Around the Courtyard: Lessons from the Modern Transition in Sardinia (1940-1960)

The chapter focuses on the transition from traditional to modern building materials and techniques in Sardinia, Italy, during the period ranging from 1940 to 1960, describing the process as a gradual and articulated epochal change, whose signs still appear evident in urban and rural character of the island’s landscapes. In this scenario, the chapter describes and analyses the renovation project of a private house, Casa Mudu, in the village of Nuraminis, laid out as a traditional courthouse in the early 1940s and modified in subsequent steps in the following decades. The importance of the house as a case study lies in the marks of the traditional to modern transition inscribed in its chaotic overlap of old and new both in technological aspects – the coexistence of building elements such as flat arches and handcrafted concrete ribbed slabs – and in respect to typological characters, such as the gradual infill of the court, a prominent feature of the local, traditional courthouse type. These features allow to read, in a single, complex, and stratified manufact, the signs of the transition. The chapter elaborates on the adaptations that the technological complexity of the manufact has imposed over the design process, sparking a fruitful dialogue between the clients, the design team and the workers. The chapter reflects on the episode and the importance of considering design as a trans-historical act, describing the implications of this stance both for material history and for the have reconsidered their stance over the design process as a trans-historical act. The chapter concludes has two notable aspects of the transition, namely i. the transformation of the building culture and its expert knowledge, comprising phenomena of irreversible loss, adaptation, and exaptation and ii. the emergence of the widespread aesthetic phenomenon of the “non finito,” (unfinished) as a manifestation of the process of transition.