Research of Historical-Typological Consistency Criteria for Farm Building Design: the Model of Analysis

The design of contemporary farm buildings often subordinates quality and aesthetic features to economic aspects, thus leading to poor landscape consistency and compatibility. Historic rural buildings, on the contrary, are expression of an accumulation of empirical knowledge broadly associated with high architectural quality. Therefore, based on the theoretical principle that they have remarkable potentials to contribute with useful elements to the design of contemporary buildings, and on the awareness that the design process is also necessarily and substantially determined by technological, economic and functional variables, this paper presents a research model proposed by the authors as a tool for the analysis of the architectural characters of both historical and contemporary rural buildings, as well as the meta-design of new construction and transformation of contemporary rural buildings. In particular, the work focuses on the general structure of this model, whose goal is to identify historical-typological consistency criteria for rural building design, by illustrating its main modules and their interconnected analytic and interpretative phases. The modules of physiognomical characterization and functional characterization of rural buildings aim at providing the module which focuses on a case-study with fundamental analysis tools; moreover, they directly contribute to the above-mentioned goal, by means of their more general value.