Progetto e continuità. Forme e tipi dell’abitare in Sardegna e nel Mediterraneo [Project and continuity. Forms and types of living in Sardinia and in the Mediterranean area]

The School of Architecture of Cagliari has dedicated considerable efforts to study the forms of landscape, urban settlements and building typologies, interpreting them as fundamental tools of analytical knowledge for any transformation approach of places. Starting from a well-established research activity on “minor” settlements in Sardinia, which was later extended to some countries of the Mediterranean area, a number of design experiences have been carried out (teaching, competitions, applied research projects) on margin contexts and on rural landscapes of the region, in addition to places of particular interest in some areas of Maghreb (Algeria and Morocco in particular). The inter-scale knowledge of the forms and types of settlement, understood as an integral part of the project, allowed us to define a framework of settlement invariants, recurring features and specific places. This framework constitutes the system of continuity references onto which we can inscribe the new sense interpretations of landscapes under transformation, in a scenario that is continually stretched between the memory of what already exists and the invention of what will be. The project, therefore, is used to conceive and produce new territorial structures, new habitats, according to an idea of long-lasting landscape and settlement palimpsest and, in this sense, it becomes a research tool on the transformation potential of places inside a process framework that is not univocally and definitively determined. In this sense and to a certain extent, the proposed experiences follow the idea of Álvaro Siza on the role of architecture as something that “already exists (...)” and that “(...) is only waiting to emerge” (Siza, 1993). Architecture is therefore not seen as “(...) the repeated production of aesthetic objects” (Frampton, 1987) but, rather, as a relational tool.