L'importanza del disegno nella rappresentazione dei progetti per la nuova città Universitaria di Roma

THE IMPORTANCE OF DESIGN IN THE REPRESENTATION OF THE PROJECTS DRAWN UPFOR THE NEW UNIVERSITY OF ROME CAMPUSThe theme dealt with in this article takes into consideration the various possible influences on the architect Marcello Piacentini as he drew up his initial draft of the general plan for the University of Rome campus. We attempt to establish “correspondences” between the design developed for the Sapienza and other campus design trends in Europe at the time. The methodology used is that of abduction, which applies the criterion of likelihood to reasoning. In Aristotelian logic, in fact, abduction corresponds to a type of syllogism in which the first statement is certain, the second likely and the result equally likely. It is a way of thinking shared by the most famous literary detectives, from Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes to Georges Simenon’s Maigret. Abduction is also a tool widely used in the history of art. In our case, we try to rigorously investigate the initial phase of creation, when images, associations, and ideas circulate in the architect’s mind, exerting an influence on the shape of the work, obviously without being recognizable, if not intuitively. In this essay we identify certain elements found in the drafting of the general plan for the university campus, yet remarkably similar to a number of designs devised by Bruno Taut. Palladio