This manual deals with the vast category of specialised buildings that, stemming from basic structures, have gradually reached a whole new level of “intentionality” and “critical consciousness”. As happened with basic buildings, the operational architectural knowledge method we hereby suggest leads to the creation of a multi-layered analysis framework. Indeed, the observation and interpretation of building elements determines the shape, structure and purpose of public buildings. The aim was to create a manual enabling the understanding of specialised buildings following a “processual-typology” methodology. Better understanding of the evolution of a cultural area’s anthropic elements is an architect’s basic tool for an ethical, landscape-friendly approach to design.@en

This volume codifies the method to read building structures that have appeared in the past as ‘spontaneous consciousness’ level in a progression of scalar sizes ranging from buildings and clusters of buildings to urban organisms and the territory. Focusing on past architecture is the field of ‘process classification’ that is the key to using history in working as architects in the modern world. We wish to extract the laws of behaviour, formation and mutation of manmade structuring on the various scales of man’s work as we consider this knowledge to be the only possible solution to the architectural crisis that has dragged on for over two centuries. It results in planning based on reviving the tradition of ‘producing’ buildings not as a dogmatic adaptation to past building methods but intended to contemporaneously fit our work into the continuity of laws and behaviour codified in our cultural area; these laws can only be understood and consequently by carefully reading the built environment that surrounds us.@en