MAPPING FOR THE PROJECT: METHODS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A “BESTIARY” OF THE MINOR RURAL HERITAGE OF SARDINIA

The knowledge of the historical stratification of the built environment requires exploring the literal meanings within the concept of heritage from different perspectives. The metaphor of the Bestiary, a systematic medieval collection of fantastic or unknown animals, is the interpretative tool for a process of mapping and taxonomic comparison of the settlement features and the building types of a rural heritage built in Sardinian countryside between the 19th and 20th centuries following the modernization and privatization processes of the rurality. An intertwined use of historical, toponymal, cartographic and satellite photography sources have allowed identifying and systematized a corpus of buildings and their landholdings whose actual distribution had not yet been put on the map and so, on an operational tool for a territorial understanding of their importance. The urgent need to give more meaning and quality to the contemporary landscape and rural architecture design in Sardinia finds in the gradual rediscovery of this unexpressed heritage a field of investigation for a better understanding of the relationship between architecture and landscape, both in terms of construction quality and consistency with the modification processes at different scales.