Semantic Model Learning

Abstract

The current “post-digital” techno-culture, in which the ambiguous and perhaps instrumental divide between “analogue and digital” (between “real and virtual”, recalling a well-known title of ‘92 by Maldonado) seems to have been finally reduced, continuously feeds new space-time conformations (images, models, sensitive environments, interfaces, etc.), generated above all by cultural hybridizations and aesthetic recycling; designs that can be found in every disciplinary field. A total project in which architecture, design and art (but not only), expanding their disciplinary boundaries, exchange their genes in a continuous mutation; metaphors and chimeras, morphemes, mythological and fantastic figures that represent the face of a culture that, from Pop Art to Postmodernism up to today, has been elaborating metamorphic processes until configuring a new model of representation, which we have been experimenting with for a while now. The research, presented here, is the last result of this long study, focused mainly on the analysis of the representative and conformative role of the semantic model in architecture and design, of which we outline the most recent evolutionary stage, also illustrating the methodology adopted. In this way an elaborative process is progressively defining itself, which concerns both research and didactics, named in its general aspects as “Semantic Model”, in which the methods and techniques of representation converge and intersect in order to understand (transforming information into knowledge), create (in the awareness of conceptual and visual references) and transmit (documenting the history) cultural processes, ideas and images preparatory to the project of architecture and design.