Egle Renata Trincanato. Drawings and digital models of a design competition, 1942

Retracing the spatialities of an architectural project in the unbuilt architecture archival drawings implies an interpretive act linking the presence of the image with the absence of the executed work. In this absence, in which a distance (temporal, physical, graphic) between the drawing and the materialization of the image itself is recognizable, the drawing leads to think about the distance between the model and its possible manifestations in a game of appearance/disappearance of the object and its image. In the archival document, those spatial qualities related to light, wall articulation, altimetric development, expansions and compressions of the architectural body in the project drawing are contained. These compositional values are directly returned in the sketches, in the annotations on the drawings in double projection, in the three-dimensionality of the axonometric and perspective representations, and are arranged in an order that enables the replication of recognizable geometric figures for the definition of a new narrative. The article aims at the graphic restitution of the competition designs that Egle Renata Trincanato drew up for the construction of outdoor schools to be built in Venice, 1942. Starting from the existing documentation, the elaboration of the digital model intends to explore the graphic issues between the archival drawing and the new digital image, tracing the cross-references and thematic connections between the operations and possible renderings. The digital model establishes an intermediate phase of restitution of the graphic operation, it fosters a navigation of the unrealized architectural organism, returning a heterogeneous temporality of the archival image; a synthesis pronounced by the relationship between light and architectural volume with respect to which to learn the plasticity and development in space and time of the drawing. In this condition of looking, a graphic autonomy is made explicit that allows the narrative of the digital to be traced back to the points of observation recorded in the project drawing; the model is understood here as an image, as eidolon, mimetic artifice: the idol that presentifies by emphasizing the gulf between the world of things and that of their respective representations. It takes on symbolic value because it makes present a being in a form that it each time transcends.