In the 20th century, Modernism, neglecting the climatic and environmental characteristics of places, imposed technologies and languages unsuitable for hot and temperate climates; all those tectonic devices that made buildings habitable were lost, such as “courtyard” building types that favored natural ventilation, the orientation of buildings that promoted winter sunlight and limited summer sunlight, aided by deep loggias that created shaded areas, as well as the construction technology with thick walls of raw bricks that exploited the thermal inertia of the material; and systems that allowed for climate-controlled interiors by machines became widespread, at times that did not suffer from the enormous problem of climate change and the link this could have with the indiscriminate use of energy derived from fossil fuels.
In contrast to this approach, without ever falling into the vernacular and instead maintaining a dialogue with modern architecture, in the second half of the 20th century, Ubaldo Badas worked in Sardinia, an Italian island in the center of the western Mediterranean, in public buildings built in the 1950s and 60s, in which he experimented with detailed technological solutions that provided adequate responses to climatic and environmental issues, while also developing interesting architectural solutions. In the craft pavilion of Sassari (1951–56) and in the agriculture pavilion at the Cagliari Fair (1959), Badas designed some technical elements to promote the natural ventilation of interior spaces, which became architectural solutions of great interest.
