For the journal, 2025 is a significant year: the fortieth anniversary of its founding at Sapienza University of Rome, the relaunch’s tenth anniversary at the University of Trento, and the first in honour of its founder. The curious recurrence of dates, the result of random events, can be interpreted in an evolutionary key according to the sequence of change / adaptation / selection-survival and attests, at the outset, to the thematic horizon of numbers 16 and 17.
The eight editorials that Roberto de Rubertis wrote for the first ten issues of the journal are a veritable manifesto that we can reread in the light of evolutionism. The ‘intentions’ (no. 1), ‘programs’ (no. 2), ‘timing’ (no. 3), ‘methods’ (no. 4), ‘topics’ (no. 5), ‘actions’ (no. 6-7), ‘outcomes’ (no. 8-9), and ‘documents’ (no. 10) contain reflections on the roles of drawing and image between history and science, useful for identifying the directions to follow for the ongoing exchange of ideas, at the level of cultural debate free from preordained and economistic dynamics.
Even the salient themes covered in the subsequent thirty-five issues can be examined by focusing on the accidental changes that have occurred in recent decades. The fundamentals of drawing, between tradition and innovation, geometry and digital techniques; project representation between visual perception and figurative space; architectural, archaeological, and urban-environmental surveying between interpretative models and graphic communication: these are fields of inquiry that have sometimes anticipated lines of research that were only fully understood in later years.
To the disciplinary aspects addressed by Roberto de Rubertis, we now add the latest frontiers connected to the technological revolution of information and communication, which enrich the panorama of the fields of representation to which the original perspective inaugurated by Darwin can be applied. It’s a very timely call, one we find echoed in Carlo Ratti’s comments on the 19. Mostra internazionale di Architettura Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective, inviting us to embrace the notion of adaptation to rethink our relationships with the built environment.
Roberto de Rubertis studied evolutionism in architecture between 2007 and 2013, once again ahead of his time, during the journal’s inactivity. “XY” can now fill the gap by proposing that the scientific community consider the relevance of this approach and the concept of “resilient images”: those that adapt to different and particular expressive needs, changing the meanings and/or methods of transmitting the message but retaining the original characteristics that best lend themselves to the modifications dictated by new uses, values and types of audience.
With this double issue, “XY” also links to the periodical initiative honouring its founder: the annual Non-Aligned Points call, which will launch in early 2026 and offer an opportunity to renew, over time, interest in that transdisciplinary jumble of questions that intertwine, often in highly complex ways, with the various dimensions of drawing.
