HAS FREZIER USED RHINO?

The proposed title for this essay is not incidentally provocative, because it hides a series of questions that lead us to reflect on a fundamental aspect of contemporary architectural production: is the new architecture the result of a greater sophistication and compositional freedom of the instrument for drawing? And is the creative potential increased with the use of existing modeling programs? Besides, whenever the studies of stereotomy were coded (and history of architecture is full of similar period, even prior to the eighteenth century) we have seen constructive trials and wondrous space solutions; especially if we take into account that the constructive knowledge of that time can not certainly be compared to the current ones. Nevertheless, bold trompes, lunettes rampantes biaise, vis de saint Gilles were widespread during the French Enlightenment and Frezier, who, indeed, encodes the stereotomy, had a great graphics skill, more, he mainly drawned from a side on a certainly refined “geometric knowledge” and on the other on the experience of the building materials. Farther, is the new architecture complemented by a new structural design? If we look to the last achievements of famous architects, they have certainly a compelling facet, so to speak “superficial”, in the sense that we see “coating skins” with unusual configurations (too often not geometric – and here we must reflect) that “hide”, however, floors and pillars. And then, with the help of increasingly advanced solid modelers, does not it seem that architecture is becoming an object of design, which, thanks to the “modeling tools”, is slipping toward the sculpture? The architectural projects seem to be confused with the objects of design: Zaha Hadid planned a sofa similar to one of her architectures and Norman Foster designed an architecture that looks like a pitcher. Let’s see the design of a car lights of last generation produced with a solid modeler as Rhino: we can certainly exchange it for the “skin” of an architecture, that only a few years ago we called futuristic. To these questions, then, we will try to provide answers, certainly not definitive – indeed, perhaps contradictory. They allow us to reflect on the disciplinary aspects relating to the new “graphics means” and how they have enabled it to intuit the formal complexity of contemporary project, which, until recently, often remained hidden in the mind of the architect (laboriously made explicit by the work of talented illustrators intended to put a “fair copy” of poetic sketches) revealing the design process, mading it visible, menageable, dinamically controllable.