"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 expressed by its purpose. Its application field is that of the cities of central and southern Apulia. This studies belong to a broader research aimed to the “re-construction” of form of those parts of the contemporary city affected by the typical formal and spatial problems of the urban sprawl. This research experiments the centrality of the morphological approach in the project of the contemporary city and proposes a new relation between the concepts of building type and urban morphology, within which the building type can find fruitful conditions for its “re-foundation”.