Esboço de uma genealogia da representação gráfica das estruturas

Abstract

Despite the available software for parametric modelling, structure teaching still uses mostly simple graphical representations, restricted to lines, points and triangles, as in past century engineering. They indicate relations among elements, but paradoxically abstract from the materiality of constructions, which the study of structures should ensure. This paper is an attempt to reconstitute the genealogy of such representations. We begin with the operative geometry of pre-Renaissance master builders, who used drawings as construction tools. Our hypothesis is a subsequent transformation in three stages, successive in principle, but sometimes used synchronically in different places and fields of knowledge. Sketches from Brunelleschi and Leonardo da Vinci exemplify the first stage, suggesting a representation that anticipates the very construction process. They are drawings of future actions. The second stage characterizes the tradition of post-Renaissance architecture treatises, until the late seventeenth century. Representations aim at an image of stability. They show a product anticipated by imagination that seems stable to the eyes. The third stage begins with Galileo's drawings, only slowly migrating into the construction field, until being improved in the nineteenth century. In this case, structural drawings cease to represent an action upon matter or an image of a material product, and become calculation tools.