disegno tecnico

“I’m not saying that the technical drawing is already Architecture, but it is certainly the last moment when the Architect is still free to fly” (gpa2017)

4 stories of Architecture written in the language of the technical drawing

1.kill the client

Graphic anthology of an important professional experience, photography of a continuous technical / customer dialogue, analysis of the creative process traveled together.

All this through 4 stories, written in the language of technical drawing, each of them is an answer to a question, all of them fix, over time, a page of the same story.

A story that ends with a literary murder, the murder of the client, a healing ritual that frees the conscience of the architect again.

Induced offense.
Self defence.
Absolution, the only possible way.

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suspended architecture drawings 17 February 2016
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study of the altar space / tholobate / dome system

2. instructions for use

Architecture is a long and difficult path towards the search for a possible balance.

Research and Balance.
Between masses and lines of force.
Between form and function.
Between question and answer.
Between architect and client.

An endless series of equations, a continuous try and try again, in order to allow, to one’s own healthy and creativity ego, to keep up all that construction that will then prove to be an architecture, perhaps.

Over time I have convinced myself that transmitting all this, being able to make it a comprehensible synthesis to all the figures involved in the whole creative process, is like writing a tale, tracing a story, developing a plot.

The problem is language.

The main elements are all the characters, the relationships and the settings.

The creative processes are the same, the profiles of the actors are developed, interpersonal relationships are built and people talk about how they interact with the places where they live and move.

The point is to choose how you want to tell the story.

I have tried, sometimes, to tell a project by writing pages on pages, talking and describing the vision of the whole, outlining a constructive detail, specifying the material chosen and how the construction technique linked to this conditioned the geometry and the shape of the whole complex.

But the more I went further, the more I tried to convey the sensations, the space, the lights and the shadows of my architecture, the more I lost in the street the technical and geometric information useful for their realization.

A few centuries ago other architects solved this problem by talking about their projects using the only language capable of communicating all the necessary information, they left us tables and tables of technical drawings in which, beyond the pure geometric and dimensional notion, the idea was transmitted of space and shape they had in mind.

They told their projects using technical drawing, a language that I have learned, forgotten and rediscovered over time. As in an initiatory journey, it was necessary to fall and get up again to be able to see again.

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suspended architecture drawings 19 March 2016
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study of transept roofs / left nave / central nave

3. the forgotten language

If it is true that Architecture needs to be built to show itself, it is the project that presents it, telling a story written in an ancient language, a language that speaks in images, through sensations, through coded information.

The architects all, masters and custodians of this knowledge, have been educated in its use, have learned to speak this language thanks to patient teachers, enlightened guides who, more or less unconsciously, have addressed, and still address today, the young minds of their students towards paths they have already explored, in a review of the art workshop, through the re-reading of the teacher / student relationship as a method of transmitting knowledge.

The school not as an institution, but as a place of cultural debate with multiple voices, in which great importance is given to the qualities and personal abilities of these tutors, the love that these are able to transmit towards and for Architecture.

For all this, I consider it a privilege to have known the latest generation of Campania architects able, in the second half of the last century, to participate with authority, and with their own style, in the international academic debate on Architecture, not just as individual professionals , but above all as major exponents of a current of thought known and recognized as the Neapolitan school. Among them there were those who spoke of Architecture with the power of words, I preferred those who chose as through technical drawing.

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suspended architecture drawings 25 December 2016
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study covering the central nave / main elevation

4. a magical world

The magical world of technical drawing, a world in which the Architect speaks this ancient, mysterious language, code for initiates, made up of geometries, numbers, memories and symbols, and how all this comes to define the final product of his work.

In this world, more and more often, I explore different linguistic paths, moments of reflection and synthesis that help me to understand a scene, to look at a character in the right light, to see a probable ending for the story I’m writing.

Like a white fly, I am aware of my heresy, and of the distance that separates me from a present where great space is given in graphic production to the most advanced software that computer science has given us, knowingly leading us to a formal homologation that conditions the Architecture itself.

A present in which the academic world itself has allowed itself to be colonized, becoming incapable of transmitting this ancient discipline to the new generations of Architects.

suspended architecture drawings 06 June 2017

suspended architecture drawings 06 June 2017
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study main elevation / central nave cover / right nave / weekday chapel

5. I keep on drawing

In this world, I continue to draw.

Continuous, convinced of the communicative power of technical drawing, in his ability to show an augmented reality, to tell the project thanks to geometries, numbers and symbols.

I try, through technical drawing, to describe my Architecture using, with artisan hands, computers and programs like I once used a pencil, compass and drawing board.

I offer the reader a different point of view, I give him a corrective lens that allows his eyes to read, in a few lines, the overall vision of the story I wrote for him.

If, in spite of everything, I can’t do it, then stories, stories remain.

They become suspended architecture drawings.

model bulletin board

MODEL BULLETIN BOARD
theory n. 1 (model A e B)
theory n. 2 (model C)
theory n. 3 (model D)