Places to Rethink: Urban Identity and Vernacular Architecture. A Case Study

Abstract

The landscape, natural and built in Italy today, is very different from idealization of the eighteenth-century travelers, who saw in 'beautiful country' a happy balance between nature and architecture. In some areas of the country, especially in the more industrialized and anthropized North, the identity of the place, threatened by forms (architectural, urban and infrastructural ...) conflicting, it is difficult to recognize, especially in the community who, unable to give the appropriate value to the proposed architecture, takes refuge in a formal decontextualized repertoire. The paper aims to analyze the urban evolution of Alessandria, a small town in northern Italy: a comparison between the historical centre and residential neighborhoods grown since the war, emerges as the building has lost its character of vernacular architecture, it will be unable to combine the contemporary with the place and its history. The contribution, without any presumption unlikely to formulate solutions to the question, would like to offer, with the classification of the building, an opportunity of reading the built landscape in which architecture, in the academic sense, if not almost track or not decisive to reverse the decline of the identity of the place.