Lessinia’s Contrade. A Design Challenge Between Heritage and Transformation

Lessinia’s contrade embody an exemplary manifestation of a distinctive way of organizing anthropic space in mountain areas. Featuring stone slabs of impressive size, considering the handwork extraction techniques, the everyday architecture epitomized in traditional contrade has given life to unique built environments and the configuration of open spaces that today form an important local heritage. What is happening to this historical legacy, both from architectural and landscape perspectives is the starting point of this research, which aims to explore paths of sustainable development able to identify cultural values for contemporary society, admitting the alteration of built heritage as a possible approach to redeem abandonment or seasonal use. In this context, it is important to reflect on how an architectural heritage connected to a fragile territorial palimpsest can once again be integrated into innovative systems capable of redefining the role of resources and the built environment as new models of sustainable development. The contribution, part of the in-progress research project “Future Ruralities” based on archival documentation, participant observation, and design strategies’ formulations, details the ongoing dynamics and lays the foundation for a transformation scenario aware of historical heritage’s importance but sensitive to economics and environmental conditions. It proposes a shift in perspective, from viewing the historical traces as datum to interpreting them as the historical source, thus understood not as fact but as an ever-changing being.