Terra Nova — Earthen Architecture and Modernity

Flaviano Maria Lorusso, and Saverio Mecca

DIDA Department of Architecture, INN-LINKS Research Unit, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

Abstract: Earthen architecture can fully satisfy a series of functions, performances and aesthetic concerns. The efficiency of the material and of the technical and constructive historical know-how can be taken into consideration today to offer an adequate answer to the pressing needs for sustainable building strategies. A new central role that ratifies both its unexpected technological modernity and its responsible and innovative compositive and linguistic-formal updating. The interpretative passage from traditional building uses and configurative results to the new possibilities for technical manipulation and as technological-structural support permits defining new horizons for architectural creation. A central role in the contemporary landscape, marked by specific implications in environmental terms, but also of formal investigation: terra nova, not intended as a return to the picturesque or the vernacular, or as rétro nostalgia, but rather as a different repetition, paradoxical cultural and practical territory of another present, which is just as efficient and poetic.

Key words: earth, architecture, modernity