Atlas Vernaculi

The laboratory focuses on questions relating to the representation, archiving and classification of vernacular heritage in the production of knowledge of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both in architecture and in related disciplines. Various interpretations of the vernacular aim to provide answers to the increasing loss of meaning of the built environment; a loss caused by intertwined problems such as increasing pollution, accelerated modern development, the disappearance of the historic city and uncontrolled urban sprawl. The relevance of vernacular structures, not as static objects, but as evidence of a different building process, is central to the laboratory’s research, and it is only by addressing the processes by which meaning is ‘produced’ that architecture as a discipline can operate a qualitative shift in its current sustainability paradigm.