Abstract
The industrialization after World War II marked a severe discontinuity between rural heritage and contemporary farm buildings. Rural landscapes have thus become more and more uniform; historical buildings are often abandoned and degraded, while contemporary buildings are often disconnected from their surrounding environment. Besides aiming to protect and restore rural heritage—more and more acknowledged as a common good contributing to societal identity—attention should be paid to increasing the quality of new buildings, a crucial issue to improve landscape quality in everyday landscape contexts. Based on a series of previous studies carried out to develop and test a robust methodology allowing the analysis of the main formal features of rural buildings, organized in a comprehensive framework known as the FarmBuiLD model (Farm Building Landscape Design), this study aims to perform an integrated and compared analysis of sets of traditional and contemporary rural buildings through experimental trials on an Italian case study. In particular, the study focuses on defining and measuring indexes allowing the quantification of the level of consistency of contemporary buildings with the traditional typologies. A contemporary farm building is evaluated based on the distance of each of its formal features from those which proved to be representative of the corresponding traditional building type, evaluated through a cluster analysis of the typological characters of traditional buildings in the study area. The results showed that different degrees of dissonance can be detected. Similarities have been found, in particular with respect to the shape of buildings and their closure with regards to landscape. The major dissonances are related to the perception of buildings as flattened on the ground, due to their excessively elongated shape, and in the case of buildings completely permeable to landscape, this being necessary for structural purposes and for the type of use of historic buildings. The expected impact of this study is to provide designers and planners with indicators allowing the evaluation, on an objective basis, of the level of consistency of new buildings with local rural heritage, thus supporting both design phases and project evaluation as well as building management processes (maintenance, restoration, extension, change in use, etc.).
Highlights
Definition of a set of parameters derived from the FarmBuiLD method for the physiognomic characterization of both historical and contemporary rural buildings (Section 2.1)
The 70th percentiles of the absolute values of the differences ∆HWk, ∆HLk, ∆EVk, ∆EWk, ∆BFOk between each parameter of every k-th historic building belonging to cluster j and the corresponding coordinate of its centroid were adopted as significance boundaries for that cluster. Named these boundaries xj, yj, zj, rj, sj, the following indicators were defined: δHWij = ∆HWij − xj δHLij = ∆HLij − yj δEVij = ∆EVij − zj δEWij = ∆EWij − rj δBFOij = ∆BFOij − sj a positive value of one of these indicators means that the corresponding parameter of the contemporary building under study lies outside the proximity interval defined for the average parameter of the cluster
29% of contemporary buildings have dij below 70th percentile of dh with cluster 1, while 22% with cluster 2: these cases were identified as assonances
Summary
The community has been replaced with agglomerations of single elements, ignoring one another, fighting, competing, or at best trying to get along with the neighbors’ [6]. This has happened in the rural landscape in which architectural artifacts responsive to the needs of economy and fast construction processes have been added to the existing assets, for the purposes of an industrialized productivity [7]. New buildings with urban functions are intertwined with the former They can be houses [8,9] or industries, which in some cases have replaced historic farm buildings through demolition and reconstruction, in a sort of ‘new rural urbanism’ [5]. The result consists of transitional rural landscapes, where historic architecture has been emptied of its function and visibility and recognition
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