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For a journal that deals with architectural drawing and representation, the topic of this issue No. 14, Analog Models, edited by Alberto Sdegno and Pedro Manuel Cabezos-Bernal, is certainly of great appeal, and this is demonstrated by the high number of contributions arrived at the editorial office at the end of the call for papers. [read more]

The Present of Architectural Drawing is the theme proposed by Paolo Belardi and Massimiliano Campi for this issue of the journal diségno and welcomed by the Editorial Board for several reasons. The first of these reasons concerns the close relationship between ideation, drawing and design, terms linked by a bond that is both theoretical and concrete; the second relates to the personalities of the two editors, who have always been interested in the themes of drawing projected towards design, exploring its theories and techniques of representation. [read more]

Issue 11 of diségno aims to make the comparison between Drawing and Design grow and mature, to think about the limits and margins of two disciplines that deal with the representation of the world of objects and the other with their construction, opening up further spaces on visual communication and visual design. [read more]

Fifty years of archaeological activities carried out in the Aeolian Islands have made it possible to bring to light the most complete collection of theatrical masks of the ancient world, an important testimony of the material culture of the theatrical world, during the Classical era. The theatrical masks, preserved at the 'L. Bernabò Brea’ of Lipari, may be schematized, from a morphological point of view, in three distinct degrees: ‘whole masks’, whole fragments and ‘mute’ fragments. The digital reconstruction and anastylosis workflow follow the same breakdown of these three degrees of status: they have been developed through an inverted pyramid trend, in a scalar and hierarchical way. The universality of the method makes it repeatable and universally applicable to other archaeological finds belonging to a proto-industrial and serial artisan production.The research aims to define a series of methodologies and techniques to be adopted for the direct survey of archaeological artefacts in fragments and for the definition of a reconstruction and digital anastylosis protocol, with the aim to restore a new memory to the so-called 'mute' finds. In order to clarify the genealogical and filiation relationships between the masks, a geometric grid of conspicuous points was identified on each digital model which allowed to rearrange the finds on the basis of their dimensional relationships and to advance, at the same time, a parallel hypothesis of segmentation and semantic annotation, it experimenting the most modern and innovative semantic annotation practices for the Cultural Heritage, in order to improve the understanding, the cataloging and enhancement of the historical data.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.26.2021.12

The garden is the symbolic filter through which men have always tried to configure their relationship with the world, the place dedicated to the encounter between nature and artefact. “Man - it has been written - is born in a garden. All legends consider the place of origin of humanity in a protected enclosure, in the womb that guards life” (Grimal, 1974). From that original idea, a whole series of systems and models are developed that are the result of the different cultures, both from the East and from the West, which have produced them from time to time. In this paper, we want to highlight the principle of imitation of nature with the constant presence of three generating elements: the enclosure, the water and the vegetation, and also how the different combination of these same elements might give rise to very different compositions: from the productive, therefore real, garden of the oasis (Nefta), to the stone garden, therefore metaphorical, (the Alhambra and the Zisa). In both cases identical elements are used but with different planning and purposes. The garden-place represents today, more than ever, a sustainable unicum both from a social and material point of view.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.25.2020.13

The villages built during the Agrarian Reform in Sicily (1920-1950) represent a significant memory of the challenging effort, by the national and local government of reorganizing the century-old structure of Sicilian agriculture. Mainly at the state of ruin, many of them have never been inhabited or used due to economic and social reasons. For this reason, as the essay reveals, studies, and analyses which deals with their main characteristics cannot be separated by the interpretations of the historical and economic context. The village Schisìna is a complex of seven small hamlets built-in 1950 to accommodate families of peasants, who would have received given a small plot of land with which to realize up their own profitable business.However, at that time the lack of electricity and drinking water discouraged farmers from moving there, hence the village rapidly fall into ruin. The essay focuses on the analyses and studies carried on by a group of researcher and students which are preliminary to a possible project for the recovery of the village for new uses connected to touristic accommodation. Il borgo rurale di Schisìna a Francavilla di Sicilia. Processi di abbandono e analisi per il recupero I borghi realizzati con la riforma agraria in Sicilia rappresentano una realtà locale rilevante. Il villaggio Schisìna è un insieme di sette borghi costruiti nel 1950. Tutto l’insieme è stato pensato per ospitare delle comunità di contadini a cui doveva essere affidato un piccolo appezzamento di terreno col quale costituire una propria attività redditizia. A quel tempo, la mancanza di elettricità e acqua corrente scoraggiarono gli agricoltori a trasferirsi lì. Da allora, solo poche persone conoscono le rovine di queste architetture senza vita che costituiscono oramai un unicum nella dorsale montana che si affaccia sul mare Jonio nella provincia interna di Messina. Due registi italiani famosi hanno immortalato il villaggio Schisina: M. Antonioni, nel 1960, nel film L’Avventura, e R. Rossellini, nel 1967, nel documentario Idea di un’isola. Il carattere distintivo di queste architetture oggi rappresenta una sfida per il rapporto tra uomo e ambiente. Si delinea un progetto di sviluppo strategico (intercomunale e multisettoriale) che combina sinergicamente tre focus presenti nelle S3: Turismo, Cultura e Beni culturali per un riscatto di quel luogo abbandonato e affascinante. Un intervento semplice e allo stesso tempo coinvolgente, capace di trasformare l’attuale devastazione dettata dall’abbandono, in una opportunità aggregativa per le giovani generazioni.

What links Thomas More to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti? And how is the creativity of alphabets related to the cover art of vinyl records? And yet there is a common thread called lettering, which is variously articulated in the expressiveness of the typographic characters of the artists. There is a bi-planarity present in the letters of the alphabet: that of expression and that of content –signifier and signified meaning, but there is also an arbitrariness that does not connect, in any way, one to the other, the will of an alphabet to exist as an autonomous form of art. Lettering is perhaps the most appropriate area of graphics for experimenting, thinking, inventing, narrating and playing with elementary forms. Letters represent an extreme synthesis of the meanings of nature and of geometry and suggest unusual alphabets, prompting us to invent new stories. From the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century, the playful revolution of lettering also invested the field of music with cover art. Many records are often first remembered, even more than for their music, for their cover art. The graphic design of the covers, moreover, often offers an intuition, at first glance, of the musical genre of the album and the personality of the artist. Today, the graphic design and the imaginative lettering of record covers have now become recognized as true forms of art.

In 2018 celebrations were launched to mark the first 50 years since the youth revolution of the Parisian Mai 68. The desire to commemorate what 1968 had been - namely, the season that forever changed the world and its customs - was felt so intensely by the world of culture that debates were organized, exhibitions set up and publications realized not only in Europe, but in many other parts of the world as well. The theme of the urban struggle and the revolutionary artistic explosions after the Second World War can be read very well in the changed idea of the city. The city was increasingly lived as a place to be re-conquered, a political space for experimenting common projects of freedom, solidarity and sharing. Corresponding to these claims there was a gigantic quantity of images, of which a certain number would remain the archetype of the 1968-1977 decade; from the psychedelic graphic art of the American West Coast, to the essential clenched fist icons of May 68, to the portraits of the new idols of the period’s youth. The city entered into an imagery thought of as creative activity, as a source of utopias and images of the desired future society, to celebrate “imagination seizing power”. The posters mentioned were chosen not so much for their aesthetic qualities as, instead, to show the relationship between the different theories and the different forms of revolt that characterized the period covered. These posters helped to enliven the scene of the turbulent street theater. At the heart of this conflict lies the very concept of communication, radically subverted by a new generation that made protest a lever for a change to civil rights and a renewal of politics.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.24.2020.8

In the field of industrial research programmes, we worked on the VISA project; Visualising Innovative and Social Artworks, through which we tried to create a new model of 3.0 museum. We embrace the challenge thrown by the MiBACT to increase the performance of Italian museums in their use of digital ICT, reinforcing communication, the fruition and the dissemination of artworks and of Cultural Heritage. The research is focalised on the study and the analysis of a wide repertoire of vases, red-figure and black-figure potteries, discovered in the Magna-Greco area. Here, we present, for the first time ever, a research that starts from the photogrammetric survey of very ancient potteries, characterised by double or triple curvature. Once we analysed the geometry of the models, we unwrapped the surfaces of the vases, normalising the figures and calculating their deformations. After that, we modelled the 3D scene, through a digital segmentation of the space. Thanks to this methodology, a new semantic meaning enriches the ‘silent’ artworks, making them alive and more communicative. Nowadays, the 3.0 Museum, has become a new centre of interpretation, able to activate the communities and to deal with many themes: sustainability (social, cultural and economical s.), marginality, inter-culture, the g-local, etc. It is a ‘liquid’ museum: a friendly and flexible museum, according to a dynamic, immersive and multiple-sensorial view, with the aim of promoting a more careful, inclusive and sustainable dissemination of culture. Il museo racconta. Dall’arte ceramica alla pittura vascolare nelle collezioni dei musei archeologici della Magna Grecia: costruire, decostruire, ricostruire Nell’ambito di un programma di ricerca industriale, si è sviluppato il progetto VISA, Visualizing Innovative and Social Artworks, per mezzo del quale si intende realizzare un nuovo modello di spazio museale, il Museo 3.0, raccogliendo la sfida lanciata dal MiBACT di aumentare le performance dei musei italiani mediante l’uso del digitale, potenziando in modo consapevole l’aspetto tecnologico della comunicazione, fruizione e valorizzazione delle opere d’arte. La ricerca si focalizza sullo studio e sull’analisi di un vasto repertorio di vasi in terracotta, a figure nere e a figure rosse, provenienti dall’area magno-greca. Qui si presenta, per la prima volta, un lavoro che parte dal rilievo fotogrammetrico di antichissime ceramiche a doppia e tripla curvatura. Una volta analizzati i modelli secondo uno studio geometrico della forma, si è passati ad un processo digitale di "srotolamento" della superficie, per concentrarsi così sulle figure rappresentate. Si è potuto così studiare la scena, per passare poi ad una ricostruzione 3D della rappresentazione vascolare, in modo da rendere l’oggetto archeologico un soggetto vivo, parlante e semantico, orientato a più livelli di fruizione. Il Museo 3.0, oggi vuol costituirsi come un grande centro di interpretazione, in grado di attivare le comunità e di confrontarsi con tematiche molto diverse, quali: la sostenibilità (sociale, culturale ed economica), la marginalità, l’inter-cultura, il glocale, ecc. È un museo "liquido", accessibile, visitabile, adattabile, secondo una visione dinamica, immersiva e multi-sensoriale, al fine di favorire una fruizione della cultura più attenta, inclusiva, sostenibile e partecipata.

Nel disegno di Architettura gran parte della produzione è dedicata a ragionamenti su architetture sognate, schizzi e visioni che aprono la porta dell’inconscio e del desiderio. Si tratta di un Disegno Visionario che il curatore di questo numero, Paolo Belardi, ha voluto proporre secondo un filo espositivo che passa dalla interpretazione di una realtà desiderata a una vagheggiata allucinazione della coscienza o della percezione. [continua a leggere]

This paper describes the experience of a three-day workshop at the end of the Visual Communication and Design course, in the first year of the Sciences of Primary Education degree course. The days of full immersion turned into a lively and creative “happening” during which communication and representation strategies for children were put into practice. The activities of painting, comics, photography, art and geometry were combined and integrated in order to experiment with reading images and to learn how to compose with them. At the end of the workshop, an exhibition of the final works was held, open to pre-schools and primary schools.

Reflections on Saint-Non and his contemporaries should lead us to some important considerations. The close relationship between archaeology and architecture, drawing and survey, mathematics and form are aspects that open interesting and original links to other disciplines to encourage research to further definitions of representation. Collaboration with archaeologists and historians of architecture can open up even more a program increasingly called for the construction for archives of memory available on the Web for museums and archaeological sites accessible in an innovative and integrated way. There have been many examples in recent years, all projected towards the communication of cultural heritage, including willingness to safeguard and defend the values they represent.

The 18th International Congress of Graphic Design in Architecture was held on September 24 and 25, 2020. This event is organized every other year by the teachers of Graphic Design of the Higher Technical Schools of Architecture in Spain. This year, the Scientific Committee designated Zaragoza as the organizational seat, on the general theme of The graphic heritage. The graphics of heritage (read more).

The theme of Issue No. 7 of diségno originates from former solicitations that always regain a great sense of relevance. The return to the term measure is an authentic aspect of the present condition that tends to become lost in less and less measurable liquid spaces. (read more)

In the third century BC, it happened that Eratosthenes of Cyrene (a city located in today's Libya) wanted to measure the radius of the earth, and he tried to do so using the instruments that were available to him at the time. The experiment gave an incredible result, obtaining a measurement that differs only 5% from the value currently known. The merit of Eratosthenes was to make a measurement with a good degree of accuracy using only one instrument: the gnomon, which is a stick planted vertically in perfectly flat, level ground [1]. (read more)

In the construction of a model, architectural drawing is not so much ‘representative drawing’ as ‘constructive drawing’. Scale and measure are fundamental criteria for interpreting and representing the parts of a unicum linked together in a hierarchical or interconnected relationship. This gives rise to the entire asset of a project, where various disciplines, or spheres of knowledge, integrate to generate models that make it possible to simulate its construction and predict its impact. For digital design, the computer screen is like a window opening onto the model’s virtual space that allows us to observe and interact with it while moving and modifying it. Virtual reality, immersive and mixed, creates new dimensions that animate the model, and from these dimensions, the complexity of the multiscalar project unfolds as the result of multidimensional thinking, for a creative, multidirectional, anti-dogmatic model.

The fifth issue of our journal is dedicated to the representation of the landscape, the environment and the territory, a theme very frequently dealt with, as multiscalar models and organisms are generally drawn and represented applying methods and principles that are widely diversified according to various arising needs or circumstances. At the same time, there are, in reality, objective difficulties in finding a common line of definition that brings together the three concepts of landscape –environment– territory, and this uncertainty derives precisely from the multi-dimensionality expressed by their conceptual depth, as well as from the ambiguity of these three terms when they are translated into other languages. (read more)

Il complesso di Torre Melissa è uno dei manufatti storici di pregio che si affacciano sulle coste calabresi del mare Jonio. Una torre-castello d’epoca aragonese sottoposta ad un restauro conservativo agli inizi degli anni duemila. In quella occasione, la torre fu rilevata con procedure manuali e l’ausilio di una stazione totale. Nel 2014 si è proceduto con un rilievo eseguito con strumenti digitali d’alta definizione (laser scanner, fotografia digitale e telecamera applicata a drone). La comparazione tra i due rilievi, effettuati con metodologie differenti, mostrano delle disuguaglianze semantiche evidenti che mettono in risalto i progressi delle odierne strumentazioni per la definizione di modelli 3D d’altissima precisione, fondamentali per le pratiche di tutela e valorizzazione di un patrimonio architettonico complesso e stratificato

The city of Reggio Calabria, its local context and the history that, in this last century, distinguished it, assumed an important role in the determination of the proposal for the project of a virtual museum of the city, which remembers its configuration before the earthquake.It’s an experience started in the 2014, about the reconstruction of a city that has been deleted by the earthquake of the 1908 and about its new settlement of the historical memory and of the place’s identities.The project deals with the creation of urban paths with an high multimedia effect and for this reason we asked to Franz Fischnaller in a brief interview to describe some of his more important experiences of virtual museum realized through new generation systems, able to link the digital entertainments to the urban sites, adapted to recreate historical lost paths.

Philiber t de L’Orme fu uno dei massimi esponenti della cultura architettonica del secondo Rinascimento in Francia [Blunt 1958]. Si è scelta una doppia immagine, tra le più conosciute del XVI secolo, che riprende in chiave allegorica l’idea del buon architetto, in contrapposizione con quello cattivo. Dalla rappresentazione della doppia allegoria emerge un concetto attuale, in quanto eterno, che intende coinvolgere il lettore in riflessioni che investono direttamente il contesto sociale e politico del fare architettura (continua a leggere).

La descrizione del tempo di sedimentazione di architetture e luoghi urbani non è una novità ma una esigenza che nella storia ha avuto esempi grafici di grande interesse che possono definirsi gli antesignani della time-line. Il disegno sfida il pensiero convenzionale della forma e diviene strumento di narrazione e classificazione di eventi storico-culturali. Come sperimentazione vengono illustrati gli esiti della ricerca GAIA (Giovani per una Archeologia InterAttiva in Calabria) per lo sviluppo di una nuova interfaccia educativa che, partendo dai modelli 3D delle città classiche, genera un sistema di segni/disegni capace di correlare luoghi, architetture e oggetti distanti nello spazio e nel tempo.

The representation of the city is read through the desire, the need, the celebration. "Place complex" par excellence: aggregation, concrete, planned and at the same time dissociating, fickle, disintegrated. The urban sites are an ever actual and stimulating theme for the representation and the generated "files" sometimes can assume unusual sizes and drawings can be compared on very different levels.In this issue of DISEGNARECON are intertwined readings of utopian and heterotopic cities according to the city's dichotomy between heaven and hell; stratified cities able to show its thickness through historical documents and old maps; possible cities determinated by certain projects and ideas for the their development; perceived cities through signs, suggestions, landscapes, real cities animated by the concreteness of programs, the executions, the chronicles

The Pawnshop palace in Messina, designed by Natale Masuccio and built starting in 1616, was severely damaged by the 1908 earthquake. Currently remains only the facade of the ground floor and some rooms behind. The aim of this research is to introduce some of the computing power in the field of "digital reconstruction of architecture" for documentation, recovery and the "conscious use" of architecture severely degraded or compromised compared to its original configuration. The reading of the monument, intended as a document, has allowed us a comparison between photography and survey to retrace, through operations analysis and breakdown of the parties, the three phases of a project more recognizable to many hands of his long and troubled history.

The Fiera del Mediterraneo Exhibition Centre of Palermo, in its original layout realized in 1946, is an interesting laboratory of visually striking ephemeral architecture and apparatuses. The whole fairgrounds lends itself to an analysis focusing on its dual image: one, “external”, because urban, territorial, Mediterranean, and another, “internal”, unfolding amidst the boulevards, the pavilions and the exhibits on display. For both images, there is a communicative project rightfully belonging to the period of the “Italian Metamorphosis” (1945/1968), the years in which Italian culture was invested by a renewed renaissance, even in the so-called minor arts such as graphics and visual communication.