Il Modello Digitale Continuo

I think Bart Kosko was right when he accused the Aristotelian mathematics of yes and no and of certainties, of being incapable of representing the world which in jàct is made up of nuances. The architect is well aware of this difficulty when he realizes that each architectural measurement carries with it an uncertainty which is extremely difficult to express in numbers and which, on the contrary, is perhaps more important than the measurement itself, since this is the sign of the hand of man and, at times, of the consummate experience of an artist. Kosko goes on to propose a new - fuzzy - logic according to Lofri Zadeh. And it appears that these fuzzy numbers with their amazing ability to incorporate uncertainty, have a future in architecture. Let's imagine we have a tridimensional model not mere/y reduced to a discrete schematic drawing of points and lines, but continuous, just like reality, or at least as continuous as possible in light of the reduction relationship that is typical of each architectural representation. Let's imagine a model which contains the vagueness of what is real, the poetic uncertainty of its measurements, capable of restoring, if necessary, the numbers of traditional representation without loosing the fuzzy trait of reality. I say that every surveyor, every planner and every architecture expert would want this type of model. No more doubts on the metric reliability ola survey done by others, without declaring and measuring the uncertainty. Well this model exists and is present/y being experimented at the laboratory of Photogrammetry of the Department of Representation and Survey at the University "La Sapienza" of Rome, in the framework of the "Finalized Project Cultural Heritage" of the National Council for Scientific Research. The DCM (Digital Continuous Model) as it has been called, simplifies the complex procedures of traditional survey enormously by unifying them while including the possible graphic representations. A DCM consists in a tridimensional photographic representation which can be examined with the help of a simple computer system, a screen and a pair of active glasses. It is not, however, just a simple stereoscopic photograph, but a continuous system of stereo photogrammetric models. Up to now, the examination of a photogrammetric stereo model was a privilege reserved for a few experts and needed specialist skills: the ability to use a stereocomparator, the ability to orient the model as well as complete visual tolerance of the strong contrasts typical of photogrammetry. Moreover, a photogrammetric survey always includes a series of models, therefore, once the study of the first model has ended one progresses to the second and so on, repeating the above-mentioned laborious procedures each time. With the DCM all this is a thing of the past: the viewing is immediate, the orientation procedures take place at the start, once and for all, and therefore may be ignored by the user, the passage from one model to another is fluid and automatic and consequent/y it feels as if there is just one image that can be viewed by moving around the object or by rising up off the ground in order to examine all the details. Furthermore, the system can measure distances and areas as well as drawing lines on the object with the methods used by any C4D. These lines can be projected on a p ian in order to obtain any type of graphic representation from the DCM. Theoretical/y, is the DCM a new representational method? To a certain extent it is, even if it would be more correct to consider the DCM as a 'generalization' of the graphic models already known. But the DCM has one additional virtue which I have already tried to underline: its ability to preserve the fuzzy quality of the real object.