Procedures and methodologies for understanding and drawing city architectures

Abstract

The experience in comparative reading the architectural components as of their role in urban interrelationships provides the opportunity to promote some reflections and exemplifications on the relevance of history as a primary reference source along any path of urban growth and architectural evolution; on the meaning of the critical evaluation of the epoch and time progression in the juxtaposition of urban segments; last but not least, on identifying, thanks to the comparative tool of the ‘cross’ reading, and measuring the capability of the city’s structures to know how to develop and actively encompass the stratification that the historical process imposes to dignify and valorise the contemporary city.
On the shared assumption that every survey activity is indeed an act involving measurement, geometric reference, structural and technological analysis, historical documentation, and is, above all, an interpretative reading task that seeks to provide a critical and cognitive evalu- ation of the examined architecture, it is fair to state that its primary purpose is to render the architectural qualities of the relevant elements, whether they are analysed as per their individ- uality or as part of the whole organism. By its very nature, the survey activity is committed to translating the continuum of reality into a system of features, traces, and signs, i.e., encoding elements of a linguistic code that is widely shareable and, therefore, transmissible. The tran- sition from the complexity of reality, from the continuum of architectural matter to the com- plexity of drawing sign structure, a challenging operation involving the discretisation of reality and its figurative rearrangement, inevitably implies an interpretative gestation concerning the surveyed object.