Dwelling with the Water

Abstract

The absence of an organic port strategy on the coasts of the Puglia Region has led to the development of many yachting expansion projects of ports and tourist landings, not included in a system vision in which every port and every city-port can assume a precise and identity feature within a sustainable transformation process of coastal and marine tourism. The choice of the city of Mola located in south of Bari was to abandon the previous expansion plans of the port, which provided for a huge increase in the available berths, in favour of a new vision of the water area of the port basin in the conditions of terramare, to be understood as a new urban space. A space that sees the mirroring of the ancient city in the sea as the founding condition of an ancient fishing and housing tradition. The research work developed in the Dicatech Department of the Polytechnic University of Bari has assumed the availability of timber generated by the VAIA storm (2018) in the Italian Alpine areas as an opportunity to rethink the wooden housing systems in the water, in continuity with the tradition and history of the places. The theme of the stilt house, of the “Trabucco” (cantilevered wooden structure on the rocks dedicated to fishing with “ great balance”) as well as that of the houseboat were faced by identifying the construction and typological grammars to redefine the protected water place of the new port of Mola as an urban place and place of representation of the relation between the city, its seafaring and the sea.