Paesaggio costruito, risorse naturali e risparmio energetico tra evoluzione e tradizione. Built landscape, natural resources and energy saving between evolution and tradition

The complex morpho-typology of natural and built landscape could apparently look as a fairly variable environmental extent, specially in its contents linked to land and territorial use, but this appearance is far from reality: human transformation, with special regards to urban settlements and infra-structures, can deeply and substantially modify the sense of “perceived landscape”. Nevertheless, the transformative processes’ phenomena -environmentally congruent or inadequate- is not legible in a short-term temporal phase: analysis on different territorial areas at national level have demonstrated and exhibited large transformations concerning the built environment and, more widely, the social structure of these territories. Against an almost total immobility along past six centuries, is nowadays evident that trasformative “events” are often incoherent with the landscape consolidated identity. The new settlement and housing demand, with regards to recent urban rules and standards, can result in conflict with some of the environmental components in the landscape, with particular reference to the historical buildings and the related conservation problems; nonetheless the aim is not to stop the potential use of new technologies, just to follow a reductive principle of “conservatism without evolution”. We need to define the criteria to determine and govern the most significant contents in landscape design, to act according to evaluation of the sustainable relevance of new solutions, following the landscape local evolutive processes. The design methodology is focussed on the combination of the very different aspects and issues featuring the specific contexts: the consideration of regional social identity and composition, the high regard of local environmental resources, the adoption of strategic local guide lines and regulation tools’ referring to landscape re-qualification, energy efficiency and use of renewable energy sources, the general respect of natural and built environment to preserve climatic, atmospheric and visual impacts in urban contexts. The study of these sites involves the reconstruction of historical traces and marks, the typological evolution of urban textures, and the evaluation of current social, environmental and climatic components. It’s so possible to establish a reference framework to achieve an “operational reading”, that is the original matrix for subsequent design proposals. Climatic requirements and natural resources are therefore called to be combined with the need for new urban -socially attractive- places; this “site awareness”, according to a phenomenological approach, is able to reassemble, in a connected, recognizable and identifiable whole system, the fluxes of the fruition systems, from and to the emerging resources of built and natural surronding contexts. The presented study cases are a synthesis where tradition and innovation acquire different dimensions resulting in: new urban and attractive centers for local communities, new public and private conditions for individuals -with special care for public fruition in open green spaces and innovative, environmental friendly housing solutions-, long term effect actions for a sustainable development perspective where natural landscape preservation and traditional built resources are associated with the socio-economical evolution of local communities.