Towards a graphic rehabilitation of structural drawing: digital expressions of Shapes and Models

The revision of graphic approach to the mechanical description of architecture contextualises the field of structural drawing with a particular variation and evolution of signs and figures adopted to explain static and dynamic phenomena. Structural analysis, with a path of historical evolution that has influenced its assumptions and practical applications in relation to the eternal constraint of Art and Science, has alternated within centuries the adoption of figures, geometries, proportions, modules and skeletons, till to reach the synthetic expression of abstracted matrixes and schemes to explain the functionality of forces and strength behaviours. The mimetic approach, usually at the basis of the theory of representation for an objective description, is changed for a standardized language of synthesis elements. In this way, the development of digital drawing has increased the set of new virtual environments where graphic entities only appear as visual objects but they are found by computational algorithms where “there is no moment in the system that can be called 'drawing'” (Sutherland, 1963). The study of the structure as Shape wants to recover the role of graphics in the structural context, focusing on the possibilities offered by digital methodologies of acquisition and drawing of the virtual image. The presented research explains the originality of reality-based 3D Models that derive from a Scan-to-Mesh approach to document the static behaviour of complex structures in historical architecture, evaluating the possibilities of optimization and relationship between digital survey, morphological databases and virtual models in the architectural and engineering structural sector.