INNOVATIVE REPRESENTATION OF ARCHITECTURE: ICONS AND CONCEPTS

This research deals with defining the boundaries of architectural representation that can be defined for the university training of new architects. This era is characterized by a strong presence of digital technology in all areas of the production process of the project and this has a strong influence on the expectations that are created around the iconic model of an "architecture product". At the same time, the significance of the conceptual elements of the context and the process itself are likely to be outclassed by the seductive appeal of the evolved forms of computerized representation. In this paper I present a path that integrates the conceptual and the iconic sides and that takes account of the epochal mutation to the representation without sacrificing any attention to the capital relevance of the conceptual representation of the meanings of historical, cultural and anthropological aspects of an architectural space. This path has also been used as a frame for a didactical application in a class of Representation in the degree course of Environmental Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano.