Fabio Colonnese, Marco Carpiceci, 2012. Architettura come rappresentazione: appunti per una sintesi/Architecture as a representation: notes for a synthesis. In Elogio della teoria. Identità delle discipline del disegno e del rilievo. Edito da Laura Carlevaris, Monica Filippa. Atti del XXXIV Convegno Internazionale dei Docenti della Rappresentazione ‐ IX Congresso UID, Roma 13‐15 Dicembre 2012. Roma: Gangemi, 2012, p.205‐210. ISBN: 9788849275193. Fabio Colonnese 1 , Marco Carpiceci 2 Department of History, Drawing and Restoration of Architecture. Sapienza University of Rome 1 f.colonnese@archiworld.it, 2 marco.carpiceci@uniroma1.it Architecture as a representation: notes for a synthesis Iconographic dimension of built architecture was enquired by semiological analysis and theoretically organized according to the communicative role of its parts. But linguistic analogy, such as imagery one, leads to enhance the optical and static value of architectural experience. We need to find new criteria to broaden the scope of analysis to the time factor, the sequential value of architectural experience and body involvement, not to mention the role of salvation and regeneration of misunderstanding in spatial perception. Semiotics, Visual perception, Architecture as a representation Symbols, icons and indices Our discipline is focused on the geometric and perceptual relationships between architectural form and its models but a special place goes to the thorny issue of "iconographic dimension stating that architecture is inherently representative, and may be subject to other representations as it is conceived as essentially a matter of forms and figures with meaning for a given social group" (Gay 2004, 11‐12). The experience of architecture is a multifaceted phenomenon, which is sensible to mood, acute needs, availability of time and many other subjective factors. The environment, in turn, affects human behaviour not only on the basis of the retinal image formed in his eye but with the promise of activities that can be understood in its parts and that stimulates his brain and muscles. Thus a building has been described as a system of signs (Eco 1980) that transmits messages at different levels of interpretation. They can for convenience be traced back to famous Charles Sander Pierce’s triad (Sander Peirce 1903): the symbol is the relation between a word and a precise meaning of habit or tradition; the icon invokes a sense of similarity, like a portrait evoking the represented subject; the index indicates a shifted meaning, such as a road sign indicating a place or a direction. Architecture rarely speaks through symbols, if we exclude all those cases in which a written text on signs or plaques refers to certain meanings. Presence of icons in architecture is far more frequent and not only in decorative practice: think of the flying stones in Japanese gardens as footprints’ icons or of certain Alvar Aalto’s handles moulded around the hand grip. Nor should we forget visual art’s role integrated into the architectural body, as in the greek temples or in the facades of Renaissance Florentine churches. If we look at the artistic qualifications of the most functional parts of the temple, such as columns, beams and frames, we find a higher level of abstraction. The theory of the wooden temple claims that the triglyphs are a memory of the wooden beams’ head. So the whole temple would be a translation of the original archaic wooden one. This kind of a more durable model is also a representation that iconically perpetuates the original meaning. And this is true even between distant buildings: intertextuality that Umberto Eco found among books (Eco 1983) is true for the entire architectural corpus. In the whole Western classical tradition buildings do nothing but remember and be cited in part or in whole. Much more often, architecture speaks for indexes, for signs that require a cultural