Architecture of the settlement and infrastructural system. The sicilian landscape between Palermo and Agrigento

One of the most suggestive contents that are offered to the contemporary architectural research concerns the reappropriation of the places of the present which are marked by the partition of the urban form, by the influencing presence of the infrastructures and by an image of the country that is no longer an expression of the work of the land but, abandoned and transformed, it often expresses the characteristics of the dispersed city; these places require a renovated disciplinary approach in view of a re-evaluation of the rural environment, reason why it is important to think over the relation between architecture and context, that means to understand to what extend the architecture can expand the system of its relations in the area and what the measure of its intrinsic modification ability is. Furthermore the full awareness of modernity imposes to question about the new morphological and dimensional nature of the places, in order to understand the sense of the spatial relations and to try an innovative aesthetic elaboration of them. Therefore, it concerns to apply (in an innovative and exciting way) all the categories of knowledge and interpretation that belong to the project, at reading scales of territorial type (or at least an intermediate one in respect to the conventional architectural scale), involving areas that are just apparently too extended; in other words to interact the big scale with the most specific scales of the architecture, in order to define new formal balances. In particular we have developed an interpretative and planning picture of the Sicilian area, that is marked by smaller urban centers, by the network of infrastructures, by the agricultural country and the natural areas, by the hybrid places of the diffused city.