TRADITIONAL CONSTRUCTION: BIOCLIMATIC VOCATION AND RECOVERY STRATEGIES

As stated by Alessandro D’Avenia, the well-known Italian writer-poet of our time, man has always sought security, often just in his path for choosing a home within the landscape. A symbol of the necessary link with Nature is also demonstrated by the collective image that expresses allocation as a phenomenon of being placed side by side with a tree, as in the Modigliani painting. While searching new architecture’s values in the traditional construction on the cultural basin of the Mediterranean Sea, interesting it seems to start from the cornerstones of the Meridian Thought.¹ This is a movement which strives for a life model in harmony with the environment, reclaims some old civilizations’ principles, and it is typical of the world’s South areas. The latest have been widely exploited and often looted for their richness as far as natural and landscape resources are concerned, sometimes at the expense of whole civilizations’ survival. Being conscious of the fact that exploitation and re-distribution of resources have created to the Planet deeper and deeper unbalances, Meridian Thought proposes a new way of facing the environmental issue as a whole, without neglecting its worldly characters, by including various cultures. Meridian Thought does no longer accept Liberist competition, the blind run to efficiency and the trend to economic optimization at short term: conversely the main subjects recuperate some traditional aspects, among which the dialogue as communication means against war and competitivity; fertility in exchange for the new practices of regulating both plant and animal life; respect for the border as a place of culture exchange, rather than seat of large dividing barriers; the nomadism of ideas, people and emotions; the slowness counterposed to the frantic life. […]