Housing form and city form: Urban morphology and local identity

Abstract

[EN] The present paper deals with the relationship between the historically built-up housing constructions and the models proposed in the “technical” books on residential architecture that circulate in Europe and Spain from the late XVII century on, inscribed in a longer term research aimed at re-constructing the bloodline linking pre-industrial residential buildings with those that ended up by being its subsequent tributaries towards the end of XIX century. The private residential building constitutes the fundamental supporting element of the city’s urban different fabrics. In the case of the city of Valencia, a great part of these fabric is composed by neighbourhoods made out of multi-family buildings or ‘casas de pisos’, frequently added serially and usually forming enclosed perimeter-blocks, who are the result of the progressive codification of building prototypes that appear within the historic city throughout the nineteenth century, through the transformation of existing buildings of pre-industrial origin, usually single-family artisan houses. The artisan house is, thus, the hypothetical starting basis of that transformation based on exploiting the undifferentiated spatial structure of the pre-industrial dwelling, expanding its built-up mass and subdividing its interior, so that it could be rented to different families. This process of typological evolution promote the new identity of the residence as a formal and functional response to the new times, which may also make it possible to outline the local affiliation of the "house", a result of the particular development of each cultural environment. This article focuses on the historical time of typological transition using as a source the re-composition of the preindustrial plot and the systematic study of the residential types contained in the contemporary architecture “handbooks”.