Search Results (3)

This paper presents the development and structure of a geospatial (work in progress), architectural heritage database designed to document, interpret, and valorize Second World War military fortifications in Sardinia. Currently hosting over 1800 georeferenced entries—including bunkers, artillery posts, underground shelters, and camouflage systems—the database constitutes the analytical core of an interdisciplinary research framework that interprets these remnants as a coherent wartime palimpsest embedded in the contemporary landscape. By integrating spatial data, archival sources, architectural features, conservation status, camouflage typologies, and both analog and digital graphic representations, the system operates as a central infrastructure for multiscale heritage analysis. It reveals the interconnections between dispersed military structures and the wider territorial fabric, thereby laying the groundwork for landscape-based interpretation and site-specific reactivation strategies. More than a cataloging tool, the database serves as an interpretive and decision-making interface—supporting the generation of cultural itineraries, the identification of critical clusters, and the design of adaptive reuse scenarios. While participatory tools and community engagement will be explored in a second phase, the current methodology emphasizes landscape-oriented reuse strategies based on the perception, spatial storytelling, and contextual reading of wartime heritage. The methodological synergy between GIS, 3D modeling, traditional drawing, and archival research (graphic and photographic documents) contributes to a holistic vision of Sardinia’s wartime heritage as both a system of knowledge and a spatial–cultural resource for future generations. Full article

In the discipline of architecture, there is an established familiarity with the 19th century’s Louis Sullivan’s pithy dictum “form follows function”. The expression has indeed directly and indirectly inspired many authors and movements, especially during the beginning of the 20th century, when objectivity showed its value in improving the progress of the industrial society. Nonetheless, the reception effects of such architecture with the primacy of function were responsible for decisive transformations in architectural form, human behaviour, social transformations and material and technological manoeuvres and gave rise to very rich developments related to form, history and inhabitants’ psychological engagements, among many others. So, what about the reception effects framed in the natural and inhabited environment? Could we make space for a sense of greater need, facing a climate emergency? The present paper brings the example of a bunker’s super-resistant heritage, as a paradigmatic sample of material resistance, that supports the idea that “Function (can) Follow the Form” when re-signifying hard architecture, as is the case with Plan Barron of Defence of Lisbon and Setubal, a recently declassified military heritage set of buildings. The study conducts a critical literature review as a qualitative method of research that groups factors into clusters to give evidence to some conceptual theoretical frameworks: “hardness”; “inheritance”; “object trouvé”; “affordance”; and “empathy”. These concepts become then the basis to frame a new paradigm: function follows form can be a pertinent approach when dealing with super-resistant structures in the present climate crisis. This inverse paragon, well explained, could work as a motto to architects for a new era of global climate action. Full article

Abandoned on the coast as skeletons, bunkers are the last theatrical gesture in the history of Western military architecture (Virilio, 1975). Technically obsolete, this military territory has fallen into extinction and is now generally forgotten. We present the Plan Barron of Defense of Lisbon and Setubal case study, a mid-twentieth-century set of bunkers, recently declassified, as a case study to discuss the future of this heritage facing the climate crisis. Can oblivious historical war heritage be an opportunity to fight climate emergencies? We present four theoretical concepts to fundament this environmental positioning: (i) Heritage Management and Climate Governance, (ii) Techno-aesthetic (Simondon, 1992): panopticon territorial cluster; (iii) Military: camouflage as design, and (iv) Civil: inheritance as future potential. The results allow us to look at military architecture in the form of a bunker, as a set of territorial, architectonic, cultural, and social interests. We demonstrate that the counterpoint of its invisibility is a singular naturalized “milieu”, a place where the memory of war can be transformed as a buffer zone that combines characteristics of climate and coastal resilience with cultural and social interest as a “common good”. Full article