Typological choices for underground architecture

Between the 8th and the 13th century, the rock civilization has produced in Puglia and Basilicata – Such as in Serbia, Cappadocia, Tunisia, Ethiopia and many other places in the world – some of the most important episodes both with regard to a monumental point of view (rock churches in Matera, Laterza, Massafra, Grottaglie, Fasano, Salento) and to the town settlement (old towns of Tursi, Matera, Ginosa, Laterza, Casalrotto di Mottola, Massafra, Grottaglie among others). In those centuries it was a real “mining town planning”, characterized by rules of aggregation of basic units – not differing very much from the Medieval urban rules – but, we could say, in the “negative” version. The city development fixed, in the centuries, interesting links of continuity and interrelation between the sub divo and rock settlements, with positive results on city typology and morphology. On the other side, modern and contemporary town planning is often a cut with the historic development of towns and diffuses typologies of settlement that did not pay attention to natural contexts (geomorphology, environment and resources) and were not able to produce new concepts of the town, more adherent to the exigencies of the people: first of all suggesting the functionalism of “zoning” and the “equisolar” orientation of the buildings and then – after the crisis of the international modernist movement – suggesting again the reassuring traditional “corridor-street” concept of the historic architecture, that Le Corbusier rushed to follow. In this paper, some experiences of education in the planning of underground houses are listed, highly efficient in terms of energy, based on the principles of passive solar architecture. These planning experiences are meant to be an aid to create a new sensibility to the specific characteristics of both the historical morpho-typological tradition, that of the relationship with the landscape, its characteristic morpho-vegetational elements and the use of construction materials from tradition.