Roberto ATZENI1 | Valentina NALDINI1 | Pablo RODRIGUEZ NAVARRO2
(1Dipartimento di Architettura, Florence University, Italy | 2Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain)
Abstract:
Spain and Sardinia, all along their Mediterranean coasts, offer a suggestive sequence of towers, this system is integrated and presented in the landscape for a surveillance and defence purpose and represented an articulated military system for a long period. Since the sixteenth century, there was the need to protect a territory otherwise easy to be attacked by pirates, which in addition to attacking ships, plundered and preyed on the Mediterranean coast. At the end of this historical period, once defeated the pirates in the “Mare Nostrum”, the coastal towers system lost its defensive function, but remained as a testimony of history. The study of the towers, their positions and their different types, suggest the creation of a multimedia catalog, which provides research and knowledge of these towers beyond a virtual connection between them, almost an attempt to revive the routes marked by history. Knowledge of the defensive network of the Mediterranean can become a complex network of cognitive architectural tradition, otherwise at risk to be partially forgotten. Research and documentation can reveal the different relationships between the land territory and the maritime and architectural solutions joining these coastal cliffs and defensive structures. The objective of this research is to analyze a part of this great system, chosen from the Costa Valenciana and compare it with the Sardinian towers system, studying similarities, constants and differences due to the asset of territory and to design needs. The whole work will be based on historical documentation retrieval and digitalization, 3D digital survey (using 3D laser scanner and terrestrial/aerial photogrammetry), 3D modeling. This study can help in creating a virtual network of towers as an amplification of the real buildings, where the towers become component of dissemination of knowledge and represent a link between the cultural heritage of a territory and its history.
Keywords: Torres costeras, Coastal towers, Valencia, Sardinia, multimedia catalog