Ricerc@Sapienza

The research investigates experimental digital models, used to enhance the educational methodology, concerning the fundamentals of graphic representation, especially in the general sense of perspective models.

This study investigates the contributions made by Gaspard Monge and the students of his School to the stereotomy of vaulted systems in France between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The complexity of the apparatuses and the generality of the proposed solutions express the extent of the contributions that descriptive geometry made to the applications that preceded it. First among these stereotomy, which, though in decline from an operational point of view, was considered fundamental in the schools that were then being founded.

La geometria descrittiva è stata da sempre parte integrante del processo progettuale nelle diverse fasi di cui esso si compone. A questa scienza è demandato il controllo delle proprietà delle linee e superfici che definiscono la forma e ne è affidata la comunicazione attraverso il disegno.

This paper considers Luigi Cremona’s and Wilhelm Fiedler’s outlook on technical instruction at school and university level, their vision about the educational role of descriptive geometry and its relation to Monge’s original conception. Like Cremona, Fiedler sees a symbiosis between descriptive and projective geometry via the fundamental idea of central projection. The link between projective and descriptive geometry plays a double role: an educational one due to the graphical aspects of the two disciplines and a conceptual one due to the connection of theory to practice.

This book intends to analyse how descriptive geometry spread through general, technical or artistic education, and thus in “polytechnic” schools, in different countries around the world. Our purpose is to go beyond the analysis of the development of the subject in individual countries. We do so by gathering and confronting the local experiences in order to highlight the parallel processes and the connections among them. We also seek to understand how they may have been provided by the circulation between countries and persons or by publications related to our subject.