Methods and Applications

After all, descriptive geometry has a historically consolidated relationship with the art and the construction in general, and it could therefore not fail to be affected by the technological evolution we mentioned earlier. The classical corpus of texts on the discipline, based first of all on the representation methods, understood as the theories of the construction of the encoded image, appeared to be completely inadequate compared with the contemporary project procedure and, what is worse, it seemed unrelated to the new representation techniques of the space, while these last, at the same time, did not seem to have a basis theory of general character, but only the algorithms that permit to solve this or that particular problem. In the academic circles, the architects who, due to changing historical events, today are the repository of the discipline of descriptive geometry, have finally seized the wish for renewal that came above all from the youth, faced, on the one hand, with a theory that does not seem to have any more applications and, on the other, with a technique that is incomprehensible, precisely because it is lacking the general concepts of a theory; now, finally, is ongoing a process of revision and renewal of the classic descriptive geometry, which is based on new definitions of the fundamentals and fulfilled through integrations and transformations of the corpus of texts on the discipline. As we will see in a while, the integrations concern, essentially, the representation methods, while the transformations involve above all the construction procedures of the geometric shapes. The representation methods, in general, are distinguishable for two essential reasons: the first, and the most important, is that each of the methods is able to record the characteristics of the shape and the dimension of an object in the space and, at the same time, it is able to transfer the object back into the space once it has been represented. A method, to be considered as such, must be able to perform this path, in both directions, autonomously, that is, without turning to other methods. The second reason that permits to distinguish the methods, the one from the other, concerns the use of each of them within the planning activity: the metric control, as in the case of the representation in plan and elevation, or the formal and perceptual control, as in the case of the perspective. The information systems make use, basically, of two digital representation methods that have been called: mathematical representation and numerical or polygonal representation.