‘Out of the blue foam’. MVRDV’s Didden Village as a full-scale model

For almost two decades MVRDV (Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, Nathalie de Vries) of Rotterdam is known for the provocative, ludic and imaginative tone of its architectural proposals and a symbolic and experimental use of color often becomes the hallmark that integrates architectures made of elementary volumes. One example is the Didden Village, an extension of a traditional row house of late nineteenth century by the superposition of two elementary volumes widely used for the game of the couple's children: two boxes in concrete with a pitched roof. The designers describe it as a "crown on top of the monument", where the crown is the new building and the monument is the building below. As a vernacular element out of its context, the Village comes obviously in contrast with the modernist buildings around it, but the choice of painting it entirely of blue declines further this contrast in color and texture terms with neighbors brick-and-stone coatings. The meticulously monochrome solution, combined with an almost sculptural definition of volumes which are practically free of architectural details, gives unity to all the parts of the micro-village and enhances the effects of sunlight. But the choice of blue, complementary to the warm red chosen for the interior, hides other objectives that can only partially reduced to mimetic issues in order to virtually disappear against the sky (a phenomenon that might be rare given the latitude). Used without interruption, the blue transforms external volumes into something suspended between an out-of-scale design object and a Pop Art installation, not far from Oldenburg & Van Bruggen’s "ordinary objects depicted in monumental scale". The blue, or rather the cyan, appears rather a color chosen for its manifest artificiality in the urban landscape. As a possible prototype for a new type of expansion of the historic towns, the building is designed and built like a model, like one of those rough maquette in blue foam — the material so beloved by the Dutch designers — at full scale, in order to stage a sort of fanciful architectural representation in the middle of gray Dutch city

Labyrinth as passive defense system. An analysis of Renaissance treatise of Francesco di Giorgio Martini

The labyrinth enriching Francesco De Marchi's treatise on fortification, which could be interpreted as just a generic and decorative symbol of protection useful to illustrate the contents and aims of the treatise, in reality also refers to a widespread design tradition in the construction of fortresses. This figure embodies an architectural device of opacity and deceiving that can be found in the design of the meandering doors, in the arrangement of the rooms and doors of ravelins and case mates and even in the more general conception of a fortress. Its use as a passive defense system is testified both by buildings in Syria and Spain, and by 15th-century treatises, such as Francesco di Giorgio Martini's, whose capannato in particular is here analyzed and redrawn to evaluate the role of labyrinth in the general concept

Collage and Photomontage in 1930s: Piero Bottoni’s Architectural Designs

By the end of 1920s, photomontage was adopted throughout Fascist Italy first as a tool for stylistic and fashion criticism, then as a teaching and exhibition device, and lastly in the practice of architectural visualization. While most of architects used it only as an occasional tool to communicate the entries for the major competitions called by the regime, others such as Giuseppe Terragni and Piero Bottoni adopted photomontage as an innovative tool for their enquiries and critical activity as well as a field of mutual exchange and influence. The former used it as a medium to integrate Fascist values into rationalist architecture, while the latter adopted it to evoke figurative references from the cinema – such as the very idea of the cameo – that were useful to visually negotiate the project space and take distance from the regime at the same time. Despite the importance the Futurism and its photographic works had had in the formation of Fascist ideals, around 1936 photomontage began to be considered as a subversive activity close to communism. This article focuses on the use of photomontage in Bottoni’s design representation – particularly of human figures and other details in perspective views – in connection with both its figurative and political agency

Writing the Architectural Space: Ludovico Quaroni’s Lesson in Space and the Limits of Visual Representation of Architecture

In his 1977 book Progettare un edificio, the Italian architect Ludovico Quaroni dedicated some pages to describe the ‘Space Effect.’ Through an uncommon narration in the first person, he invites the readers to experiment with their mind an imaginary literary space made of a number of architectural volumes. After various ‘scenes,’ which gradually drive the readers from the abstract to the material world, the journey ends inside a dome-covered cylinder which turns into the Roman Pantheon. The analysis of the descriptive and intermedial qualities of the text reveals it is a didactic tool to introduce the readers/students to the practice of a mental design environment and underlines the role of words in capturing the effect of space, eventually interpreted as a mere geometric model of real world, when the drawing fails in it

Architectural Intangible Heritage and Graphic Reconstruction. Terminological and Philological Notes

UNESCO’s extension of the concept of heritage to intangible has been changing the status of architectural designs and the operative frame of the practice of architectural reconstruction. The variety of reconstruction cases requires specific procedures and terms. The terms are here investigated by an analysis of the historical and theoretical roots of such a practice, focusing on the role of Quatremère de Quincy; the procedures are discussed by means of a series of personal experiences concerning with literary architecture, architectural projects, and fictive architecture. They are retrospectively analysed from the point of view of the sources – to define both the content and the appearance – which can be ‘endogenous’ to the document/monument (and priority) or ‘exogenous’, with a focus on the transparency of procedure

Mapping the Persistence and Evolution of the Quincunx

world. It spread in the Byzantine era; it flourishes during the Renaissance, either in combination or as an alternative to the Vitruvian proportioning criteria; it suffers from a process of mathematization in the eighteenth century; it arrives at the twentieth century in the form of the so-called “nine-square grid problem” and is further re-evaluated in its historical prospective at the end of the century, in the Post-modern context. This article provides a mapping of its diffusion and inquires its development and evolution through the centuries

Drawing, drafting, designing, and pasting. Human figures (and cameos) in architecture design communication

In architectural drawings, human figures are generally requested to express the scale of design space and to illustrate the functions, but many cases demonstrate they are capable of playing cultural roles, indirectly revealing the architects’ ideological positions toward society. By comparing their use in the work of Otto Wagner, Mies van de Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Mansilla and Tuñón, this article analyses their role as visual mediator between representation and reality according to the different graphical techniques and their intertextual potential to connote the representation and the specific figures adopted. In particular, it focuses on the case of the cameo, and the cameo of the architect in particular, to discuss the semantic consequences on the drawing and to frame it into the wider, pictorial typology of the portrait of an architect

Architecture as representation. Notes on Álvaro Siza’s anthropomorphism

Although following in the wake of the Modern Movement tradition, Álvaro Siza Vieira’s architectural research moves along the thin red line between abstraction and representation. The apparent arbitrariness of some of his compositions is primarily an expression of his attention to the perception of a moving subject that never translates into merely illusionistic devices. Yet, in the last two decades of the 20th century, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic presences began to haunt his designs and buildings. The keys to understanding this phase of Siza’s creative trajectory reside in his metaphorical and analogical approach to design, testified by his texts, his hypertrophic graphic activity, his production as a designer and, most of all, as a sculptor. On one hand, his words and sketches reveal the tension and negotiation between architecture form and the human/animal body; on the other hand, his objects and sculptures result as intermediate moments of experimentation and clarification by responding the ergonomic demands through the semantic economy of objet trouvée. Through these two interests, Siza’s architectural anthropomorphism is here analyzed in relationship with the visual and mental effects on the observers, interpreted as both an opportunity for a theatrical architecture parlant and as a transition towards a new grade of poetic abstraction

The Geometry of Vision: Hermann Maertens’ Optical Scale for a Deterministic Architecture

In 1870s the German architect Hermann Eduard Maertens grounded his Optical Scale research on Hermann Helmholtz and Franciscus Donders’ works about the physiology of vision and engrafted it in the tradition of Renaissance perspective and proportion theory’s applications to architecture and urban planning. This article describes the scientific core of his approach, in the context of a general revision of aesthetic enjoyment of artworks and a deterministic reorientation of human knowledge toward the industrial production; his elaboration of a triad of visual angles to determine size and organization of space according to visual targets; the diffusion of visual cones as a graphic tool to include perceptual values in the project; the immediate success of his formula among architects and urban planners but, at the same time, the critical reception of his static concept of urban perception; the means of transmission of his ideas in the XX century and their often unaware long-term influence on some postwar years researches.En 1870 el arquitecto alemán Eduard Maertens basó su investigación en Escala Óptica en los trabajos de Hermann Helmholtz y Franciscus Donders sobre fisiología de la visión, injertado en la tradición de la perspectiva renacentista y en las aplicaciones en arquitectura y planeamiento urbano de la teoría de las proporciones. Este artículo describe el fundamento científico de este enfoque, en el contexto de una revisión general del disfrute estético de las obras de arte y una reorientación determinista del conocimiento humano hacia la producción industrial; su elaboración de una tríada de ángulos visuales para determinar el tamaño y la organización del espacio según objetivos visuales; la difusión de conos visuales como una herramienta gráfica para incluir valores perceptuales en el proyecto; el éxito inmediato de su fórmula entre arquitectos y urbanistas pero, al mismo tiempo, la recepción crítica de su concepto estático de percepción urbana; los medios de transmisión de sus ideas en el siglo XX y su habitualmente inconsciente y prolongada influencia en algunas investigaciones de los años de postguerra

Chapter Leonardo da Vinci e il padiglione d’acqua nel labirinto

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences