XY. Critical review of studies on the representation of architecture and use of the image in science and art
XY. Critical review of studies on the representation of architecture and use of the image in science and art (e-ISSN 2499-8346) is a biannual scientific journal which promotes research on the role of figurative expression as a tool for the construction and communication of knowledge.
Copyright (c) 2025 Redazione XY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Copyright (c) 2025 Giovanna Massari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Experiences of Visuality in Urban Regeneration Processes between Memory, Participation, and Imagination
This article aims to explore the role of the image as a tool for critical reflection and active community participation in urban regeneration practices. To this end, three design initiatives - 10 Porte sul Futuro, Luoghi Dismessi, and Prossima Apertura - implemented in the metropolitan area of Rome and its immediate hinterland have been selected. These projects share a common goal: the cultural and identity-based reappropriation of urban spaces by local communities, in order to re-signify them as meaningful places. The spaces addressed by these projects do not exhibit homogeneous physical or topographical features, but they all express a condition of marginality in contemporary urban living and, consequently, a sense of exclusion or precariousness for those who, in various ways and even for brief periods, ‘inhabit’ them. What unites the three initiatives is their approach: visual installations and iconic works are assigned the role of stimulating new interpretations and proposing alternative narratives for these spaces, so that communities may reinterpret them as places of possibility rather than as residual voids. This approach, implemented through processes of participatory co-design, fosters dialogue between the built environment and its inhabitants, aiming to raise awareness and promote the restoration of essential relationships between city and citizenry. In this context, the article highlights how the diverse characteristics of visual products and the dynamics of citizen engagement contribute to the redefinition of such liminal spaces, transforming them into resources for the community.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elena Ippoliti, Carlo Settimio Battisti, Nicola Brucoli, Flavia Camagni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Commercial Ruins. Representative Analysis of New Neglected Marginalities for their Adaptive Reuse
The evolution of the contemporary city, dominated by the neoliberal consumerist logics, has led in the last century to a centripetal urbanism marked by commercial construction. These works, scattered across suburban areas and inherently indifferent to aesthetics, were conceived solely to serve market logic. Yet, after only a few decades, they lost their function and were abandoned, victims of the rise of digital commerce. These ‘commercial ruins’ represent a further simplification of the Vitruvian ratio, devoid of beauty and deprived even of utility. The inherent contradiction in consumerist architecture mirrors, in hyperbolic form, the evolutionary patterns of contemporary cities, making the study of representation crucial for its autopsy-like capacity to reveal transformations and activate regenerative processes through design. In addition to being analysed as products, they convey a language in constant evolution with respect to context; indeed, although genetically unified by the globalised stylistic features of marketing and standardised structures, these ‘selling machines’ are nonetheless dependent on the environment and culture in which they are grafted. It is therefore essential to define methodologies and processes to understand their detectable phenomena, identifying the structure and image to investigate their relationships and dynamisms, mechanisms of adaptation and survival of signs. Representative analysis delve into their semantic evolution to propose adaptive reuse aimed at sustainable regeneration. Commercial ruins are identified paradigmatically in Austria, where the building fabric, marked by a distinctive architectural language, is studied in its linguistic stratifications, revealing typological patterns that blur the traditional divide between the historic city and the suburbs. Even in their marginality, such areas retain the potential to incubate future development.
Copyright (c) 2025 Laura Suvieri, Fabio Bianconi, Marco Filippucci, Andreas Lechner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Peri-urban Observatories: The Case Study of La Cantueña in the Metropolitan Area of Madrid
The term ‘periphery’ and the expression ‘peri-urban territory’ are currently generating conceptual confusion, both in collective imagination and academic debate. This is reflected in the diverse methods used to investigate and represent areas that defy categorisation and cannot be defined univocally. Such areas are often described as marginal, unresolved, residual, transitional, and also as zones of opportunity. In response to the rapid urban expansion of major global metropolises, various international approaches and novel investigation methodologies have been developed. These aim to understand and represent the inherent indefinability of peri-urban spaces and to re-evaluate obsolete concepts of the periphery, historically defined in opposition to and dependent on the urban centre. This article explores the potential use of residual zones as peri-urban observatories, understood as tools for investigation and visual education for the community, emphasising the importance of direct observation. It presents the case study of a potential peri-urban observatory within the Iberian Peninsula, in the Madrid Metropolitan Area: Los Cerros de la Cantueña, a group of four hills commonly referred to as La Cantueña. Due to its elevated position relative to the surrounding plain, Los Cerros de la Cantueña serves not only as a biodiversity reserve and public park but also as a privileged vantage point. From these hills, one can observe industrial areas, large shopping centres, residential blocks of urban settlements orbiting central Madrid, the various road infrastructures linking them to the ‘centre’, and the centre itself.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessandra Coppari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
A Lens between Nature and Death. Cemeteries: The Staging of New Hybrid Landscapes, Places where Symbiosis Generates Life
Lichens are an association of species: a plant organism originating from the symbiosis between a fungus and an alga, capable of transforming an apparently lifeless place into a space suitable for life. The organism resulting from this symbiosis is a new individual, suspended between the kingdoms of Fungi and Plantae. ‘Marginality’ is not only a condition inherent in their biological structure but also determines the environment in which they perform their vital functions: in a state that would be extreme for most complex organisms, lichens make the ‘liminal’ zone their habitat. Classified by ecological sciences as ‘pioneer species’, they inhabit spaces, leading them into a constant transition state. Thanks to them, the residual spaces of death have the potential to transform into spaces ready to host life; through their bodies – the thalli – they convert the voids scattered within the minute ecological network characterising the cemetery space. The analysis proposed in the text explores the condition of lichens – both from a scientific and metaphorical, and consequently theoretical, perspective – and their impact on a place that is also symbolic of marginality: The Monumental Cemetery of Verano. The result is a series of changing images, developed through an abstraction of the traditional scientific method, yielding concentric universes: evocative images, following the path traced mid-last century by György Kepes with The New Landscape in Art and Science. This aims to represent the tension developing in the abandoned spaces of cities and the possibilities arising from it.
Copyright (c) 2025 Vittoria Ghio, Francesco Tosetto, Itzel Inti Maria Donati, Justyna Profaska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Alphabet of ‘Spaces-between’. Similarities and Changes of In-between Places
The urban analysis of highly historicised fabrics is not always immediately intelligible, especially when one seeks a spatial dimension so rarefied and lacking in clear definition that it becomes difficult to categorise - like that of ‘in-between’ places. The space in between - between things - is the place of connections, where the focus of investigation shifts to relationships that transcend material architecture, while still implicitly acknowledging its existence. In exploring this theme, it becomes necessary to draw on literature that, even if only marginally, addresses this field of inquiry. As a result, it is obvious to come across a large number of definitions which attempt to connote the same concept, though each defining it with a different nuance. An ambiguous, ephemeral, immaterial concept. The aim of this research is therefore to trace the infra-structure as a constituent part of a complex fabric and as a component through which “we manufacture the image of reality” (Wittgenstein 1967: 177). Certainly not as a simple or simplified given, but as an elementary moment - and therefore node - in which maximum complexity is condensed. Considerations regarding urban phenomena of this type make it possible to include within the city these new contemporary territories which, rejecting such dichotomous mechanisms, work on unifying aspects and organisms, and thus on areas of relation, which find their fertile ground in the in-between of the city. The research, starting from the re-reading of the surveys of two cities facing the Mediterranean, makes use of operations of deconstruction, enumeration, and comparison, in order to define new repertoires for reading the city - starting from the in-between, intended as places that oppose a dominant culture of ‘full architecture’, that is, the predominance of the built environment over the incidence of interruptions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sonia Mercurio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Human-Space Relationship in Barrio Mugica (Villa 31) of Buenos Aires: The Necessity of Human Habitation
This study concerns the relationship between man and space in Barrio Padre Carlos Mugica, formerly Villa 31 of Buenos Aires, which can be traced back to the human need to inhabit the world. The relationship between man and space is the root of all Villas in Buenos Aires and Argentina. It is a relationship based on the human-space continuity, the human need to live and inhabit space, and therefore the innate tendency to carve out space within space to inhabit the world. Barrio Mugica is a unique and particular space. It is a living organism, spatial and human, spontaneous and resilient. It is a complex place in itself and, simultaneously, a space that contains and expresses the complexity of the contemporary metropolis. In Barrio Mugica, the necessity of human habitation expresses a particular relationship and a visible integration between man and space. In the need to occupy space – not only to inhabit the world but also to claim a place in it and assert oneself as a living human being – people and spaces integrate, creating human and spatial relationships, while the individual constructs a dual spatiality, both physical and mental, materialising through architectural self-construction, both their physical surroundings and their inner mental world. Spatially, Barrio Mugica has nothing to do with the peripheral spaces of large metropolises or with the margins of urban centres. Villa 31 is a space that has developed within the city, not outside or at its edges. However, it can be considered peripheral and marginal when referring to those social peripheries and marginalities that Pope Francis identifies as “existential” peripheries, where survival education prevails (Bergoglio 2015). The objective of this study is to historically and presently highlight – even through the author’s photographic reportage – the necessity of human habitation expressed in Villa 31 and the particular human-space relationship on which the Villa itself is founded. Understanding the human need to live and inhabit space and to claim a place in the world can be helpful in the future of the Villas and the people who inhabit them. Moreover, it may also be helpful in the future for expanding and rethinking perspectives and positions on the Villas for those who observe them.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rosario Marrocco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Between the Visible and the Invisible: The Perspective of the Margin for Narratives of Suspended Places
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible” (Klee 1959: 76): the increasing interest in dismissed and marginal places, which are becoming ever more prevalent in contemporary urban, industrial, and rural contexts, necessitates a profound reflection on the languages and representational devices that accompany and anticipate their transformation processes (Maniglio 2010). This article thus proposes to investigate the dual role of representation, understood both as a device for recognition and as an agent of transformation for marginal spaces. Recognition implies the surveying act of identifying latent qualities and invisible dimensions; transformation, conversely, is founded on the revelatory act of reinterpreting the context to generate new forms of appropriation and rediscovered identity values. From the perspective of the margin, representation assumes a maieutic valence: a process that, akin to the Socratic tradition, brings forth often-ignored potentialities at the boundary between the natural and the artificial, intertwining analysis and prefiguration, recognition and vision, absences and permanences - for spaces that elude dominant centrality. The concept of a suspended place, understood as a space that evades traditional categorisations - often marginal or in transition - finds a powerful echo in the languages of art, architecture, and photography, projecting a new aesthetic and cultural vision that supports possible physical transformations linked to functional, environmental, and social needs (Matta-Clark 1993). The analysis therefore focuses on the representative power of images in re-signifying these places, referencing the works of artists and architects who transcend objective documentation of the territory to focus on the sensitive dimension of the relationships between communities and landscape (Pierluisi 2022).
Copyright (c) 2025 Giorgia Strano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
To Depict the Landscape at the Edges, Utilizing Unconventional Maps and Graphic Experimentation Techniques
The European Landscape Convention (Florence, 2000) has extended the focus from landscapes of exceptional value to degraded territories, implicitly recognising the crucial role that all places play for the quality of life of populations, in urban and rural areas. In this cultural and social perspective, the landscapes of “everyday life”, the “abandoned” landscapes, and finally the “marginal” landscapes, are worthy of new attention. Taking up the idea of margin put in focus by Gilles Clement (Manifesto del Terzo Paesaggio, Macerata, 2005) that turns its sense from a pure residual area to a complex environment ready to unfold the maximum of its potentialities, the purpose of this contribution is to examine the role of depiction in giving shape to the landscape, giving meaning to words from the same area, and disassembling, reassembling, and giving new meanings to marginal areas (Tarpino, Il paesaggio fragile, Torino, 2016). The need to clarify the relationship - between visible and invisible components, between material and immaterial aspects, of which residents are stakeholders holders and bearers in a living and landscape context - therefore requires attention to those forms of representation that can allow landscapes on the margins to emerge as perceived and lived, in a way that is both descriptive and proactive through the use of unconventional maps and graphic experimentation techniques that leave room for multiple interpretations, visions and designs.
Copyright (c) 2025 XY. Studies on the representation of architecture and the use of the image in science and art https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Silvia Metzeltin, Giovanna Durì https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The image of the mountain has been built around the idea of an entity characterised by a considerable mass, often associated with the perception of being an impervious area. This place, marked by its great height and extension, and difficult to traverse, has profoundly influenced the human imagination to the extent that, over the centuries and across several cultures, the mountain has been attributed symbolic values, representing both power and transcendence. According to Greek mythology, the mountaintop was the divine site of the union between Earth (Hera) and Heaven (Zeus), while in many religions and cultures ascending to heaven via the mountain was perceived as a path of purification - a return to the ‘beginning’ and a manifestation of the sacred. That said, this article aims to explore some imaginative scenarios that have shaped different cultures across time and space. Starting from the gnosiological conception of the ancient Imago Mundi, the first scenario examines the relationships - if not the idiomatic and conceptual equivalences - between imagination, utopia, and mountains. This leads to the gnosiological assumptions of the Speculum Mundi in Renaissance art through the representation of mountains in painting. In the Renaissance (Pinturicchio, Mantegna, Leonardo, etc.), the mountain becomes part of a landscape inscribed in the conception of ecstasy, the out-of-self as the connection between macro and microcosm, the sensible and the intelligible. The second scenario explores the symbolic significance of the mountain in a contemporary context through the work of Chinese artist Yang Yongliang who, starting from the Chinese pictorial tradition of depicting mountain landscapes as a celebration of the harmony between human species and Nature (known as Shan shui), restores the mountain as a call to awareness against consumerist policies based on profit and the consequent socio-environmental disasters.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cesare Battelli, Ornella Zerlenga https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 XY. Studies on the representation of architecture and the use of the image in science and art https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Cyborg Mountains. Post-war and Post-mining Metamorphoses in the Border Areas between Trentino-Alto Adige and Sardinia
The anthropic contribution, in geological terms, is now a widely recognised component in current debates, but it is often viewed exclusively in oppositional terms, as something foreign or disruptive compared to an assumed original naturalness of these contexts, particularly when we speak about mountains. Through the comparison of two distinct case studies, differing in location and genesis (war/extractive) but united by similar dynamics and evolutionary processes, we aim to analyze those situations in which the anthropic contribution participates in the creation of parts of mountains, new geographies, and hybrid geologies. In both the abandoned fortifications of the First World War in Trentino-Alto Adige and the post-mining landscapes of south-west Sardinia, the mountain has undergone a process of artificial transformation ex ante and ex post. These mutating organisms challenge the idea of a mere artefact, presenting a catalogue of new landforms, geographical objects, and geological volumes scattered between the Pre-Alps, Iglesiente, Vallarsa, and Sulcis, within a framework of ‘man-made’ natural elements. These contemporary fossils constitute topographical apparitions on a territorial scale, capable of reconfiguring entire geographical compartments through processes of addition, subtraction or accumulation: they resemble the products of new forms of archaeology, lying somewhere halfway between landscape and architecture. In a sort of cyclopean alchemy capable of reshuffling characteristics and attributes, concrete merges with granite, the extraction waste transforms into resources and emerging landscapes. The composition of these mineral organisms with unique characteristics, understood as geological splinters emerged from destructive or constructive processes, encourages a reconsideration of the notion of mountains and naturalness within a potential strategy of coevolution.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sara Favargiotti, Adriano Dessì, Marco Ferrari, Roberto Sanna https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Stories by drawing. Dino Buzzati’s Mountains
Regarded as one of the greatest Italian writers of the 20th century and therefore better known for his literary activity than for his graphic-pictorial activity, Dino Buzzati (1906-1972) expressed his love for the mountains through images conceived as painted stories. Both his biography and bibliography reflect a vocation for visual expression, running parallel to his passion for writing. This dual literary and figurative soul lends itself to evaluating the rhetorical effectiveness of images in their complementary relationship with words. The fruits of his versatile pen are accompanied by the exercise of the visual arts in drawing, painting, and illustrated stories, which culminate in comics. Among his mountain-themed images, one notable example is the rhetorical figures of his famous tempera, a surreal Milan cathedral (1958). The square becomes an Alpine plateau with spires and pinnacles inspired by Cima Canali melting like wax into conoids of dejection that frame the rural scene. Metonymy plays with puns and anamorphosis, emphasizing the dual use of words within the graphic allegory, with a clear reference to the expressive power of figures in verbal language. The mountain, rich in symbolic references, is a recurring and metamorphic presence of rarefied landscapes, composed of only a few essential elements, and it transforms into sandy dunes, erupting volcanoes, threatening cumulonimbus clouds, or turreted cities, serving as a visual gymnasium for artistic expression. It offers the starting point for comparing two languages differently linked to the creation of ‘figures’. The graphic-pictorial stories of the writer, Milanese by training but deeply connected to the mountains by birth and choice, underline the interplay between graphic and verbal language. Buzzati depicts the mountains in his own unique way, how he sees and feels them and represents them in an imaginative way: the expressive freedom of drawing replaces the precision of words, while still leaving the door open to the dreamlike realm of imagination.
Copyright (c) 2025 Michela Rossi, Sara Conte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Representing by Outlines. The Mountain, Described through its Contour
The mountain’s profile is recognized as one of the distinctive elements by which it is identified, its reading by contrast with the background sky characterising its iconic recognition. In this sense, the paper investigates the representation of the mountain through the graphic form of the profile, understood as the drawing that reproduces the extreme line of its outline. Consider the triangular profile drawn freehand as the ultimate synthesis of the concept of the mountain but also the detailed one crafted by mountaineers to illustrate the new routes they have travelled; the topographical profile as the scaled representation on a Cartesian plane of the elevation trend along a planimetric line; the artistic profile (as realistic as it is abstract) that the illustrator draws to describe the mountain through captivating graphic artefacts; the profile of the mountain routes in bicycle hiking or great and epic stage races; the profile found in the logos of corporate and territorial brands, where both real and imagined mountains are featured. The contribution adopts a taxonomic approach to the varied alternation of modes and typologies representing the mountain profile, which symbolically take on the figurative meaning of different ways and types of looking at mountains, with the aim of fostering visual keys to interpreting its role as an identity and shared heritage.
Copyright (c) 2025 Simone Bori https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Visible Traces, Invisible Traces. The Texture of the Mountain as Infrastructure
The highlands of Abruzzo, including the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park and the Sirente-Velino Regional Park, are defined by towering peaks converging on vast plateaus. The geomorphological characteristics of these areas dictate specific forms of human interaction, such as pastoralism, agriculture, and forestry. The result is a landscape shaped by human practices and modes of occupation, centred on the communal use of resources and assets. This weave is evident not only in visible traces, such as those of ‘open fields’, but also in property and administrative traces, seemingly invisible yet strategically significant for accessing and exploiting the area’s resources. By analysing these locations in detail, we uncover a network of resources that, through the ‘design of the territory’, identifies the shared heritage of the mountain landscape. Can we think of the mountain as a single infrastructure? A weave constructed from countless relationships and contact zones where degrees of collaboration can be identified? This contribution seeks to explore a new way of reading and representing the mountain landscape. Through the observation and decoding of these traces, we can craft new spatial imaginaries and make hidden structures visible, expressing and reinterpreting the physical alphabet of anthropogeography. A single palimpsest, composed of deliberate layers, emerges, a weave that is drawn and thus designed.
Copyright (c) 2025 Roberta Agnifili https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Interpreting the Alpine Region over Time through the High-Altitude Network of Outposts
Mountain huts at high altitudes tell the story of the times and ways in which man has known the Alps. Originally created as shelters, today they make up a network of outposts that have developed on the mountains over time, reflecting the socio-economic changes in history. However, the current climatic context and the increasing degree of their use question the presence and role of these structures in a fragile context such as the high mountains. Developing future scenarios for high-altitude constructions requires in-depth knowledge of their evolution and their relationship with the territory. Georeferenced reconstructions, diagrams, and interpretive tools become the main support for analysing mountain areas to understand the development of the network of outposts over time, interpreting the dynamics of its use and its relationship with climate. Starting from the creation of an original dataset of 914 Italian Alpine huts above 1500 m a.s.l., identified through literature analysis, and from processing of the related geographic, altimetric, temporal, and receptive data collected, the article illustrates the evolution of the relationship between man and mountain through analytical and interpretive representations. By connecting this information with climatic and geo-hydrological risk data, the investigation suggests a method for constructing a knowledge framework, useful to develop future scenarios. The intersection of climatic, geo-hydrological, and architectural information provides a cross-cutting approach to understanding the Alpine region, useful for evaluating the presence and role of mountain huts and to highlight how, in the future, the network of high-altitude shelters could play a fundamental role in the strategies for the sustainable management of mountain territories.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elisa Bernard, Massimiliano Condotta, Elisa Zatta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Italian Mountain Villages in Wisconsin. Hillbrows and Hilltowns by Robert Venturi
Hillbrows and Hilltowns (Venturi, unpublished manuscript 225.XI.108, Venturi Scott Brown Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania) is the title of the text in which Robert Venturi gathers his most profound and spontaneous reflections on the relationship between architecture and landscape, specifically focusing on how small rural villages dot the mountainous landscape of the central Italian Apennines. Written in 1955, and since then unpublished, the short essay is presented for the first time with the dual aim of bringing attention both to the theoretical roots of Venturi’s thought and to the necessary practices for re-imagining the Italian mountain landscape in contemporary society. The ambitious essay by the Italian-American architect originates from numerous experiences, from his first trip to Italy in 1948, to his years as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome between 1954 and 1956. Venturi’s desire to explore the most remote Italian rural villages is intertwined with a dual identity significance; on one hand, he visits the small town of Atessa (Abruzzo) to explore his father Roberto’s birthplace, while on the other, the harmonious visions offered by these hilltop architectures captivate him to the point of prompting a deep introspective analysis on the identity of American architecture. In the text Hillbrows and Hilltowns, Venturi attempts to answer the challenging question: what is authentic? Which architecture is genuinely part of and an expression of a culture, and how can it survive over time without breaking the reciprocal bond between Nature and Architecture? Venturi supports his argument with the works of Frank L. Wright at Taliesin, drawing a fascinating analogy between an entire Italian medieval village and a newly constructed home in the American landscape, where Alberti’s words seem to resonate: “the city is like a large house, and the house in turn a small city”. (Alberti 1450, 1966).
Copyright (c) 2025 Francesca Sisci https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Urgent expressions between science and society
The essay is a consideration on the relationship between visuality and the urgencies that often live science and society. The assumption that thought is structured through images and that images guide thought is the backdrop to research that crosses the world of visuality. Thanks to images and drawing it is possible to find answers to unresolved issues (Friedrich Kekulé), propose solutions to react to urgent and pressing needs (Renzo Piano), but also denounce and raise awareness regarding compelling issues (Banksy). In the visual arts, the response to ecological crises takes various forms, ranging from graphs and infographics illustrating climate data to works of art where the artist’s actions merge with evolving landscapes, prompting reflections on the relationship between man and nature. Art, as a means to address social crises, takes the form of protest pieces that often reinterpret symbols rooted in the collective consciousness and express themselves through street art. Initiatives aimed at preserving these artworks through digital archives are also emerging. To understand what is happening around us, the performing arts also operate with transversal gazes, often tracing social and environmental urgencies in the interactions between the virtual and the real. The imminence of needs is expressed in the dynamic languages of ballet reinterpretations, sometimes proposing grotesque images that amplify human impotence in the face of drastic epochal changes. Lights, syncopated choreographies and augmented reality experiments propose a multiplicity of gazes that are integrated into contemporary gestures, to reveal just some of the possible urgent performativity.
Copyright (c) 2024 XY. Studies on the representation of architecture and the use of the image in science and art https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Phenomenological Cartography as Appropriation of the Inhabited: Gender and City Workshops in Malaga, Spain
The case study of the Gender and City workshops, developed between 2011 and 2015 by the City Council of Malaga (Spain), exemplifies how actual representativeness allows the city's appropriation by those participating. For this, it is essential to start from a gender dimension approach to get to know the city. Collaborative in situ mapping is presented as a methodology for recognising everyday spaces. The first results led to a debate on the problems in the city, starting with identifying individual difficulties to contextualise them in the neighbourhood and the inhabited space. The representation of these problems is fundamental, as drawing can be named. The idea of "what is not named does not exist" is transferred to drawing. What is not marked does not exist. The normative drawing of planning deals with aspects such as typology, buildability, the relationship between full and empty, or the definition of public and private. But everyday qualitative issues such as fear, confusion, discomfort due to dirt, the emptiness of an abandoned lot or the loneliness of productive areas outside working hours are not reproduced in any planimetry and, therefore, do not form part of the disciplinary debate. This fact favours the process of privatisation of the harmful effects of the city on people. The final results showed that collaborative mapping helps to make problems visible and to name them. It also helps to generate a sense of belonging and empowerment among the neighbourhood residents.
2001- Odyssey at the Academy: women draw
The construction of the spaces we inhabit is not neutral, nor is the production of knowledge as both have a cultural meaning. Design is limited, organized, and valued by androcentric power structures and, consequently, architecture universalizes a masculine model as a neutral one but women bodies and those of minorities are absent, repressed and forgotten. In Academics, the discourse of scientific and technical objectivity has dominated drawing learning strategies for the construction of spaces. Since the second half of the 20th century, the codified representation of architecture has evolved into an instrument of analysis, interpretation, communication and even criticism, becoming the means to express opposition to what is established without words. Sometimes, camouflaged in master’s degree projects, other architectures flow from the Academy itself. They emerge from the common desire to transform the reality that surrounds them, from resistance and often from a gender approach. These other discourses that propose new ways of operating in space require other graphic procedures: we project what we can draw. In March 2001, the architect Izaskun Chinchilla presented her final degree project at the Madrid School of Architecture. Under the title Project for the artificial reforestation of the Retiro Park in Madrid, she showed an enormous and dense hybrid graphic production that fused the handmade, the digital, the intuitive and the scientific stuff and anticipated a more-than-human imaginary illustrated by minor ecofeminist architectures.
On Performance. Addressing environmental phenomena in architecture, from representation to discourse
In addressing the urgency to revise architectural drawings, under the pressing demands for sustainability, this essay considers theoretical underpinnings on architectural performance and specific case studies, centering on modernist and contemporary architects whose work has engaged with bridging concerns about form with energy efficiency, thermal comfort and climate control. The diagrammatic section, tracing tangible and intangible elements, emerges as an essential tool that has the power, on the one hand, to enable analysis and criticism and, on the other, to put forward and generate revised design approaches and spatial concepts. To grapple with the current socioecological issues, the article argues, we need to be reminded that environmental sustainability is equally a representational, a cultural and a design issue.
Copyright (c) 2023 XY. Studies on the representation of architecture and the use of the image in science and art https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Disegno is therefore the Idea: it is the True Form of the Thing
I have accepted the proposal for a reflection on manual drawing, favouring its inventive aspect, both in its incisive and more assembly ways. I still do not know tools of structured interaction between humans and machines – such as new neuronal interfaces, etc. –, and consequently, I consider the expression digital drawing an oxymoron. In Italian, ‘drawing’ is a polysemic word, together nomen actionis, nomen acti and obiectum, as it simultaneously designates both the conception, the executive practice, and finally the outcome of the design. These designations, however, constitute the unfolding of an operational thought, which develops around things to form images of them. A bildnerische Denken. However, an essential distinction is needed in the relationship between thought, image and figure. In my opinion, a mental image similar to a drawing is not given. I fully share Garroni’s opinion that in our experience, sensations, perceptions and imaginations are formed as ‘internal images’, dynamic, not yet iconic, around which thought clusters to stimulate the expression of a first figure. These figures/drawings constitute an analytical basis for the project as they identify the phases of its formative phenomenology. And to this end, overcoming their generic denomination (sketches), I tried to identify inventively typical characteristics in four classes of inventive drawings: image drawings or initial ones, traced almost as unique signs, in which we find the deep inspiration and the first rationality of the idea; schematic drawings or those that allow the reordering of the constituent elements of the image in the principle of the structure of its form; assembly drawings, which characterize the development of the work, or the products of a way of doing that he invents by doing and undoing; and finally layout drawings, specific to the operational writing of the project. Terminal acts of that rational research on it, for the punctual discovery of its grammatical and syntactic mechanism.
Much has been written about the differences (fundamental and not) between the drawing created with hand tools and the one generated thanks to the use of digital technology. The present investigation is based on the hypothesis that defends the relevance of considering temporality in any analysis of the process involved in drawing. Thus, and thanks to the series of critical positions that we develop and that are a consequence of the different approaches that the temporal parameter enables, we propose a new and fertile hand drawing analysis strategy. The temporal component of manual drawing is precisely the one that best allows us to critically compare it. The process (creation), the result (document) and the interpretation of the drawing will be concepts that we will redefine thanks to the relationship with time and that will allow us to articulate the discourse, first, and the strategy, later, of the construction of a contemporary classification (in relation to the digital world) of manual drawing. The very tension of the lines on the paper (Fraser, Henmi 1994: 163), as well as their verbalized perception (Prinz 1991: 20) will be put in relation to that foreign country (Markus, Cameron 2002: 120) that the time different from the current one to better explain the multiple meanings contained in the graphic signifier (fig. 1). The conclusions of the research will thus underline the limitations of the new technologies applied to drawing while allowing to illuminate the reasons why, we believe, the construction of images thanks to the combination of symbols (signifiers, spots, colors, lines ...) that we call drawing is an inherent part of the very essence of the human race and its social relationship and with the environment.