Teoria e procedure info-grafiche per la rappresentazione dello spazio nell’architettura rupestre

In the last two decades, the diffusion of digital photogrammetry and modelling techniques have deeply changed the processes of surveying, representing and disseminating knowledge about Cultural Heritage. In particular, the field of rockcut architecture has been revolutionized. Studying rock-cut architecture means tackling the paradox of an architecture without an extrados, which however has relationships with outdoor space. It also means assuming the irregularity and specificity of each individual compartment of the cultural and territorial structure to which it belongs. The peculiar constructive nature of this kind of architecture, which is primarily made by subtracting matter rather than by assembling components, gives the interior space a formal and perceptual centrality that can be today recorded with efficiency, precision and quickness. The mesh model after the digital photogrammetry survey of the Karanlik Kilise in Cappadocia, for example, provides the opportunity of obtaining “impossible” views of the internal volume of the church as if it were a solid piece in an empty space. This kind of representations, which envision the volume which has been ideally subtracted from the rock to accomplish the architectural space, seems to offers a kind of information that is complementary to the direct experience of space. To evaluate their contribution to the knowledge of sites, it is important to recognize they are conceptually related to some analysis models elaborated in the last century. The architects’ attention to space as a central element of architecture is an achievement of the 20th century and the elaboration of solidified-space models dates to the post-war analyses by Luigi Moretti and other architects. This kind of models move in the field of “figuration” which, in its etymological meaning of “figure + action”, is to be intended as a process that makes visible a hidden content and “confers a sensitive presence to what by its nature owns no one”. The practice of extrapolating the building from the context and the internal space from the envelope, helped both to conceive architecture with the eyes of the rock-cut space and the idea of the excavation, and to rediscover and reevaluate the rupestrian habitat as an ethical and anthropocentric settlement model.