Anti-urban Sardinia. Imperfect principles of the nuragic city

In a historical moment of profound discontinuity where processes of globalization and intensive construction narcotize places, looking towards the archaic cultures’architectures can reveal some universal principles and potential answers for the contemporary project. The main aim is to rediscover an original knowledge for the construction of a sustainable and coherent alternative to the landscape. In this sense, Sardinia represents one of the most interesting cases in the Mediterranean basin. It is the place where the Nuragic culture has been able to create singular architectures: almost eight thousand truncated cone towers, the nuraghi, with small scattered villages. Furthermore, the water places, the sacred wells, the necropolises, the domus the janas, symbolic and sacred spaces, the places of the production as well (lithic, ceramic, and metallurgical industry) has created a still perceptible system which has determined a dense network of territorial connections. This is a different form of the city, a sort of city-territory, an alternative to its traditional compact concept. The paper intends to propose a reflection on the composition of the Nuragic city that can contain in itself substantial principles. The Nuragic culture shows us a particular type of sustainable intelligence in generating and building spaces with persistent elements which go beyond time and pursue that value defined as eternally current.