From rural shelter to Chora's town dwellings: Morphological evolution of traditional buildings and settlements of Amorgos

The purpose of the study is to discover the formal elements and rules of the architectural language of Amorgos, and account for their evolution. Historically significant as it is--the history of Amorgos' settlements extends over 800 years--, the study is not restricted to the decoding of the particular insular language. It sets a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the morphological relationship and content-related borders between town and countryside, and between "logia" (high) and "laike" (folk) traditions in environments like Amorgos.; By positing an original, prototypical form, called Spiti or Kelli, and a small set of transformations that have functional, economic, topographic, social, and historical significance, it accounts for the range of traditional styles encountered in both rural and urban Amorgos. It connects functional and morphological changes in rural residential and non-residential forms of shelter with content-related changes. In turn, these are explained in terms of socio-historical changes. Spiti, the initial shape, is a house for all functions. Yet, based on the simple scheme (Spiti + element(s) + function(s)) = Named Spiti), by superimposing the right functional and/or structural element(s) in Spiti's interior in the right way, it has reproduced itself and generated thirteen different named spiti(a), or elementary versions of Amorgos' most frequent building types. The dwelling is only one of them.; A major reorganization of dwellings occurred in Chora by the introduction of the Sala, a mainland dwelling style, in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, within the context of the town, the development of the new style, representing the Logia tradition, was conditioned by the pre-existing style, the Spiti, of the laike tradition.; The study gives a new importance to the rural areas and rural shelter in general, including non-dwellings, as a tool for analyzing the far more complex environment of towns (Chora). Based on the original survey of some 107 town dwellings and at least 75 structures on agricultural sites, it also gives new impetus to the systematic collection of original architectural and oral data in the field of architectural analysis.