Conservation of productive architetcture in southern Italy. A fortified farm house in the County of Modica

In the county of Modica you can observe both the position and a fortification system based on a sequence of productive architectures functionally dislocated to ensure the control and, eventually, the defence. The lack of foundations for which these architectonic structures where developed, due to the low yield of agriculture in the actual society, has gradually dimmed the interest in their conservations helping their progressive deterioration. Between 2004 and 2007 in one of this examples, the fortified farm house “Torre don Virgilio” abandoned from many years, an entrepreneurial initiative has started, converting the complex in a receptive structure by equipping it with all comforts that today characterize a possible residential standard. A professional job became a method in order to estimate in which measure the transformations introduced to adapt the standard on an acceptable level can inhibit the expressive abilities and, above all, the conservation possibilities of an architecture born with different requires. In particular, the change of use has foreseen and overturn the traditional relationship between the building and its hinterland: the closed type farm house, grown around a courtyard in reason of new requirements concerning its use as house vacations/farm holyday, had to open itself towards the territory integrating old buildings with new functions (swimming pool, restaurant, systems, parkings). Even if strongly transformed to fit the new feature, the farm is always readable in its transformations. The goal with which all this has been pursued and implemented to take account of the specificities of the building as much as possible while respecting the principles of safety, minimum intervention, reversibility, distinctiveness and compatibility.