Ante Litteram. Analogie concettuali

Examining the relationships that can be established between the concepts by reading and “decoding” the artworks, can be called a “social game” that flows from a kind of dialogue between the author and the interpreter, where the subject of discussion is the project carried out. A call for a possible reading of the architectural and art works, comparable to a language system, destined for transmitting their sense, that is not revealed in the immediacy of a visual surface, but through a drill-back process of comprehension of the object, of its project and, finally, of its ideation from which it was born. Break “a canvas” of an image for identifying a conceptual essence is a basic condition for this game. Some examples that intertwine architecture with other disciplines will be analyzed, thus researching in depth its own foundation. Once grasped, the concepts can be compared mutually in a scientific or ironical way, intuitive or substantiated, subjective or impartial. It is proposed to examine three itineraries, by which the main modalities of the formation of the analogies are produced. The assumptions are the three possible positions that the participants of the conceptual dialogue can adopt: one in which the participation of the author stops at the carrying out of the work, thereafter he assumes a passive position and doesn’t participate at the process of the forming of the analogies, that just the only interpreter establishes; the other in which the author is an artificer of the analogies that are building up in the mind of an interpreter, inducted to a reading with a specific reference of ascendancy, pre-determined in a conceptualizing phase; and, lastly, in which the author and the interpreter are the part of a bigger process, and both are involved in theoretical experiments, that overcome individual examples. A game, that comes to raise significant matters, calls on to deepen complex issues ranging from hermeneutics to semiology, poses us problems which the expressive language brings along with it, raising doubts that various ways of interpreting an image can trigger, and pushes us to reflect upon the very meaning of the architecture.