Architettura rurale nella pianura modenese. L'origine della forma e lo studio della composizione

Rural architecture study in Italy is developed with a systematic character from the first decades of the twentieth century. Already by the mid-fifties the need to know to characterize the local specialties, has led scholars to define the geography of rural buildings by identifying the relationship between the settlement forms in the landscape and the functions that meet specific production requirements and daily life, in close relationship with the canons of agrarian history, economics and politics. These principles are rooted on a natural setting, which over time, influence and affects the development and evolution of the historical construction of settlements characters. The rural architecture studies in Modena plain is aimed at defining a methodology of research, that individuals of particularly significant reference area, to be observed on a regional scale "settlement to settlement", up to architectural scale "building by building," as evolution of geographical studies and typological by macro of CNR. Through the sequence of historical maps it was identified last period of transition from the "historic landscape" (agrarian) to "modern landscape" (industrial), redesigning the entire territory in its essential components: buildings, areas of relevance, farms, roads and waterways. Through historical sequences, it has been outlined a detailed evolution of settlement systems, establishing relationships, meanings, typological variations and invariants. Approximately 180 significant case studies have been identified for form, function, type, and defined a catalog of settlement and building types, composition types, defining the most significant compositional forms. The redrawing of the territory takes shape the analysis of settlement patterns to reach trace hypothesis about the origin of the rural architectural form in the plain of Modena, studying the functional groupings and compositional variations.