Ein Text, erschienen im Zusammenhang mit der Ausstellung "Rebuild: Figures of Space"
Das aut: feuilleton wurde erstmals veröffentlicht in „Tommaso Fantini (Hrsg.), Atelier Walter Angonese. The Construction of the Idea / La costruzione dell’idea“, Mendrisio Academy Press / Quodlibet, Mendrisio / Macerata 2025
Each semester of the second-year Atelier Angonese opens with a redrawing exercise, which is necessarily tied to the annual theme and has proven to be an extremely effective practice for reading, analysing, and understanding architecture.
The underlying intention of this exercise is captured by the following story: “Before the printing revolution, the transmission of knowledge relied on the work of copyists. The works produced through manual copying were never identical to the originals, even when executed with care and rigour. The variations from the source could have different causes: inexperience, misunderstanding, or a deliberate act. It is in this voluntary, creative, and autonomous gesture that the meaning of copying lies – as novelty, development, and invention”.
The redrawing carried out during the fall semester, which focuses on the theme of the individual domestic space, focuses on an analysis of single-family houses – often the work of a single architect or linked to the course theme that year. In the spring semester, dedicated to collective housing, students study and redraw a selection of residential buildings chosen for their relevance to architectural history, their formal specificity, or their relevance to the project site.
For each building, students are required to carry out source research – consulting bibliographies, publications, scans of original drawings, and archival documents – and produce technical drawings (plans, elevations, sections) at various scales. For the single-family houses only, this also includes a three-dimensional reconstruction using painted MDF models at a scale of 1 : 20 or 1 : 33.
Each building included in the archive represents a constructed project, because it is only in the transition from the world of ideas to the physical world of things that architectural figures take shape and become material. All hypotheses and reflections developed during this exercise can thus be tested against the reality of the built work – its matter, its forms, and its spaces.
The most immediate and pragmatic outcome of the exercise is the students’ acquisition of essential tools and procedures within a short period. A precise method of graphical representation is transmitted through the definition of a clear and simple visual language, while manual skills are trained in view of producing study and presentation models.
We firmly believe in a referential approach, one that draws from a rich body of architectural examples: indeed, the second aim of this exercise is to expose students to buildings considered exemplary, which may enrich each student‘s cultural background.
Through this initial accumulation of architectural references, students begin to familiarize themselves with fundamental issues related to dwelling and the production of space, while also embarking on the complex process of understanding scale, spatial relationships, and proportion—through the connection between drawing and three-dimensional form.
The drawings produced by the students are representations that relies on a degree of abstraction and focus on the most significant aspects of the architecture, rather than on strict documentary accuracy.
By “significant aspects,” I refer to the fundamental and defining features of each building –such as spatial organization, structural systems, formal values, or spatial character. The educational value of the redrawing exercise lies precisely in its ability to develop the critical potential of drawing to convey certain project-specific themes.
Pragmatic elements or construction details – such as frames, openings, structures, and services – are presented in a schematic and standardized manner, unless they are essential to the architectural sense of the building.
At the beginning of each semester – particularly in the one focused on collective housing – all the plans and sections of the buildings in the archive are printed and displayed on the studio walls, turning the space into a kind of gallery of architectural figures.
All drawings in the archive are executed using the same technique and follow the same graphic conventions. Differences in drawing language, period, or construction technique are removed, allowing direct comparisons to be made.
Thinking by analogy, through figures and their semantic content, is a method that allows each project to be connected to the broader history of architecture. Reference is not understood as quotation, but – as suggested in the metaphor of the copyist – is studied through its compositional logic as a bearer of meaning, which may then be reinterpreted and transformed through imagination into new forms and spatial experiences.
Personally, I strongly believe in the pedagogical value of redrawing. I still carry with me the impact of encountering, during my second year, the tectonic spaces of the Japanese master Kazuo Shinohara. Redrawing and reconstructing his House in Hanayama left an indelible mark on my way of thinking about architecture – one that continues to resonate with me in my work today.
tommaso fantini
geb. 1992 in Rimini; Architekturstudium an der USI – Accademia di architettura in Mendrisio, Doktorat unter der Leitung von Walter Angonese; seit 2017 Assistent bei Antonio Calfati und seit 2018 Assistent und Wissenschaftler im Atelier Angonese an der USI – Accademia di architettura in Mendrisio; seit 2017 Architekturbüro VG13 Architects in Mailand (gemeinsam mit Alberto Rossi); zahlreiche Projekte in Italien, der Schweiz und Marokko; Lehraufträge an der Università Federico II in Neapel, der Hochschule Biberach (D) und der Universität in Genua
Eine vom Atelier Walter Angonese an der USI in Mendrisio konzipierte Ausstellung, die anhand von Modellen aus der Architekturgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts Raumkonzepte vermittelt.
weiterlesen …
