Descriptio architecturae. Note sulla “architettura letteraria”

Reading about architecture often means having to set up a sort of complex scenography in our mental theatre. In shaping its forms, inputs from the spatial and geometric interpretation of data obtainable from the text are intertwined with those from the memory of similar past experiences or, more simply – so to speak–, from the imagination. Although the description of a building may refer or not to real places and may follow different literary strategies to evoke in the reader mental images that are coherent and similar to those conceived by the writer, it cannot help but ask for the active contribution of the reader. In the “lesson in space” that Ludovico Quaroni writes on Progettare un edificio (1977), the Roman architect uses a technique of writing in the first person that makes use of many different literary and ludic models to shift this contribution on an emotional level. In this way, he intends to encourage the formation of univocal and controlled mental images, capable of simulating the sensations produced by the spatial effect of elementary forms, which gradually pass from abstraction to materiality until they turn into actual buildings and thus suggest, in a subliminal way, a design method that precedes and prepares for drawing.