The Drawn Landscape in 3D Databases: The Management of Complexity and Representation in the Historical City

The complex structure of landscape, from the multiple nature of the term, has motivated recent research, some extracts in this contribution, towards systems able to define the procedures needed to represent, in an appropriate way, complex relationships found in the analysed sites. As a result of an attempt to update on reading landscape‟s modes, research has tried to identify more or less complex urban scenes, deeply different from each other both from the formal point of view, both from the cultural and perceptual one. The contribution presents modes of analysis, digital acquisition and processing of these landscape enhancement systems, in order to analyse not just the formal differences, but also to structure a methodology of documentation and representation that can solve problems of management of city and landscape planning. The virtual space is configured through a systematic drawing and it is structured on several case of studies, demonstrating how reality based interactive digital models can be valid systems for real landscape representation. Virtual space holds relations and exchanges data with its user simulating the real landscape and becoming the place where design and experimentation can be organized in a simplified form to clarify data and critical readings useful to increase some values of real landscape. Virtual data access tools are oriented towards an interaction between real and virtual space in a system that multiplies the size of real landscape to infinity: at the end of this complexity, the image, expression of synthesis of data, and the design, that generates the same image, are confirmed as the only instruments able to give order to a method of representation and description of environmental complexity. Three-dimensional models and databases, configure landscapes that define the future of research through the study of systems of interaction between man, drawing and virtual space.