VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
Architecture without architects – rural architecture or vernacular architecture – historically played a transcendental role in the structuring of the territory, in the formalization of its geometry between the cultivation areas, the pasture areas, the arteries or accesses that adapt to the sinusoidal forms of the landscape itself. All this leads us to the cataloging of different landscape mosaics. It is an architecture built by people with an optimal knowledge of the place which responds to the laws of the landscape itself as if it were one more element of it. In addition to this feature, a pragmatic articulation between the interior rooms and the exterior spaces is added, obtaining an optimal functional result. Simultaneously, it responds to sustainability criteria that lead to climatic comfort in its interior due to its orientation, its materials, its construction techniques,… Currently, this architecture is becoming more obsolete every day due to the mere fact that its inhabitants have moved to the cities to seek a more comfortable life and that has led to the rapid deterioration of this beautiful architecture. Its survival goes through two different paths, agricultural expansion and industrialization and/or change of use. Both mean intervening seriously in this heritage to adapt it to the contemporary, which must seek its modernization without losing its origin and completely avoid its museumization, taking into account the substantial changes existing in the market in terms of materials and means of locomotion.
PhD architect and full professor of the Department of Architectural Projects at the UPC. Extraordinary Doctorate Award. He has written several books on rural architecture. He has curated several exhibitions on vernacular architecture. He participated in a biographical exhibition on his rural architecture research at the Shenzhen International Convention and Exhibition Center-China-. He won the first prize at the International Congress of Architects for the book Rural Architecture of La Garrotxa and has received a distinction for his academic and professional career.