naples, Italy. 

On September 11, 2025, the project, named Monte Sant'Angelo Subway Station, will be opened by Campania President Vincenzo De Luca and EAV President Umberto De Gregorio.

As part of the urban and cultural revitalization of Naples' Traiano district, Anish Kapoor was asked to design a station for the new underground metro system in 2003. 

The construction of Monte Sant'Angelo Station and its accompanying Traiano entrance marked the start of a project that would take the next 20 years.

The station is a striking example of the collaboration between architecture and sculpture, which has long been a major theme in Kapoor's work. 

Kapoor's work both creates and holds the new space in which it is experienced, starting with his early pigment works that rose from the floor, biomorphic and architectural, fully formed yet made of materials whose fragility left them on the verge of formlessness, and continuing with his monumental public works like Cloud Gate in Chicago, a seamless mirrored form that absorbs and reflects everything around it.

Three key motifs of Kapoor's work—the legendary item, the body, and the void—have come together at Monte Sant'Angelo station in a more powerful way than before. Made of weathering steel and ground swells, the university entrance to the station is classic, raw, and labial; it looks as though it offers a drop into the underworld as it does a train station entry to transport you on your daily journey.

The opposite of this engrossing drop can be seen at the Traiano entry, where the steel aperture is smooth, tubular, rim-like, and clean. In a sculpture that is not an object in the landscape but rather is connected, rooted, and a part of it, Kapoor reverses upwards and downwards, turning internal space inside out as he does in so much of his work. The two entrances and exits of Kapoor's Monte Sant'Angelo station are shaped like apertures, with architecture and sculpture acting as physical organisms.

Working with Jan Kaplický and Amanda Levete from Future Systems, the tunnel walls were kept rough and elemental to maintain the work's singular integrity while adhering to Kapoor's distinctive topography of continuous and undistinguished interior and exterior. 

The porosity of the flesh is an embodiment of this architecture, which is a clash of the formal and utilitarian with the mythic and beautiful. It is architecture and art like nothing before.

"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," said Anish Kapoor.

Anish Kapoor, who was born in Mumbai in 1954, is regarded as one of the most prominent modern artists in the world. 

His work is permanently shown in some of the most significant international collections and museums, and he has held significant solo exhibitions throughout the world since representing Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale (1990), when he received the Premio Duemila and the Turner Prize (1991). 

Many of his public works have become iconic monuments, and he is becoming more and more well-known for his sculptures that blur the lines between architecture and art.

All images in the article: Anish Kapoor, Monte Sant'Angelo Station. Naples, Italy. Photograph by Amedeo Benestante. © Anish Kappor. All rights reserved, DACS - SIAE, 2023.

> via Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor Naples station weathering steel