Framing, Filling, Linking. The Drawing of Elements for City Description

Abstract

Representing contemporary cities - real, imagined, virtual, designed, future, efficient, smart, sustainable - also considering their dimension as a scenario of daily life and paradigm of today’s living, is a complex activity and no longer entrusted exclusively to designers and scholars. Some of the images that represent them have an evocative and narrative capacity that shifts the attention to the emotional and perceptive state that the place has on its inhabitants. The representation is therefore called to tell the story of the city using multiple languages and produce meaningful images, build narratives composed of material with a high visual and conceptual content. The aim of the current investigation is to explore graphic languages oriented to the construction of meaningful images, studying the compositional dynamics and the devices through which to transfer the system of knowledge to which the research tends. The present research, which is at the same time visual and spatial, experiments with a device of representation of the architecture of the city, starting from the drawing of a map that contains the organization by levels of the structural elements of the facades. The surface is composed of sequences of these elements according to compositional and summative criteria, making them emerge in their linguistic and design autonomy, in order to indicate paths of knowledge, extracting information and connections for thematic areas.