The Countryside: a big House

Starting from the Palladio’s ideas about the city, the research explores the nature of the city and how the Countryside and the City, although historically opposite contexts, diverge just in their outer form. The both constructive reason are the same, what changes is the measure and the use of space: the Countryside is just the City of the agriculture. The cultivating’s requests force the rural landscape’s organization by the work that every single farmhand carries in his own plot. The Hyblaean plateau is the clearest synthesis of this construction, for this reason the subject of the ongoing research is outlined. Here the man’s work (the farmhands’ needs to supplement with own agricultural products the low-wage earned in the latifundium) and the area’s character (the duality between the cugno’s and cava’s landscape due to the rivers digging the calcareous tableland) shaped the territory. The little rural house is the basic cell of this wide construction, an Eden built by poor means clearly defined by some essential elements: a room inside, a plan to sit in front, a tank close to, a farmyard, a pergola, a few trees whose shadow gift a little space. Understanding the house’s reasons is understanding the landscape’s ones: a construction in which the detail and the large scale are built at the same time.