Survey and Representation

Research focus

The Peer review has evaluated this group as Average

The Survey and Representation section has been created quite recently in order to further and reinforce, within the departmental scenario, the role of disciplines associated with the area of rendering. It is a matter of disciplines present in many different versions within the Architecture Faculty of the Athenaeum, that have not, probably precisely due to their variety, succeeded in gaining autonomous visibility within the Department. Due to the limited resources and energies, the coordination with environments within and externally to university structure calls for a clear strategy. The peculiarity of the team with respect to others created within the Polytechnic consists of its increasingly consolidated capacity to survey the existing situation, render the ideated one, and communicate the built reality. These aspects coincide with three possible lines of development deemed capable of unifying the fragmented nature of the fields of expertise and scientific results, exalting their qualities and differences. They center on specific thematic spheres of research, and aim to build stable relationships of confrontation and exchange with other institutions and structures, also on an international level. Finally, they create the bases for a coordination of the didactic activities concerning all the disciplines associated with the scientific and disciplinary sector. The decision to create the sector as part of the Department of Architectural Design is inspired precisely by this intention: to assert the central role of architectural planning, the necessity of its adequate rendition on every scale (territorial, urban, of whole buildings and their construction details) and in every phase (ideation, experimentation and communication). The historically consolidated and recognized value of the disciplines of representation as part of the training of an architect, and its role of indispensable instrument therefore receives its due recognition. 217 The confrontation with the new frontiers of technology and instruments is inevitable, and this also holds true for the confrontation with the new horizons opened by the new, advanced graphic languages; the latter have only recently made it possible to go beyond static rendering, inserting the time factor within the representations as element necessary for the visual appreciation of a space. In fact, a sequence of prospects, rather than a static single view, guarantees a realistic rendition of the architectural object. At the same time to the theme of rendering of the design, a research sphere inspired by the tradition of urban studies and surveys from the Seventies is confirmed; it consists of the representation of existing realities in their different interpretations and on different scales (territorial, urban, of whole buildings and their construction details). The third theme, the communication of the architectural plan, becomes relevant at this point. It becomes more and more crucial, within a context of urban transformations, also linked precisely to the territory in which the Polytechnic operates, to be able to communicate the architectural product in an adequate manner. This communication must take place on different levels; one must reach both the general public and professionals. In this sense it is essential to choose the correct strategy of representation. The maintenance of the thematic spheres is based, programmatically, on the cognitive equivalence between analysis and design: while the architectural plan familiarizes with reality through a formulation of a synthetic judgment, or in other words by showing how it may be transformed, the survey investigates the actual constructions through a process of abstraction of transmissible concepts of a geometric-spatial and constructive nature. By outlining the work prospects within the thematic nuclei – that of project rendering, the one associated with the survey and that of communication of the architecture – one proposes to maintain a substantial continuity with the polytechnic tradition of paying attention both to the constructive datum and the rigor of the methodological bases. The research work is moreover aimed at a renewal of the experimentation on all thematic spheres, in the light of innovations in the fields of information technology and techniques, with which it is necessary to reestablish a correct relationship of instrumental utilization free of awe. To assure this, a stable integration has been created with the L.A.M.M. – Laboratory of Morphological Models and representation of constructions - and, even if in a more partial form, with the Model Building Laboratory. Relationships, in the form of confrontation and cooperation, have moreover been established with the more immediately tangent disciplinary areas (History and Restoration), as well as with other departmental service structures as the Thematic Cartography Workshop and the Information Technology Workshop. Lab infrastructures 218 The research activities of the section is aided, even if with autonomous forms of management, by the Laboratory of Analysis and Morphologic Models of Architecture, where Giovanna A. Massari, associate professor at the University of Trento, is scientific consultant. The L.A.M.M. (Laboratory of Analysis and Morphological Models of Architecture) founded by Vittorio Ugo and Giovanna A. Massari, that has been active from 1996 to 2003 as part of the Department of Conservation and History of Architecture, has now been transferred to the Department of Architectural Design of the Milan Polytechnic; its activities comprise assignments by third parties, co-funded MIUR researches and didactic experiences conducted post-lauream. The laboratory is an integrated structure for theoretic research, scientific but also didactic experimentation, the supply of professional services and work on particular themes, programs and types of research, that are articulated within the context of representation understood as a specific form of knowledge and privileged place for the development of architectural design; the analysis and the morphological study are therefore among the basic interests of the activities conducted. The workshop aims to produce, in addition to traditional graphic models, also critical and thematic, experimental and theoretical models, developing the techniques and theories associated with the themes of representation in its historical context and its relations with geometrics and aesthetics. Said models, linked to different scales of analysis, from the cultural heritage to architectural and urban constructions, to objects on a territorial scale, are elaborated both on the basis of existing documents and design materials and on the basis of data produced by special topographic, photogrammetric and longimetric-direct survey campaigns.

Dipartimento di afferenza

Dipartimento di Progettazione dell’Architettura

Docenti afferenti

Full Professors
Massimo Fortis
Assistant Professors
Cecilia Bolognesi
Maria Pomperiana Iarossi
Daniele Giovanni Papi
Sergio Porta