ANALYSIS OF THE RURAL BUILT HERITAGE THROUGH THE FarmBuiLD MODEL

Modern rural buildings are mainly characterized, on the one hand, by spatial layouts imposed by the functional needs of a mechanized agriculture, and on the other hand, industrial building techniques and solutions. The development of quality-oriented guidelines aimed at making the rural architecture consistent with the landscape context proves thus crucial given the need to improve the landscape resources. The paper refers to the FarmBuiLD model (Farm Building Landscape Design), developed as a tool for the analysis and meta-design of farm buildings. The work focuses on the implementation of specific modules of FarmBuiLD, aimed at the physiognomic characterization of the rural built heritage through survey sampling. The goal of this paper is to define and test a repeatable and flexible methodology for defining suitable samples of rural buildings for the typological analyses, and to work out a proper procedure for surveying the data about their architectural features. The method developed involves the integrated use of stratified sampling techniques and photogrammetric surveys. With reference to an Italian study area, we defined a pilot sample of historic rural buildings with sampling rate of 10%. The stratification was based on the combined use of two variables: the typology class, defined on the basis of the original functions of the historic rural buildings (rural houses; farm buildings; buildings with combined residential and farming functions; country villas); and the altimetry class of the building location (altitudes not greater than 50 m above sea level, consisting in the plain lands; altitudes between 50 and 300 m above sea level, including all the hill-foot and hilly lands). We acquired a geodatabase of photographic orthoimages of the sample buildings, by means of perspective rendering of single photograms with known metric references. We surveyed the main metrics of the architectonic envelopes and processed them through inferential analysis. The method proved suitable to perform building analyses taking account of the main characteristics of rural landscape and traditional building typologies. The most significant intervals of building sizes in fact result as follows: length ranging between 10 m and 25 m, width between 5 m and 10 m, height between 5 and 10 m. More in depth analyses of the geometric data and the architectonic features are being performed also through the adoption of proper statistical estimators and the consideration of the buildings distributions into the strata. The general structure of the investigation may be adopted also for the development of analysis processes appropriate for different national and regional contexts