Ricerc@Sapienza

In the last two decades, the diffusion of digital photogrammetry and modelling
techniques have deeply changed the processes of surveying, representing and
disseminating knowledge about Cultural Heritage. In particular, the field of rockcut
architecture has been revolutionized. Studying rock-cut architecture means
tackling the paradox of an architecture without an extrados, which however has
relationships with outdoor space. It also means assuming the irregularity and
specificity of each individual compartment of the cultural and territorial structure
to which it belongs. The peculiar constructive nature of this kind of architecture,
which is primarily made by subtracting matter rather than by assembling
components, gives the interior space a formal and perceptual centrality that can
be today recorded with efficiency, precision and quickness. The mesh model after
the digital photogrammetry survey of the Karanlik Kilise in Cappadocia, for
example, provides the opportunity of obtaining “impossible” views of the internal
volume of the church as if it were a solid piece in an empty space. This kind of
representations, which envision the volume which has been ideally subtracted
from the rock to accomplish the architectural space, seems to offers a kind of
information that is complementary to the direct experience of space. To evaluate
their contribution to the knowledge of sites, it is important to recognize they are
conceptually related to some analysis models elaborated in the last century. The
architects’ attention to space as a central element of architecture is an
achievement of the 20th century and the elaboration of solidified-space models
dates to the post-war analyses by Luigi Moretti and other architects. This kind of
models move in the field of “figuration” which, in its etymological meaning of
“figure + action”, is to be intended as a process that makes visible a hidden
content and “confers a sensitive presence to what by its nature owns no one”.
The practice of extrapolating the building from the context and the internal space
from the envelope, helped both to conceive architecture with the eyes of the
rock-cut space and the idea of the excavation, and to rediscover and reevaluate
the rupestrian habitat as an ethical and anthropocentric settlement model.