From Drawing to the Sensitive Model: The Epistemology of Data in Digital Architectural and Urban Representation

Abstract

Architectural representation cannot be reduced to a mere device for translating reality; it is a cognitive practice that selects, orders, and renders possible worlds operative. Digitalization alters its epistemic regime, shifting the focus from the sign to informational relations: the line becomes data, the image turns into process, and drawing migrates into a computational environment that organizes knowledge and decision-making. Perspective, once responsible for constructing a symbolic order of knowledge, gives way to a software-based logic capable of redefining the relationship between gesture and calculation, between visibility and operativity. Within this transition, data do not function as neutral measures, but as operators of meaning that include, exclude, and connect elements of reality, thereby establishing hierarchies and trajectories of signification. The information model exemplifies this transformation: beyond its managerial use, it constitutes a cognitive infrastructure that integrates design, construction, and maintenance within a single ecology of information. Rather than disappearing, drawing persists as a cognitive principle that informs the structure of the model and guides its interpretative capacity: detail, error, and variation become resources of meaning rather than residues to be eliminated. This leads to the notion of a sensitive model, understood as the convergence of algorithmic precision and perceptual ambiguity–a form of representation capable of mediating between calculation and imagination, between visibility and decision, thus restoring to the project its critical status. From this perspective, digital transformation does not interrupt the genealogy of drawing, but extends it, translating the graphic act into an informational writing in which representation becomes not a description, but an active construction of knowledge and a shared responsibility toward reality.