The Use of Wood in the Post Seism Reconstruction in South Italy: the Framed Houses of Reggio Calabria

After the earthquake of 1783 that stroke and destroyed the town of Reggio Calabria the Bourbon Government in the new building rules, due to the recent terrible experiences and on the basis of the building regulations already adopted in Lisbon after the seism of 1755, defines the typology of “casa baraccata”. The latter is characterized, like the contemporaneous Portuguese experience, by a wooden bearing framework. Such regulation, that prescribes for the buildings an “internal net of timber scarcely covered”, made it possible that the bearing structure frameworks became the most used local building technology. In 1908, due to the violent earthquake that stroke the cities facing the Straits of Messina, the new building regulation was edited for the reconstruction. It introduced “framed structures made of wood, iron, reinforced concrete, or masonry” between those capable to resist to the seismic stress. Nevertheless the solutions which made use of wood are still employed for the common buildings just like those in reinforced concrete. The framework consisted in a series of vertical uprights and crossbars, which resulting meshes were filled up with light material and wind-braced with diagonal beams like St. Andrew’s crosses. Thanks to archive researches, lately carried out, it has been possible to find out several projects. They concerned private buildings, which date back to the first decade of the twentieth century, that had to be realized with this very building system and then they had to be approved by the Building Commission. A subsequent investigation on the existent buildings made it possible to single out many cases belonging to the post earthquake reconstruction, which maintained the original framed structures. The Paper starts with the unpublished drawings of the above-mentioned projects, presents the different typologies of building frameworks found out in the documents and then illustrates the “case intelaiate” still existent in Reggio Calabria from the technical-constructive point of view.