THE USE OF RURAL SHAPES AND MATERIALS IN ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

Contemporary architecture is heavily conditioned by environmental protection requirements both in terms of containing the consumption of primary resources and employing energetically self-sufficient casings.
It is also due to these reasons that it more and more frequently draws shapes and materials from the rural world to perform the same functions, originally connected with farming, in civil architecture.
This leads to modifications and new connotations in this modern architecture that can be defined as “environmental” since aimed at lowering energy consumption and as, more generally, the exploitation of resources.
The study compares some recent civil architecture creations and projects with rural constructions, making special reference to greenhouses, which more than other constructions represent a clear application of solar energy use by adopting suitable covering materials.
The comparison highlights the similarities of some forms of casings, or part of them, with traditional farming greenhouses and the current tendency towards formal/energy and environmental applications also to buildings of considerable size, such as skyscrapers in metropolises.
Images and comparisons lead to more general considerations on the concept of architecture meant as artificial constructions made by men by using the materials provided by nature and assembled in a way to obtain an internal space separated from the external space and where different activities may be performed and environmental conditions may develop which are different from the external ones.
This leads us to an epistemological architecture that encloses all the typologies of architecture (civil, rural, industrial, etc.) and has its surroundings as the main reference, with natural materials and energy sources.

International Symposium on High Technology for Greenhouse System Management: Greensys2007

P. Dal Sasso, G. Ruggiero, G. Marinelli

glasshouse, greenhouses, greentowers, solar energy

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2008.801.32