Assignments of the digital architecture

Sponsored by the computer advances, it is the best moment so that the architectural discipline envisage two vital needs that throughout the centuries have settled his normal formative activity thanks to lines of experiment and distant procedures to the prevailing technology today: for a part, the design of new constructive plans directed to the construction of small and large civil, militaries or ecclesiastic works; additionally, the reestablishment -first virtual and then real- of the architectural vestiges originating from remote eras that are found disappeared, being unavoidable to correct the injuries caused by the time and the unjust human action. In this second case, the data processing has become one of the referring principals in wheel to which is articulated a correct record, conservation and/or restoration of the existing patrimonial goods.

A double assignment, properly such architecture and archaeology, to which are added professional perfectly exercised in the technological-digital and constructive disciplines, conceiving projects of a unquestionable experimental condition. Departing in most of the interventions of a simple documental base, monuments of the antiquity as the Great Zigurat of Babylon, the Alexandria Library or the Vesta Temple (all intervened by Tullio Rolandi), and the Ducal Palace of Palladio (designed, now, by SungAh Kim), have reborn of granitic sediments being erected on the electronic support with an extraordinary descriptive conviction. Within our frontiers (Spain), to emphasize the projects in the graph matter made by Emilio López-Galiacho and Toni Meca.

The first, López-Galiacho, reconstructs digitally the sumptuous Villa Rotonda of Palladio, giving to her an air of innovation upon collecting his classic structure under a lines epidermis that evokes a great geometric glass prism. In the definitive project that understands the intervention on this building, titled The Capable Skin, mixes the distinctive attributes of architectural labor with elements born under the patronage of Internet; it being transformed the iconography of the web "palladiana" in a fascinating background on the one which are shortened the profiles of the great residence (... The interior of the skin acts as a projection screen that collects and faces to the monument the information that this generates. The Skin is constituted simultaneously in mirror and in cibernetic landscape that substitutes to the real landscape, proposing new looks on concepts as place, monument and representation). This peculiar Villa Rotonda of López-Galiacho can be traveled in all his extension by the spectator through technical of virtual reality applied on inmersive platforms (like the CAVE) in those which the user acts with the elements microcosm conceived for such project, those which leave to his find while this wanders by the space displayed before himself.

As far as he is concerned, the director of Cover 7, Toni Meca, stimuled by the accomplishment of Glory Day, The Mystery of the Sacred Family (film whose argumentational plot turns in connection with the mysterious incidents happened in the inauguration -december 31, 2002- of the stately cathedral begotten for which would be one of the harbingers of the artistic forefronts of 20th century, Antoni Gaudi), resumes the inconclusive company of terminating virtually the construction of the considered as badge shrine of the modernist Barcelona. The constructive omissions that presents the stony framework of The Sacred Family are supplied materially with help of the computer, justifying the workmanship of the corporate form thanks to the nearby -in the time- graphic contributions that are preserved of the author. Some forms whose digital manufacture needs the use of vectorials applications, those which procure to recreate faithfully the corresponding corporal magnitude to the real pieces of the required model. For his mathematical nature, this vectorials procedures provide a series of attributes and geometric nature functions that favor the creation and modification of structures so much regulars as amorphous. A regular structure, normally revealing of the original form with which is conceived in his day the model or architectural element; or irregular, characteristic of the situational changes produced on the material physiognomy of the primitive piece.

When it end the virtual raising of the famous sanctuary situated in Barcelona, the structure will consist of some 25 million of polygonal surfaces. Will have been thousands the number of taken photographs of the most hidden corners existing in the real temple, and countless the plans, scale models and sculptures, accomplished manually and after digitized to simulate the volumetrics models and his material appearance through software 3DStudio MAX and Softimage 3D, and hardware facilitated by Intergraph. The operative system that gives support to these application graphics is Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation.

These systems -100% digitals- for shapes reproduction related to performances in buildings, are seen strongly reinforced with the different nearby techniques incorporation to the mechanisms catalogue destined graphic and real treatment of elements not only architectural but also straddled them within other artistics kinds as could be the pictorial works. Thus, the photogametry, assited by CAD technology, solves many of the questions that emerge in connection with the need of knowing a priori the suitable formulations -not prejudicial- of operation, diagnosing the physical irregularity that affects to the intervened component.

To these two mentioned projects, perfectly molded to the architectural occupations introduced some paragraphs before, is added a personal aspiration booked in the design of a new building whose distinctive features reaffirm the digital era that we lived. A case of architectural intervention on the one which I put on different check technological allegations that shelter under his electronic dominance a classic construction whose creative kernel goes through the adoption within his spatial bosom of pictorial and sculptorical iconographies of equally traditional making and allegory. What remain of this section, I devote to present this inconclusive experience located in the area where converge in a perfect connivance architecture and digital technology.