Abstract

In the intellectual life of an architect, design and representation are inextricably connected terms, both in theoretical speculation and in operational practice. Indeed the drawn image is both a document of what is yet to be realized (and in this case it assumes a pre-figurative value), and a registration of what exists, in that way becoming an action purporting to document. In both cases, of course, the object – the building, already built or yet to build – will be or is elsewhere, and it is made present to our eyes through drawing. The visionary action of Alberti’s lineamenti remains the focus of the designer’s entire operational life, but the new digital technologies pose unprecedented issues to the draftsman. One is autographism; yet another is the role that the illusory forms of mimetic rendition may take, relative to the objectivity of a concrete world that is increasingly removed from the field of knowledge and experience. The question remains open of how to allocate a strong linguistic identity to digital images: maybe they don’t dwell in the technological world – the same world that enables them to be realized – but, as proposed here, in the world of art. In this way, it might be possible to strengthen and to renew an old link between science and figurative expression, a link that lies, through the invention of perspective, at the very origins of the modern civilizations of the images.