Lo Buglio, D., Pariente, T., Derycke D. & De Luca, L. (2016). Un regard sur le rôle des projections dans l'évolution des méthodes de représentation de l'architecture: Premières pistes pour l'étude des dessins de Jean-Baptiste Hourlier. La figuration de la Cité. Paris : Académie d’Architecture française

Abstract:

A number of drawings by the architect Jean-Baptiste Hourlier were presented at the ‘Figurations de la Cité’ exhibition held at the Académie d'Architecture de France in November 2016. These drawings, of exceptional format, constitute the architect's third-year ‘envoi de Rome’, when he was a resident at the Villa Médicis. In addition to the quality of their execution, the various documents, produced around 1930, offer a hypothesis for the reconstruction of the city of Siena in the 14th century. This astonishing set of projections shows a vision of the city as it might have appeared several centuries ago. The graphic corpus is made up of four documents: an elevation of the Piazza del Campo, an overall plan of the city of Siena, a second detailed plan of the city of Siena in the 14th century and finally a particularly intriguing aerial view.

While his proposal brings together a reading of reality (that of the early twentieth century, at the time of the survey) with a morphological analysis of the town in the Middle Ages, there remains a sensitive part of the city whose depth is difficult to estimate. This observation marks the starting point for a methodological exploration of these documents. Based on the graphic analysis of the corpus, the aim is to draw up a few implicit lines of thought on the contribution of projections to architectural representation.

In order to assess the distance the architect may have taken and to understand the place given to projections in the graphic narrative, it is useful to begin by considering the spatialization of the documents. The idea is to use an analysis of the projective coherence of Hourlier's drawings to create a three-dimensional model of his hypothesis. By comparing this 3D model with the geometric representation of the current state of the town of Siena, it is possible to estimate, or even quantify, the differences at three levels: topographical, morphological (at least for the buildings still standing today) and semantic. In addition to the avenues that this approach opens up for the study of Hourlier's work, it could also be of interest in examining the evolution of figurative methods.

Comparison between the model obtained from a photogrammetric survey and the model produced from Hourlier's drawings.