Studio e sviluppo di workflow VPL nella modellazione parametrica per la documentazione, l'analisi e il monitoraggio del costruito storico

Abstract “Imbued with a message from the past, the historic monuments of generations of people remain to the present day as living witnesses of their age-old traditions. People are becoming more and more conscious of the unity of human values and regard ancient monuments as a common heritage. The common responsibility to safeguard them for future generations is recognized. It is our duty to hand them on in the full richness of their authenticity.” (Venice Charter, 1964). This is the opening of the Venice Charter, intended to remind us the heritage’s importance, common to all of us, and our shared responsibility about its safeguarding and transmission to the future generations. Nevertheless, the heritage on the Italian territory is threatened by a high seismic and hydrogeological risk level almost in the whole country, being it several times affected by natural disasters hopelessly altering the landscape and the heritage built upon it. It is so physiological the necessity of documenting and analysing such heritage – so rich in our territory – defining new methodologies in that direction, with an eye on diagnostic and structural monitoring, through approaches related to the so-called Smart Cultural Heritage, that is the brand new research area joining humanities with computer sciences with the aim of studying, promoting and communicate the cultural heritage with the aid of digital technologies (Calvano, 2019). The theoric-methodological bases of the Architectural Survey (Docci & Maestri, 1994; 2010; Bertocci & Bini, 2016), in its traditional and craft dimension, can guide us in an ever more digitalized era, where the automation pursuit must not and cannot make us lose the contact with approaches based on the sensibility and the critics unique to the human being, the engineer or the architect surveyer, restitutioner, drawer. In this way, along the path leading to the digital survey in its various declinations ad integrations among them, the thesis work wants to move up starting from such theoric-methodological base, so to analyse the current digital integrated survey methodologies. The thesis work goes on studying the model meant in its broader interpretations, as far as going through the various modelling strategies, the mathematical and the numerical ones, then venturing in the field of the parametric modelling and so in the BIM issues and its application to the heritage as HBIM (Murphy et al., 2007; 2009). Then, we focus on the so-called ‘algorithmic’ modelling (Terzidis, 2003; 2006) where the attention moves from the model itself to its generating processes, with the aim of implementing computational methodologies in visual programming environments for the heritage. Thus, the discourse is reviewed in the light of our field of study in terms of representative model as far as final and representative instance of the knowledge process of the architectural survey (Centofanti, 2018). We move from a scientific literature review about the application of the visual programming methodologies firstly in the disciplinary field of the architectural drawing and modelling, starting from the Explicit Digital Drawing (DDE) (Calvano, 2019), going then towards its applications on the heritage, focusing on the main theme of the thesis work. Finally we reach the implementations in visual programming environments with the aim of experimenting computational methodologies able to carry out semi-automatic modelling processes that, in the virtuous relation between user and algorithm can treasure the technologic innovations provided by the computational thinking, keeping the instances about the heuristic dimensions unique to the representative model for the heritage. In that respect the research study wants to make clear its quid: in the current research landscape about processes automation, we want approach in a first step within a framework of semi-automation and finally towards the building of an ongoing exchange between user and algorithm. The goal won’t be that of implementing ‘black box’ algorithms, that gathering a series of inputs gives us another series of outputs, rather one wants to get to the point of the building of the mental process then materialized in the algorithm, as far as reading between the lines of this process looking at it as open and ever-changing along its flow. Such methodologies have been implemented on a specific case of study, nevertheless we consider it adaptable to other ones, with different morphological and geometric features, as far as more complex. In the final part will be developed the ideas for the future perspectives of the research study, that doesn’t want to run out in the drafting of this thesis work, rather wants to continue with the aim of consolidating such methodological approach so to get in the scientific landscape of this knowledge area, flowing into an expanding research line on the national and international landscape.