MATERIALS FOR THE RECOVERY OF WIDE RURAL HOLDINGS: The historical farms of Su Dominariu and Casal del Re

The paper is part of a research carried on by the DICAAR about the Rural Landscapes of Sardinia and concerns in particular the construction of an operational plan for the design strategies in these contexts. On this issue, a survey scale focused on the rural farmstead assumes a renewed centrality in the relationship between project and sustainable development. In this regard, the farm structure becomes an interesting case study to investigate the issues of multifunctionality and circularity within the rural landscape and an opportunity to rethink about some lack of guidelines within the planning issues. The historical rural farms represents a palimpsest of historical stratifications of the buildings, realized to satisfy the necessary and instrumental needs of the various activities that had been taken place on the long-term. Su Dominariu and Casal del Re, two wide rural holdings of inland Sardinia, represent two emblematic cases of such transformations. The former is a complex result of successive stratifications linked to the installation of a nineteenth-century agricultural colony, which was then converted into a large riding school. The latter was an agricultural estate built in a former common ground: a series of additions and overlaps of new outbuildings have profoundly transformed the original features. The research aims to constitute an instrumental corpus about the history of the construction of these large rural 'holders': specifically investigating their relationship with the ground and the construction techniques, the elements of the buildings and their design strategies with respect to the site topography. This is for the understanding of a possible model of circularity of the economy on a local scale that shall better understand the principles of necessity linked to contemporary agricultural production. In fact, the redeveloped farm can once again become the minimum unit for reactivating the countryside through virtuous processes of recycling local resources, as their constructive history say.