Towards the knowledge and conservation of pre-industrial architecture in calabria: Formal, typological and constructive features of mills buildings

Abstract

The paper proposes the knowledge of the industrial architectural heritage present in Calabria between the XVI–XIX centuries; it examines the architectural and constructive character of factories and presents an overview of significant architectures, focusing on the mill buildings. The study highlights the compositional and constructive panorama in which the mills are developed and analyzes significant types and seeks to outline, drawing from knowledge from archival sources and various analyses, the typical evolution of the mills, the stages of formation and transformation, the formal-symbolic, functional-distributive and materials-constructive changes. The survey, moves from an examination of basic types in comparison with some of the most complex structures, to highlight the variant and invariant properties. Beside the representative types, unknown examples are presented, with elementary compositive systems, which are, however, modeled on the identity and the organization of the reference type. The focus is also on this heritage which has not yet been surveyed, to trace the singularities and initiate actions of conservation as well as cultural and/or touristic regeneration.