Artificiality and Naturalness: Semi-underground Houses and Their Role in the Construction of a Sustainable Urban Landscape

The contemporary interest, on one hand for a renewed relationship between city and natural landscape, on the other for settlement typologies intrinsically efficient from an energy standpoint took back the attention on the design of the dug city, or rather, almost completely excavated. This is an emblematic model of the requirement that deals with the factors of its environment, like sun, wind, ground, shadow and flora, forcing some designers to migrate from usual design methodologies, indifferent to these design parameters, and they are careful only to the “laws of form”, in search of criteria and fine calculation tools to optimize the configuration and the structure of buildings, in order to ensure that they can be managed as “passively” as possible. What it means, with the minimum contribution of plants to ensure the best satisfaction of comfort and psychological needs of users: not only lighting, sunbathing, ventilation, thermal comfort in summer and winter, acoustic comfort, but also view characteristics, quality of lighting and sociological aspects. In general dialectic between artifice and nature, the theme of dug architecture today is faced not only as one of the most interesting and rich suggestions, but also as one of those, in which the reflection on objectives, methodologies and tools is longer necessary, to the identification of a new way of urban living and effective solutions against energy consumption.