Drawing space in the places of myth: Luigi moretti and sicily

How was architecture drawn in the 1930s? This is the starting question through which we want to set up a wider reflection on the architecture of that period, taking as reference a Sicilian project by Luigi Moretti: the Casa del Balilla in Messina, dating back to 1936. The initial analysis of the building's drawings is aimed at evaluating the expressive contents of drawing as a disciplinar y instrument of architecture. But the fact that Luigi Moretti’s first work in Sicily has never been built has also led to the elaboration of a further exegesis, consisting in the construction of a virtual three-dimensional model of the building: a process aimed at verifying the complexity of the forms transcending the unpredictability that per vades the final product of this logical-applicative consecutio of the tools of Science of Representation: digital images. Therefore, the reduction of the three-dimensional object (the model) into a two-dimensional entity (the image) poses both metalinguistic and projective questions: the model acts as a critical instrument that explains the reality imagined by Luigi Moretti, returning –through the heuristic force of images– all those syntactic, spatial, architectu-ral, urban or even territorial tensions that the building would have possibly generated.