Ginex_2018_Clean_Città_editor.pdf.

Before the sands cities.
Nefta and the mountain oasis of Chott el Djerid, Tamerza, Mides and Chebika.
Procedures and methodologies for knowledge and reading pre-Sahara urban morphologies
Introduction
The Mediterranean zone often calls up the faraway
images, where ground, water and light are very
important elements. These images aren’t usually real
elements, but the abstract ideas, where the archetypal
notion plays a decisive role.
So, it will be very difficult to explain the architectural
system which defines the Mediterranean zone, but every
research can consider as an inside part of a general
context.
The Mediterranean architecture forms as an elaborate
stratification where its mean represents the analytical
researches which classify its own elements.
It is only the nature of the place, its microcosmic idea
of a general event, which it gives uniqueness to the
Mediterranean elements that put on the safeguard
power of the urban and morphology growth of the whole
area, and above all, of the Islamic zone.
I have been looking to represent through the study of
some sample towns of the Mediterranean background,
reported to the Tunisian area of the Maghreb, the logical
processes which characterized the urban settlements of
the North-African area in order to define a vocabulary
of Mediterranean elements and forms to catch and
showing the only aspects which characterize the whole
geographical background.
Therefore, this work is a tessera of a hypothetical
mosaic of research which look for composing a “map”
of “invariant” forms as summation by parts; and at the
same time, this union between form and architecture
represents a reference archetype which gives to the
Mediterranean town and its “eternity and stability” a
cultural recognition of the Mediterranean model.