The XIX and early XX century sicilian sanitary buildings: the specialization of typology, new materials and constructive solutions

Abstract

In all the western world between the XIX and the XX century the changed social demands, the new results offered by medical researches, the more restrictive hygienic regulations than in past times, all that favoured a renewed way to intend sanitary buildings; it happened in the design approach, with consequent new distributive and functional schemes, and also in the experimentation of materials, technical elements and building components, in order to improve the hygienic conditions, the hospitalization and the treatments. Like and perhaps more than the residences or other building typologies, hospitals, sanatoria, lazarettos and the nursing homes they were built according to the modern design criteria amply documented by the sanitary building treatises and the specialized magazines; otherwise pre-existent buildings have been readapted, simple or very often monumental buildings like the conventual architectures, the nobler mansions or the suburban villas, by those transformations necessary to make them more corresponding to the new standards and criteria. The XIX and still more the early XX century sanitary building had to be compared to the rigid regulations finalized to guarantee the new use functions and destinations, more rational distributive schemes; strongly conditioning were also those restrains created by the hygienic request that now suggested the traditional materials application, revised and experimented in the light of the hospital necessities, now it proposed the building industry new products adoption, in order to guarantee an effective defence against the micro-organisms inside the rooms and in the building components. This study analyzes the Sicilian reality, also with regard to the national and over-national one, examining the general situation characterized by many examples expressive of a design effort indeed innovative and adjourned, but also some proposals founded upon unrealized utopias, or ordinary realizations representatives of the current experimentations, with regard to the material-constructive and functional aspects.