1,721,165 research outputs found
La rampa e il piano inclinato nella città del Novecento
Full text linkUsati tradizionalmente per lo spostamento di animali, veicoli e merci, la rampa e il piano inclinato hanno accompagnato la crescita degli spazi urbani nel XX secolo e lo sviluppo di tipologie innovative, che segnano la transizione architettonica dal paradigma industriale a quello ambientale. Attraverso la rilettura di una serie di progetti chiave, l’autore descrive la loro evoluzione da dispositivi funzionali a estetici ed etici, rivelando il loro ruolo nel rappresentare e promuovere differenti idee di umanità.Traditionally used for the movement of animals, vehicles and goods, the ramp and the inclined plane accompanied both the growth of urban spaces in the twentieth century and the development of innovative typologies, which marked the architectural transition from the industrial paradigm to the environmental one. Through the reinterpretation of a series of key designs, the author describes their evolution from functional to aesthetic and ethical devices, revealing their role in representing and promoting different ideas of humanity
"Characters in Search of an Author". Human figures and storytelling in architectural design communication
Full text linkIn a presentation drawing, human figures have a natural attitude to work as an optical reference to measure the design space and to provide a sort of instructions to use it, but over the centuries, their agency has been multifaceted. The practice of photo-collages, which was fed by photography and cinema development, has recently spread thank to the digital techniques and human figures in architecture renderings seem to have become as fundamental as a top-modes for a fashion magazine cover. Besides providing a recognizable mark to the design entry, selecting peculiar figures can visually connect a design to a specific place and time, working as a cultural, situationist and sensorial agent. This seems to be true particularly for the cultural typologies. In renderings of museums, theatres or libraries, often ordinary people are integrated by figures of artworks and celebrities, like in Alberto Campo Baeza and Raphael Gabrion’s design for a Louvre new building in Lievin, France, whose figures are placed in the renderings not only to explain the functions but also to remind the ambiguous threshold between representation and reality
Knowing (by) building. Full-scale models in design space envisioning
No full textItalian architect Umberto Riva has often expressed his secret wish to be allowed to build a former project, experience it and demolish it in order to re-build it with an higher acknowledge. Such a rare privileged condition is partially achieved by architect’s working back on his works years later or by his direct decisional engaging in the building phases. In the continuous research for the most exhaustive and involving envisioning tool, able both to give back the artist a wide spatial knowledge of his own design and the client a heartening image of his endeavour, full-scale modelling can offer a very realistic experience of a project. Mock-ups were used by Renaissance and Baroque artists to design the visual corrections to be applied to their geometric proportionated buildings, but they can be conceived as a direct-forming tool as they can convey unpredictable feed-backs to their author as well as productively involving clients in a participated design process
‘Captions Not Included’. Notes on the Architects and ‘Their’ Images
Full text linkArchitects not only produce images of their projects but also take pictures of the reality around them, eventually appropriating of pictures made by others. In particular, this process of mediated assimilation of reality is quite hard to define as it follows many different criteria that tend to turn the pictures themselves into analogical devices oriented to the design development. Often, a fundamental step of the process is to make them wordless images by removing (intentionally or not) the caption. This action opens the pictures to a wide range of interpretations and uses (as well as misinterpretations and abuses) that are part of the omnivorous creative process of the architects. In order to frame the phenomenology of this process in the extended field of the 20th century art production, this article proposes a chaotic assemblage of major and minor episodes whose considerations indirectly reflects both the mostly unconscious process of the architects and the ‘under-construction’ mental scheme of the author. In this sense, this early, partial, subjective map provides no answers but questions and conjectural work-areas to be tested through further connections and developments
Grids and Squared Paper in Renaissance Architecture
No full textSquared and graph paper played an important role in the practice of architects, both in the analysis and measuring of the human environment and ancient monuments, and in the design process. They have been addressing not only the graphic procedures but also the architects’ way of thinking, like every tool does. In the centuries that preceded the industrial production of squared paper, which began by the late 18th century, drawing a grid onto a sheet often involved the superimposition of graphic, procedural and philosophical intentions at one time.
The idea of the square grid in architecture is generally linked to Greek civilization, mathematics, the Hippodamian city, and the square module of Hellenistic temples, but is also intertwined with the Roman centuriatio and the medieval ad quadratum composition. It is possible that in antiquity architects used squared panel as a design support but squared paper did not appear before the Renaissance. Even at that time, it was mainly used by artisans who worked with fabrics and tapestries. Apart from the perspective applications of the grid, the painters learnt to transfer and enlarge small sketches onto the walls by associating grids of different sizes, while Albrecht Dürer, in some famous engravings, adopted it as a graduated picture plane to illustrate how to reproduce three-dimensional elements onto a two-dimensional support in a pseudo-scientific way.
The architects, who used to entrust their design process to a few ratios between integers, used the grid as a modular and operational support for their drawings. Filarete used two types of square grid – one for the proportions and one for the scale drawing – while Bramante is the author of the famous half-plan for the new church of St. Peter drawn onto a grid, whose meaning and role is quite controversial. Certainly, Bramante also has the merit of teaching his numerous collaborators, such as Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Baldassarre Peruzzi, the benefits of such a working method, which is testified by some of their designs. After his Italian travel, Philibert De l'Orme promoted the use of the square grid, too, and, in Nouvelle Inventions (1567), superimposes a grid on the table of the architectural orders and shows how to proportion the section of a church starting from a 7x7 square grid. Promoted by the circulation of treatises and prints, other innovative uses of the squared paper can be found in the work of north-European artists and gardeners, like Hans Vredeman de Vries and other Dutch architects who applied this tool to different design fields.
This article focuses on the role squared paper had in the Renaissance decades in contributing to the transition from an organic-anthropometric paradigm to a mechanical-mathematical one. The squared paper gradually became a specific design environment alternative to the Vitruvian addresses in which to size and assemble the components of architecture already disassembled and organized in the illustrated treatises. In following the operational logic of movable type printing and proto-industrial production, this design process became distinctive of the engineering schools, as already testified by the positions of Bernardo Vittone, in Istruzioni elementari and Istruzioni Diverse, contributing to their historical separation from the arts academy
Architettura terapeutica. Wayfinding e percorsi per i malati di Alzheimer
No full textIl morbo di Alzheimer procede per tappe e, a poco a poco, distrugge la memoria, la ragione, il giudizio, il linguaggio e, infine, la possibilità di effettuare anche il più semplice dei compiti. In un quadro patologico in cui gli effetti della malattia possono variare notevolmente da un individuo all’altro, così come da un giorno all’altro, l'obiettivo delle abitazioni specializzate è quello di ottimizzare le attività dei residenti con Alzheimer, in modo da consentirgli una vita quanto più autonoma in un ambiente dignitoso e familiare, perché proprio il mantenerli attivi costituisce a oggi la più efficace forma di contrasto e terapia. Per cominciare a concepire l’architettura come un sistema terapeutico attivo a tutti gli effetti, in grado di aiutare il malato e sorreggerne la memoria e l’equilibrio, c’è ancora molto da capire sull’impairment cognitivo ovvero su come funziona la percezione del malato, il suo processo cognitivo e di orientamento. Il primo passo consiste nel concepire l’intero ambiente, in tutte le sue più banali componenti, alla luce dei principi del wayfinding, di un orientamento spaziale basato su criteri percettivi scientifici e applicato alle sue difficili condizioni fisiologiche, soprattutto in virtù del fenomeno del wandering, il vagabondaggio senza meta dei malati di Alzheimer, che va ripensato come una risorsa, da incentivare e rendere sicura
Less is more. Drawing in the age of Copy&Paste
No full textThe practice of CAD and retouching software leads no longer to creation on the white sheet but to choose information and to transform predefined formats in a strainless environment. Like in a supermarket, we must choose among a lot of tools and pre-established operational protocols that crowd the field of view. Drawing working detail is modifying a downloaded block; preparing a perspective is retouching a photo in Photoshop; drawing a survey is decimating the points of a laser-scanner cloud, to remove the excess material that captures the shape (such as Michelangelo said). The most of our work is to build structures of relationships and to run processes: only the printer physically creates the final tangible product.
Our body is no more involved in the drawing act: every operation starts with the same pressure on the mouse’s left button, while sitting for hours in front of a vertical screen. The ease of deforming and multiplying leads to losing sight of goals and scale of representation: the consequent graphic product is often standardized and hypertrophic, with an amount of useless information and visual noise. Moreover this practice cancels the semantic role of line in favour of a photo-realism that bypasses the graphic standards and reduces the active contribution of observers, for it loses the role of place of dialogue between imagination and reality.
In this context, the practice of hand drawing takes on the role of antidote to this waste of resources, to uncritically acting, to the mechanical copy and paste. The additive operational sequence of hand drawing didactically can mimic the construction phases. The implicit resistance of paper and pencil involves the whole body and perspectival sketches anticipate the exploration of the physical environment not only visually but also tactilely. Economy and semantic regulate the small effort of each line: each single sign is strictly necessary and significant, full of connotative attitude that calls the observer back to an active role in interpreting and imagining. Moreover free hand drawing turns on an eye-hand continuous feedback that exalts the heuristic potential of designing process
Keplero, Bernini e l’ellisse: da geometria celeste a prassi architettonica?
No full textCon le osservazioni marziane, Kepler attribuisce all’ellissi – e indirettamente all’ovale, sua approssimazione – il valore di segnale di un intero universo di moti e forze invisibili. Bernini, attento alle questioni astronomiche, è considerato il principale portavoce di questa nuova sensibilità estetica, in virtù delle sue prestazioni percettive e delle sue intrinseche relazioni geometriche, attraverso la mediazione culturale di Galileo, che non rinuncerà mai al primato del cerchio.With his observations on Mars, Kepler considers the ellipse – and indirectly the oval, its approximation – as the sign of a whole universe of invisible motions
and forces. Bernini, attentive to astronomical issues, is considered the main spokesperson of this new aesthetic sensitivity, thanks to its perceptive performances
and intrinsic geometric relations, culturally mediated by Galileo who never renounced the supremacy of the circle
Mostra didattica dei corsi dell’area di rappresentazione nei Corsi di Laurea di Ingegneria
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