Afterword. Communicating by text and image
Topology for health care facilities’ design
Mathematical concepts applied to painting, as well as to architectural design, arise frequently from intuition. The important role they play in design processes is being currently vindicated, as it is evidenced by artists and mathematicians as Lucio Saffaro. Topology is concerned with the properties of spaces that are preserved under continuous deformations, and has proved […]
Unusual geometries in Ridolfi’s stair design. The case study of Villino Alatri in Rome
In 1931, with the Master Plan of Rome and with the variation of the detailed plan of the area, about the cubic volume and maximum height of buildings, comes the desire on the part of the owners to increase the cubature of Villino Alatri. The task is assigned to architects Ridolfi, Fiorentino and Frankl, whose […]
The dual space image in the painting. The space of Caravaggio and Chagall
The study of a double image of the space within the painting, especially in the sacred pictorial representations or with mythological background, reveals possible meanings beyond those already clearly identified by the same representation. These meanings often declare and clarify the conception of philosophical and mathematical space, as well as the vision of the geometric […]
Mathematical constructs in defining the image for graphic communication
«Negligent speech doth not only discredit the person of the Speaker, but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason and judgment; it discrediteth the force and uniformity of the matter, and substance »1. The visual representation is one of the more direct and effective ways to communicate. Crossing the boundaries between image and language, Johnson’s […]
Signs and symbols between graphics and mathematics
Today in the collective imagination, mathematics presents repulsive aspects, but contrary to the past, even fascinating aspects. The latter are almost exclusively attributable to the geometry and range from recent fractal structures to ancient polyhedra which attracted over the centuries a large number of artists, from Leonardo to Dürer and from Escher to Saffaro, with […]
Morphological evolutions of transpolyhedra. Eloquence of the images to generate tensegrity structures
The image, as shown by the artistic research of Lucio Saffaro, can be interpreted as visual representation of complex concepts, theme clearly useful in the architectural and engineering field. The construction of innovative structural solutions also arises from the graphic evolutions of simple forms. That’s the case of tensegral structures, born from the movement of […]
Dynamic Morphemes
Sculpture, like writing and architectural drawing, is one of the ways in which we can investigate the qualities of space and time. A space that in the series Dynamic Morphemes has a variable geometry that is therefore connected with a two–dimensional time: towards the future, with a return to the past, circular, taking in the […]
Unpublished writings
Three unpublished typewritten documents were found in Lucio Saffaro’s home after his death, which took place in 1998 in Bologna, and now they are printed in these pages. The cataloguing and subsequent archiving, by Saffaro Foundation, ended in 2004 and revealed a lot of unpublished literary writings that are collected and stored in thirteen folders. […]
Lucio Saffaro and the “metaphysics of the world”
Art and measure were the privileged places in which Lucio Saffaro’s meditations (Trieste 1929– Bologna 1998) started. A constant and peculiar combination that led him to such a rigorous work, between the internal structures of science and art, that it allowed him to overcome the distinction problem between the two disciplinary dichotomies. Rightly, the consistency […]