Archaeology and nature: hyblean cultural landscape and territorial ...

“The loss of place, asserts Christian Norberg-Schulz, proceeds at an equal pace with the loss of the basic
language, of building customs and styles. Having impact above all is the loss of the basic language that,
independently of the local language, renders an architecture as close to life as possible. [...] Since the formal
language is based on qualitative knowledge, the prevalence of the measurable cancels it out” [4]
It therefore follows that a qualitatively appropriate understanding of the place is the binding foundation for the
realization of architectures in concord with aesthetic, existential, social and also symbolic values; the design
of the topos with its continuous transformations, in turn, must allow expressing the senses and meanings, as
well as the essence of city and social living, with the store of knowledge and traditions, acquired and passed
on.
The fascination exercised by the possibilities offered by progress in the scientific-mathematical field, spilling
over into technique, contributes to giving form to an expressivity that makes the curved line evolved and fluid,
apparently free, the emblem of the possibilities of contemporaneity.
Graphic elaboration, through digital manipulation with the continuous transformation of flow lines, besides
achieving a captivating aesthetics of images, transfers and explicates content and meanings linked to the
essence of places, to their history, to their traditions. Topology is the geometric science that allows managing
the soft forms of contemporary expression with rigorous algorithms; it “is the discipline of the relationships
that occur in the place and the space surrounding the place and does not recognise metrics”. [5]
The digital, with all the tools deriving from it, also offers the opportunity to translate what we thought
exclusively conceptual in plastic models; three-dimensional printing, multi-axis milling machines, are
instruments that, thanks to appropriate software, are able to give tactility to any form.
Consequently the representation, having expanded its expressive capacity, from the traditional to digital,
whose software, founded on mathematical algorithms, enable an articulated dialog between thought, hand
and project design, has acquired a wealth of elaborative possibilities that are close to natural processes.
Non-Euclidean subtended geometries, in this way, explicate complex structural forms, above all in the
contents, and therefore their potential is still to be researched in configurative-qualitative aspects rather than
in quantitative ones.
The ensemble of all these aspects, acting together on the random order of the process of planning the future
and with which we are confronted in the moment of cognitive exploration and graphic elaboration, are
determining in devising the process of developing the idea. They are precisely those which, identifying the
signs of the specificity of a place, allow, through the project configuration, to maintain their complex and
chaotic identity.
This approach to the problem, allowing architectonic form to emerge from the understanding and reflection
on the surrounding environment, in turn, may take the aspects linked to building techniques, to materials
usage and the morpho-typological features of the basic residential building of a determined context into
serious consideration. The relationships that, in this composition pathway, are established between
technological specificity and architectonic thought, tend towards experimentation that transforms intuition into
innovation. The environment system breaks in irrepressibly, no longer in defining sinuous forms, as in nature,
or conceptual, in relationship to the expectations of the social-economic system, but in the careful and
respectful attitude of a heritage that may not easily be renewed.
Fig. 5: Zaha Hadid, Competition for museum of Nuragic and Contemporary, Cagliari, 2006.
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