Strategie del dettaglio. Ragioni critiche del disegno di architettura = Strategies of the Detail. Critical Reasons for Architectural Drawing

Drawing is the writing before the project, the design research tool par excellence of the architectural discipline, an abstract space of concrete contents. It is a process that takes place at every scale starting from the representation in actual scale that is characteristic of details, an ordered system of signs that translates into operative form the construction of ideas by reinterpreting the physical and cultural materials of architecture. The drawing of details therefore makes concrete the mental process that transposes the intellectual experience of designing into spatial forms through associative links. The ‘detail strategy’ as a method of transferring the part into the whole is based on the uncompromising exercise of precision and the rigour of measurement, on the visual specificity of the scale virtually close to or coinciding with the echelle grandeur, on the efficacy of the way in which the set of signs defining the language of representation is organised. The drawing of details cannot therefore disregard a specific geometric rule that is always a tool and never an end: the double orthogonal projections, plan and section. The two-dimensional accuracy of these representations guarantees the transferability of a drawing to the constructive, concrete plane. It is then possible to tentatively attempt to define ‘detail strategy’ the process that visually records the substance of an architectural theme and thus represents the ‘reflexive consciousness’ of the project, the profound, tectonic essence – morphological, linguistic and expressive – of the disciplinary materials. The ‘detail strategy’ corresponds to the way of organising a morphological corollary, a visual atlas of plastic micro-events transposable in every new architecture, according to a principle of balanced relationship between technique and purpose. The ‘law of metamorphosis’ that presides over the ‘detail strategies’ coincides with the specificity of the incessant research that identifies every authentic architectural project: the dimension of the 'interminable', something unmistakable and ungraspable that is an investigation of the open form that proceeds by approximations and, as such, is subject to successive re-elaborations, variations and clarifications. It is the projection of a stubborn and peculiar artistic practice of critical interpretation of reality, based on the search for morphological coherence through the definition of a language that finds in the design of detail its internal methodological synthesis, its inalienable foundation and its essential reason. A research, this one, that must be focused on the coincidence between structure and form, between time, matter and memory, that is, on the fundamental disciplinary materials that, together, indissolubly reunite remembering and projecting, design culture and new architectures, history of forms and new forms of interpretation and explanation of the real, that do not express absolute values, but relational ones. It is on the basis of these reasons that through the exercise of rigour and meticulous attention to the centrality of form, the strategies of detailing can still offer paths of morphological research and thus represent a hope of duration, a practical-theoretical response to the problem of transitoriness that characterises the texture of our time, moving from the idea that the definition of a work of architecture “rests entirely in the design itself” (L.B. Alberti).