The environmental sustainability of the manor farm system

Abstract

The research, at the moment under development, it generally aims to define those criteria of environmental sustainability, pursued from the past, for the construction of rural buildings in Puglia and particularly in the farmstead. The significant part of the study investigates the relationship/dependence between the rural building and the landscape where embeds itself and to which, after many stratifications, it provided a clear identity, sometimes even characterizing it positively. The position of the farmstead on the territory, in fact, has often conditioned the infrastructural network and the structuring of the agricultural landscape. More in detail, the research aims to trace the ancient logic of localization on the territory and exploitation of the agricultural landscape character in the Apulian rural architecture and to define which of them derive from an empirical knowledge and which respond to an already encoded design. These constructive expedients – are especially useful to obtaining an effective passive cooling, to promote the natural ventilation and to built an ingenious systems for the recovery and the preservation of rainwater-are still found in some of the farmsteads examined, most of whom are, today, in a serious state of neglect.