Paysage sans paysans : lectures de projet

Castiglioncello and Castelnuovo are border realities between Tuscany, Marche and Emilia-Romagna, presented as paradigms of the peculiar villages of the central Apennines, genetically belonging to the ramified system of medieval castles, and closely connected to an agricultural economy or to the strategic control of communication routes. During the 20th century they have been affected by a progressive process of depopulation and abandonment. The forma urbis of the two villages is characterized by the founding elements of civil and religious power, a primitive fortress and a small church. These are surrounded by the residential fabric, that has been shaped by the orography and by the family needs, staging a condition of reciprocity between town and agrarian landscape that is typical of these places. This contribution is the result of a research led by Maria Grazia Eccheli at the Department of Architecture in Florence and aims to present the role of the architectural design as a knowledge tool, able to highlight structural features of a settlement through a new small scale architectural ‘interlace’ of conservation, integration, addition, volumetric juxtapositions, alternations of solids and voids. Being able of reading such urban fragments it is possible to derive measures and rules of modern building and to achieve an architectural design suspended between old and new, not rhetorical or mimetic, nor fascinatingly contemplative, but responding with forms to contemporary life needs and resulting from a timeless, site-specific vocabulary.