Re_Inhabiting Abandoned Settlements

This project deals with the issue of reinterpretation and renovation of the urban form of abandoned ruined settlements, endowed with architectural and landscape quality, in view of their possible reuse simultaneously aimed at their protection and valorization. The design approach is based on a point of view that considers the question of reuse as an extraordinary opportunity of “re-foundation” and reconfiguration of the form of city, according to its morphological and spatial structure, rather than only as a matter of methods and techniques of restoration and adaptation of its buildings and spaces to the new inhabiting needs as well as to new possible uses. Starting from the conviction that the reuse is the only way to preserve by the effects of abandonment this kind of artifacts - whose value of is not so much linked to the value of a single building but rather to that of the set of buildings that constitute them, namely to their mutual relations and to the relations established with the place - the theoretical aim of the work has been the identification of a principle of intervention that allowed us at the same time to establish a relation of “continuity” with the forms of the settlement without giving up their interpretation. The case study of the abandoned Greek village of Kita, connoted by its tower stone houses, is paradigmatic for the virtuality of its “unfinished” form - typical of the ruin-, available to be completed and re-interpreted, and for the potentialities linked to the extraordinary beauty of its territory, characterized and qualified by its suggestive presence. According to a morphological rather than historical interpretation of the urban structure of the settlement, the project aims to renew its form and make its identity more intelligible in relation to its constitutive characters and to the idea of city that it suggests.