Traditional building cultures, landscape and sustainability

The aim of the study is to demonstrate that interest in sustainable development of the architecture is indeed a consequence of the current global crisis, but it is also preceded by a latent focus of the designers of the twentieth century for traditional construction systems and their balanced relationship with the natural environment. All moments of crisis – after the first world war, for example - have led to a rediscovery of the reassuring effect that vernacular forms and techniques have on the perception of architecture and its environment. In Italy, in fact, during the first post-world war, there has been a reconsideration of the rustic regional architecture in the border areas, hoping to find in its buildings a foundations for a renewed architecture and a strengthening of national identity. In the Thirties, instead, there are different reasons behind the interest for the rural bulding’s tradition in the Mediterranean countries. It represents the basics of an ethical project and the forerunner of the rationalist standard for the Italian architect Giuseppe Pagano, and is also the foundation of the Mediterranean origin of rationalism for Josep L. Sert. The Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy shares with them the ethical assumptions identified in rural architecture, but in building systems and forms of his country he read the reasons for rejecting the European Modern. In this period, therefore, it is possible to identify two different reflections on tradition. The first belongs to the European Mediterranean culture, captures the positive foundations of traditional rural building and places them in a process of technical improvement. The second - typical of Mediterranean countries less developed - sees in the tradition the only solution which respects the local community and the environment. Moreover since the thirties - as pointed out by William Curtis in Modern architecture of the twentieth century (ed. 1996) - tradition plays a subtle influence in the assimilation of modernism, especially in countries far away from European culture. And the use of the latter is clocked by exhibitions and writings by designers after World War II: articles by Luigi Figini, including Natural Architecture in Ibiza (1950); the exhibition Architecture Without Architects, organized by Bernard Rudowsky at the MoMA (1964-1965) and published in the homonymous catalogue (1964); Hassan Fathy's book Architecture for the Poor (1973), on their actual experience as a designer and manufacturer according to the principles of rural Egypt. Even today, in fact, if we look at results of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (2007 -2011), we see that the local building traditions becoming a social and technical incentives for sustainable design, especially in developing countries, while the challenge in industrialized countries is to make the technology environmentally friendly and equally capable of dialogue with the landscape such as tradition.