"Compacting" the sprawling city. Building type and idea of the "fabric-building"

The paper illustrates the results of the theoretical and applied research carried out by the author on the forms and characters of the urban house conceived as an inseparable part of a “fabric-building”, within a design process aimed at the morphological reconfiguration of the involved urban context, rather than a stand-alone “object”, designed only as an answer to the “specific” themes of its function. This studies belong to a broader research aimed to the “re-construction” of the urban form of those parts of the contemporary city affected by the typical formal and spatial problems of the urban sprawl. Their application field is that of the cities of central and southern Apulia. This research is developed on two complementary levels: the analytic-cognitive level, dedicated to the individuation and description of the constitutive characters of the traditional house of central and southern Apulia; the design level, dedicated to its typological, constructive and formal “re-foundation”, according to new settlement and morphological “grammars”, defined by assuming an idea of city aimed at the “densification” rather than to the “dispersion”.