ARCHITECTURE TOURISM AND MARGINAL AREAS RESEARCH AND DESIGN PROPOSALS

Abstract

What is the role of architecture when enhancing tourism in a region? How can the architect’s vision help reactivate under performing regions, considering the relationship between design, heritage, tourism and landscape? How can design’s architectural and landscape processes contribute to the reinvention of marginal areas, reflect upon the sense of place and the needs expressed by visitors, while prioritizing the region’s aims and its inhabitants? The book attempts to answer these questions, by proposing interpretations and methodologies for architectural intervention. The twelve essays collected here represent the results of recent researches conducted by scholars and architects who have dealt with the topic, investigating, from the point of view of historical, territorial, architectural or archaeological analysis, the possibilities of performing contemporary architectural intervention in areas that are considered marginal. Most of the presented texts focuses on the region of the great Mediterranean which, in the vision of Fernand Braudel, who qualifies it as an area with a strong unity, where architecture and archeology are both tools and metaphors capable of weaving relationships between the various dimensions of the landscape The need to reason about the past and to think about the future is what unites the research presented, where architecture becomes a vehicle for an identity that, being increasingly plural, cannot lose its memory.