Study of Liegi’s types and specialized buildings

The research elaborated in the final workshop in the city of Liege, established by the department dICAR in the Polytechnic in Bari, deals with study of specialized and basic buildings typically developed in the city of Liege. Particularly interesting is the confrontation with the building types constructed at first in the Italian peninsula of which we have a sufficient knowledge thanks to the studies made by the School of typologies. The reconstruction of the case of housing types in the Francophone city shows the presence of row house, in the north of Europe called house Mitoyenne, which seems developed in this cultural area since the XII century. The housing complex that appears in the primeval medieval buildings of the city shows two different, principal dimensions which can change essentially in the width of the façade on street. They are recognizable row house with front, tread mt. 3-3, 50 and row house with front mt. 5-5, 50; both with a variable depth around mt. 12-15 and over. They function as a clear social divide, typical of Liege’s society. Other character particularly far from the building type existing in the Italian area is, together with very inclined pitched roof that above all in the first construction show the watershed line perpendicular to the front road, the very permeable façade declaring its membership to the elastic-wood cultural area recognisable in the north European boundary. The diachronic transformation processes of the type are more similar to the Italian cities: vertical increase, coinciding with the progressive substitution of trellis with brickwork, multifamily houses, as well as recast in units of higher grade to form the in-line house. In the matter of specialized buildings, is important to note the huge realization of Romanic churches which being classified in the ecclesiastic order as “collegiate”, are not organized related to urban space; they never have the entry axis in the main aisle but mediately the crossing of a narthex that permit the lateral access. The serial types show sometimes an excessive repetition of the bodies organized without never developing important nodal points.