Railway building in Central Sicily: typology-building and construction analysis

Italian railway architecture, dated from the last decades of the XIX Century, is characterized by the opposition between conflicting realities, tradition and innovation, that is historicism and modernism. So, it is often at the centre of the architectural debate to find a connotative language for this typology. Railway architecture was born from an almost “independent” culture encoded by manuals and by the typologies chosen by the Government’s Central Technical Direction and it is common knowledge that the development of some layouts directed to strictly commercial matters and logics. The result of these policies shows itself when it comes to intervene on the buildings which were designed for local railway routes service (roadmen’s houses, signal boxes, warehouses, dormitories, etc.) and which are now no longer in use and more often at the center of public attention in relations to recent policies which propose their dismantling. From this perspective knowledge of the distinctive features (typological, morphological and building) of local railway building is a compulsory step to recovering and reutilization of this heritage. To recover these properties intervention guidelines are outlined starting from a technical analysis aimed to find the original features of the Central Sicily railway architecture.