Dorsum. Topography and tectonic as lenses of inquiry for architecture in mountain and rural contexts

The term dorsum was used by the Latins not only for the backs of animate beings – and thus their spines – but also to refer to mountain ridges. This statement evokes an essential image of the mountain or rural landscape, in which type-morphological aspects and the human skeleton stand in analogy. Thus, orography becomes backbone, supporting the position of settlements; artifacts become bones, elements carried and dependent on the landline in their form; infrastructures are the limbs, ruins the fractures. To this reading, an additional element can be added, that of communities, actors who modify the physiology of the organism to inhabit it. Staying within this metaphor, the contribution aims to accompany the transition from the territorial to the architectural scale to identify possible approaches that allow for a contemporary interpretation of history, tradition and memory: the fragilities of these contexts take on a different connotation when explored through the lenses of topography and tectonic, essential methodological tools of architecture that locate in the design process the cultural environment for territorial development, reducing “to the bones” the site-specific design topics and the possible attitudes to front them. Through an analysis of case studies that reread the forms, ecologies, and meanings of vernacular architecture in minor contexts, a critical gaze is proposed considering "pride in modesty" (Sabatino, 2010) as a guiding sentiment for the formulation of design methodologies that put the spatial experience of humans in co-existential relationship with nature at the center of the discourse. This is intended to help stimulate a disciplinary debate on the necessary adaptation of architectural design paradigms in villages, hamlets and marginal places, in order to conceive and propose projects adapted to today's needs of small settlements in mountainous and rural contexts.