A Quantitative Physiognomic Analysis of Contemporary Farm Buildings to Improve Awareness in Rural Planning

Ordinary citizens and stakeholders are gaining increasing awareness of rural landscapes as a common good, where architectural quality is an integral part of the environment. While historic rural buildings represent an acknowledged landscape value, this does not apply to contemporary buildings, which up to now have been considered service architecture to support the production of material goods. This study developed a method for analyzing the formal characteristics of contemporary farm building that adds quantitative aspects to the qualitative descriptions with the application of analytical tools. In particular, this work presents a validation and implementation of the methodological model FarmBuiLD (Farm Building Landscape Design) through application to contemporary rural buildings (constructed after World War II) in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, as well as a study of the relationships between the formal features and functional requirements of contemporary rural architecture. The results show how the contemporary rural architecture is diversified in terms of shape, relationship with the surrounding landscape, and articulation or compactness. Physiognomic clusters were defined on the basis of joint interpretation of the results. They allowed definition of the correspondences between physiognomic characteristics and specific functional requirements expressed by users of the rural landscape. This research also shows how the application of analytical tools can increase knowledge of contemporary farm buildings.