Roberta Spallone

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at Polytechnic University of Turin

The research was carried out in the framework of the project PRIN 2022 called INFORTREAT, which aimed to create 3D information models that could make accessible constructive knowledge related to military architecture to scholars, professionals, and the community. This paper develops previous work dealing with the graphical reconstruction and 3D mod...

This research focuses on the contextualization and digital reconstruction of twelve funerary artifacts from a Han Era archeological site, currently housed at the Asian Art Museum of Turin (MAO). The reconstructed artifacts have played a central role in a virtual exhibition that has integrated and represented the characteristic elements of Han art,...

Architecture archives constitute an invaluable source of knowledge and an essential pillar for scientific research dedicated to understanding architecture in all its nuances. This resource interests a wide spectrum of disciplines, including the history of architecture, conservation, design theory, and representation. In recent years, we have witnes...

This research involved a multidisciplinary group of scholars with expertise in Indian art and archaeology, digital representation, and information processing systems, with the support of VR@POLITO and MOD Lab Arch of the Politecnico di Torino. The paper describes a project aimed at the analysis, interpretive reconstruction, and communication, usin...

This paper presents research undertaken by scholars of Museo Egizio, Turin, the Department of Architecture and Design of Politecnico di Torino, the Department of Control and Computer Engineering of Politecnico di Torino, and the VR@POLITO lab.

This paper presents the outcomes of a multidisciplinary teaching, dedicated to third-year students of the bachelor program in Design and Visual Communication.

This contribution follows previous research about the recognition and geometric and morphological analysis of more than 70 Baroque atria covered by unitary and complex vaults in Turin city centre, the digital survey, and the AR experiments aimed at the presentation of the research’s results. The current proposal aims to communicate, spread, share,...

This paper presents the activity carried out as part of the Ph.D. program in Architectural and Landscape Heritage at the Politecnico di Torino entitled “An Integral Approach to the Study of Fortifications”. A survey was conducted on a still-existing seventeenth-century portion of the fortifications of the city. The course included the organization...

Guarini's Trattato di Fortificatione provides an up-to-date international overview of military culture and art in the field of tracing the elements of modern fortifications. The bastions, which represent one of its main elements, have been investigated in the present work through the graphic analysis and geometric decomposition of the bastions’ tra...

The present research concerns the contextualisation and presentation of eleven small statues from the Tang era dated from the XI and XII centuries CE today housed at the Asian Art Museum in Turin (MAO). A multidisciplinary group with expertise in Asian art, digital representation, and information processing systems, with the support of VR@POLITO an...

As Extended Reality (XR) continues to grow, new possibilities arise to provide users with novel ways to experience cultural heritage (CH). In particular, applications based on Virtual Reality (VR) like, e.g., virtual museums, have gained increasing popularity, since they can offer new ways for preserving and presenting CH content that are not feasi...

Recent trends in the Digital Humanities – conceived as new modalities of collaborative, transdisciplinary and computational research and presentation – also strongly influence research approaches and presentation practices in museums. Indeed, ongoing projects in museums have considerably expanded digital access to data and information, documentatio...

The project is born from a research agreement between the Department of Architecture and Design of the Politecnico di Torino and the Municipality of Turin to realise an augmented reality simulation of Castello di Mirafiori and cultural accompaniment for citizens. The building and the gardens are documented by archival and bibliographical sources th...

This research has been carried out in the framework of the research agreement to enhance the cultural assets of the Museo d’Arte Orientale (MAO) in Turin through digitization, 3D modelling and experiences in virtual and augmented reality. The aim of the present work is to communicate the evolutionary process in Buddha iconography in the Mathura are...

Digital Culture is progressively spreading to all fields of knowledge. In the field of archaeology, and specifically in the case of museums, it offers a wide range of possible tools and methods that may open new research opportunities. Within the framework of the collaboration between the Fondazione Museo delle Antichità Egizie di Torino, the Depar...

The experience described in this paper concerns the reconstruction of the temple of Ptah at Karnak with the aim to check and present two hypotheses for the original placement of statues of the goddess Sekhmet now kept at the Museo Egizio, Turin. The reconstruction including the statues, enjoyable through virtual reality, highlights its potential as...

Integrated surveying with active and passive systems is a well-established process for understanding artifacts at different scales and levels of complexity. But some acquisition problems still exist, related to the presence of non-optically cooperating materials, reflective surfaces, and non-homogeneous and uncontrolled illumination conditions. Esp...

This research is realised in the framework of a project recently funded as part of the PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan) in the Accessibility sector. The working team has been established in the framework of the scientific agreement between the Museum of Villa della Regina in Turin, the Department of Architecture and Design at Politecnic...

Galata, one of the oldest districts in Istanbul, still shows a historical and multi-layered urban texture. In 2019, within the “Urban Facade-Istanbul Waterfront” international workshop, a 3D laser scanner survey of Galata’s city walls was carried out. The raw data therein collected became the basis for a thesis in Architecture, as part of a joint r...

La presente ricerca nasce nell’ambito della collaborazione tra il Dipartimento di Architettura e Design del Politecnico di Torino e la Direzione regionale Musei Piemonte e sviluppa il progetto di visualizzazione di un edificio temporaneo destinato a sede del I Parlamento italiano collocato nel cortile di Palazzo Carignano. Il lavoro, allo stadio at...

This paper deals with the comparison between the manuscript preserved in the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna - a preparatory work for Book VII of Sebastiano Serlio - with the printed volume, paying particular attention to the drawings and their relationship to the written text. In particular, the comparison refers to the initial section of the book, d...

A growing number of research works, experiments and applications is investigating the potential at the intersection of augmented reality (AR) and the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. Project management, project communication, collaborative design, maintenance and construction progress documentation, construction site safe...

This paper presents the results of multidisciplinary research in which reconstructive digital modelling operates on different areas of heritage and at different scales to realize an analysis, interpretation, and communication experience in the field of museum valorization. It is, in fact, a work that includes both the philological reconstruction of...

This paper investigates and describes the parametric reconstruction of Palladio’s villas, using his treatise, I Quattro libri dell’architettura , as the primary source. The process starts with an extensive comparison of Palladio’s rooms’ ratios, the compositional rules of the villas’ plans, and the digital creation of parametric architectural eleme...

In recent years a culture of conservation has been developed also regarding Modernism archives, that come to us with their often considerable amount of materials. Valorization, interpretation, fruition and sharing of knowledge address the works of many international scholars. In particular, using the continuous innovations of digital modelling tool...

For years, virtual reconstruction in the figurative arts, and sculpture, in particular, has been developing and consolidating. The workflow from the acquisition to three-dimensional modelling and to the integration of missing parts, has been optimized through processes entirely implemented in the digital dimension. The most recent developments in a...

This contribution illustrates the results of research that aims to connect the workflow for knowledge – survey, interpretation, modeling – to the transmission of this knowledge and enhancement of Cultural Heritage by physical models, demonstrating its potential in a “Design for All” perspective. Palazzo Mazzonis, the current seat of the MAO (Museo...

This paper shows the results of research advances on complex vaulted systems produced by the integration of laser scanner survey techniques and three-dimensional modeling for the geometric interpretation of built architecture to recognizing the geometric matrices of the design conception. The integration between TLS techniques and digital modeling...

p>20^th century pre-digital architectural archives are a current topic of interest for scholars involved in historical studies as well as those studying conservation, valorisation and communication. These vast archival heritages could be enhanced by the methodologies, techniques and tools offered by the digital revolution. The present pro...

Nexus Network Journal guest editors Roberta Spallone and Marco Vitali introduce the papers in vol. 22 no. 4, a special issue dedicated to Complex Vaulted Systems.

This paper presents the methodological framework set up for the analysis, interpretation, and representation of the banded vaulted systems recognized in eleven Baroque atria in Turin. In these atria, the banded vaults, locally named “a fascie”, are featured by a series of arches orthogonal to the perimeter walls on which they rest. The arches divid...

In Guarini’s systematization of vaulted systems based on geometric reasoning, the lunette vaults created by cutting main vaults of different geometric shape and inserting the groins take on a primary role. This operation increases the natural lighting of the rooms and ensures airiness and dynamism to atria and halls of Baroque palaces. In the Archi...

“New Technologies Aimed to Analysis and Conservation of Architectural Heritage” is the title of a research project in progress, which involves the research group supervised by prof. Spallone (Politecnico di Torino) and prof. López (Universitat Politècnica de València) winner of the call for "Stays of senior professors and researchers in foreign cen...

Complex Vaulted Systems: Geometry, Design, Construction is the title of PhD Excellence course promoted in 2019 by the PhD course in Architectural and Landscape Heritage of the Department of Architecture and Design and funded by the Doctoral School at Politecnico di Torino. The research on vaulted systems through descriptive geometry and new digital...

Increasingly, the archives of 20th century architecture are attracting the interest of scholars as a source for in-depth understanding of architectural works and the trajectories of artistic movements and individual designers. The autograph drawing, in the different phases of the elaboration of the project, uses methods and techniques that reveal t...

span>Guarini first develops a rigorous and systematic discourse on vaulted systems. In three treatises: Architettura Civile, Euclides adauctus, and Modo di misurare le fabriche, he described the geometric nature of the vaults, the principles of geometry and their practices in the stereotomy, and the measurement of the vaults’ surfaces and volumes,...

The present work focuses on the study of vaulted systems by Guarini, by virtue of the paradigmatic role that Guarini assumes in the field of studies dedicated to this topic. The research has been compared in-depth analysis aimed at connecting relevant data with archival drawings, historical studies and treatises in order to use digital representati...

The issue of conservation and valorisation of Cultural Heritage involves today 20th century architectural archives, that come to us with their often considerable amount of materials, where the predominance of the design drawings arises. Interpretation, fruition and sharing of archival materials aimed to deepening the knowledge of contemporary maste...

The Extraordinario Libro by Sebastiano Serlio (Extraordinario Libro di Architettura, Per Giovan de Tournes, Lyon, 1551) contains 50 plates that represent models of portals (30 ‘rustic’ and 20 ‘delicate’). These portals are the results of the combination of the five orders’ elements—subject of Book IV (1537)—with rustic ornamentation. The portals th...

The object of the research is to recognize the application of the seven rectangular ratios described by Serlio in Book I on Geometry (1545) in the designs of the 24 villas presented in the Vienna Manuscript (Codex Ser. n. 2649 conserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, preparatory to his Book VII on Architecture published posthumously in...

Turin Baroque atria, characterized by complex vaulted systems, are a unique case in the architecture of the time. These atria have been realized with particular spatial schemes that present: unified spaces, absence of intermediate pillars, and composite vaults made of brickwork masonry. Three main types of vaulted systems established: the “star-sha...

This paper presents the most recent developments in a project aimed to the documentation, storage and dissemination of the cultural heritage. The subject of the project are more than 70 Baroque atria in Turin, recognized by critics for their particular unitary vaulted systems Our research team is currently working on digitizing documents and studyi...

This paper examines the relationships between Drawing and Project in the light of the work of two leading architects in the Turin panorama, Carlo Mollino and Aldo Morbelli. Peers, but different in education, temperament and design poetics, the two architects appear as original figures with respect to the national scene, in which the adhesion to int...

The Modo di misurare le fabriche (1674), by Guarino Guarini is a treatise devoted to the explanation of methods to calculate surfaces and volumes. This treatise is one of the least studied among Guarini’s theoretical works. Referring to Euclides adauctus (1671), Guarini expresses the desire to make the geometric principles developed therein applica...

Archives created by architects and engineers are unique and significant sources for scientific research, in relation with multiple disciplines. Contemporary architectural archives, as a documentary evidence, contain relations which cannot easily be read and contextualized because of the documents organization and order, given by the archival necess...

In this chapter are developed some considerations about the heuristic potentialities of parametric digital modeling as a tool for analyzing and interpreting architectural heritage. Observed that the parametric thinking in architecture could be recognized almost from the origin, new parametric modeling software allows to verify the design criteria o...

Located in mountainous area, between Relizane and Mascara cities, the Beni-Rached Qalaa is made up of four distinct conurbations, amidst multiple rocky peaks, following the banks of river, nearby the fertile plains, staggered between two separate zones. The citadel presents a structure and characters common to Berber and Aurasian villages, intended...

This paper presents a research aimed to create a collection of digital interactive models of Carlo Mollino’s designs. Mollino’s archive contains hundreds and hundreds of drawings, photographs, writings and other materials, related to his design activity in the fields of architecture and furniture design. Only few architectural designs were realized...

Re-draw architectures as heuristic practice aims to explore the motives, the conception, and the formal and technologic choices, understand the relationship with the original and current context, the transformations, from concept to realization and during the life. In the research the practice of re-drawing, is involving the author along with a gro...

20th c. Architectural Archives are probably the latest and hugest collections of architectural documents on paper. Their conservation depends largely on the discovery, analysis, comprehension and interpretation of their value as Cultural Heritage. Today design documents produced by contemporary masters of Architecture, especially original drawings,...

This paper focuses on the initial “spark” of the design process, in which Drawing, Image, Language intertwine and/or prevail over each other. The possible and ideal meeting point of these three concepts has been identified and recreated within the International Competition IBA 84; which represents a suitable model for comparing different strategies...

This contribution arises from the interest (on the themes of semiotics and communication of architecture, even in its deep meanings) derived from studies and comparisons with Renato De Fusco, Maria Luisa Scalvini, Pio Luigi Brusasco, Pier Tosoni, Alberto Borghini. A question has been confirmed: what can be the meanings of architecture, especially i...

Since the late Nineties, digital architectural animation emerged as one of the main methods for representing design ideas. The ‘spectacle of architecture’ created by digital representation of space and time, arose as one of the most effective media for the prefiguration of architectural design. The great complexity of architectural video’s producti...

In the baroque Turin it is possible to identify routes aimed to discover atria of palaces and houses, freely accessible, whose unitary vaulted systems made of brickworks show an admirable combination of geometry and architecture, making them a case of interest in architectural history (Callet & Lesueurs 1855, Norberg Schultz 1980) for quality, quan...

In his Trattato di Fortificatione, Guarino Guarini described and drew a pentagonal bastioned scheme as an ideal ‘regular fortress’. The closely connected geometry, architecture, and ballistics in the drawing form a true fortified system. Guarini draws his experience from knowledge of military architecture in Italy, Flanders, and France. He was in T...

In two autograph plates of Architettura Civile, Guarini represents, in oblique or orthographic projection, the shape generation of vaults, even invented by him, created by the variety of combinations of "six round bodies", through cuts and intersections. Some of the proposed models, attributable to the field of architecture of the palaces, relate t...

20th c. Architectural Archives are probably the latest and hugest collections of architectural documents on paper. Their conservation depends largely on the discovery, analysis, comprehension and interpretation of their value as Cultural Heritage. Today design documents produced by contemporary masters of Architecture, especially original drawings,...

Re-draw architectures as heuristic practice aims to explore the motives, the conception, and the formal and technologic choices, understand the relationship with the original and current context, the transformations, from concept to realization and during the life. In the research the practice of re-drawing, is involving the author along with a gr...

Among its many and varied potential, B.I.M. includes those of diachronic and multi-scalar management of digital models. These potentialities have been tested in an innovative way on the case study of a medieval settlement of particular morphology, for its comb-shaped layout interspersed by narrow alleys, placed on a system of three ridges, in Asti...

Fra le sue numerose e multiformi potenzialità, il B.I.M. annovera quelle della gestione diacronica e multiscalare dei modelli digitali. Tali potenzialità sono state sperimentate in maniera innovativa sul caso studio di un insediamento medievale di particolare caratterizzazione morfologica, per la sua disposizione a pettine inframezzata da stretti v...

During his stay in Turin as an architect and engineer at the Savoy court, Guarini addresses the issue of fortifications. In those years, in fact, he also works in the field of military buildings, despite being predominantly engaged, both on theoretical and practical ambit, in civil and religious architecture. Dates back to the 1676, the publication...

The paper charts a course that links the urban transformation in Turin after the unification to the intensive residential design which gives substance to the plot. The motor of the two phenomena can be identified in the cultural ferment produced in a new educational institution for engineers and architects, and powered by a fervent theoretical acti...

Between the end of the twenties and the beginning of the World war two Turin, as the most of the Italian cities, was endowed by the fascist regime of many new buildings to guarantee its visibility and to control the territory: the fascist party main houses and the local ones. The style that was adopted for these constructions was inspired by the g...

This paper develops some consideration about the issues raised by the reconstruction of 'architectures on paper' of contemporary masters.Generally archival drawings are patchy and fragmented and refer to different ideative moments and paths of inspiration that lend themselves to numerous and different interpretative readings. Moreover it's necessar...

Contemporary design drawings represent an immense and quite complex cultural heritage to be interpreted, communicated, preserved and publicised. Digital technologies - and the convergence they provide - have much to offer, for example in safeguarding the iconographic heritage ascribed to the field of so-called minor architecture, otherwise in dange...

This chapter reviews methods and techniques of digital reconstruction of disappeared architectural masterpieces. Through the overview of theoretical positions are explored heuristic values and communicative potentials of three-dimensional reconstruction, and prerogatives of animation in the interaction with three-dimensional data. Different critica...

This paper proposes corresponding interpretations about surveys data concerning the same object but realized within a century of each other: the wall paintings from three tombs built in Qau el-Kebir. The theme is developed firstly analysing direct surveys from Ballerini's diary during the Italian excavation campaign in 1905, later examining the sur...

This paper describes integrated methodologies of survey and three-dimensional modeling, aimed to analysis on intrados shape of masonry compound vaults, developed in Palazzo Grosso. The analyses, useful to deal with the problems of restoration and recovery, which made it possible to compare the design drawings with the outcomes of shape, highlightin...

Da circa quindici anni lo 'spettacolo dell'architettura' ha individuato nella rappresentazione digitale spazio-temporale, in particolare nell'animazione, uno dei media più efficaci per la prefigurazione e la comunicazione del progetto. La notevole complessità della produzione di video che, in pochi minuti, illustrino le peculiarità di un'idea, ha c...

The representation of transformation of urban landscapes, thanks to the tools offered by the digital convergence, more and more uses of multimedia outputs where the mix between real and virtual is done seamlessly. In the simulations created, true, false, and fake overlap and merge, exerting an undeniable seductive power. Through the analysis of cas...

In the pre-unitary period some Italian states (Piedmont, Lombardy, Tuscany) provide themselves of the cadastres "geometrico-particellari", whose maps are often the first reliable representation of large portions of the territory. Also in other areas of the peninsula, in some cadastres, called in this case, "descrittivi", such as the Bourbon of Sic...

Il mercato di Fossano vive, fra Otto e Novecento, una fase di riordino e razionalizzazione, regolamentata dalla municipalità. In questo periodo, infatti, una serie di iniziative, intraprese per ragioni di mobilità, di decoro e di igiene pubblica, interessa la localizzazione delle attività nel loro complesso, il progetto, la costruzione e lo spostam...

The application of digital representation techniques for a virtual reconstruction of some XX Century architectures is essential for preserving the memory and the authenticity of several buildings that represented an important chapter of the Italian history of architecture; at present these buildings appear improperly transformed or completely demol...

As demonstrated by significant sociological studies, gaming activities allow behavioral experiments that otherwise would not occur. Today some International Universities use gaming activities, in particular video games, for educational purposes. In the architectural field, characterized by increasing complexities in design process, the video game c...

The present research, concerning Plantery's vaults in Turin, connects different questions related to their geometric shape referred to architectural culture, centering and building methods used in masonry structures, decorative styles at that time. Survey works and representation by 3D digital modelling allow formulating different geometrical hypot...

In the last years "digital revolution" has pervaded the world of representation and transmission of ideas offering new methods, technologies, tools and strategies for digital representation. Dynamic and hyper-medial representations have burst on the scene of the architectural representation methods - traditionally static -, thanks to the most recen...

Plantery's vaults, by the name of the architect working in Turin since first years of '700, are composed by a main vault intersected by some axial and angular secondary vaults. Plantery's vaults allow to roof over unitary spaces obtaining effects of lightness also by small rises. Their diffusion, up to the '80s of the century, in boardrooms as pala...

THE HARBOUR FRONT VIEW. ARCHITECTURE AND COLOUR IN THE ANCIENT HARBOUR OF RÉTHIMNO. Réthimno, old city located in Crete Island, between XIII and XVII century under the dominion of Venice, had the rule of provincial capital. The city holds interesting remains: buildings, streets and monuments realized in this period and in the later one, character...

In this paper I want to present some considerations about the role of World Wide Web for transmitting the idea of " venustas " , related to the architectural design. For this purpose, it is necessary to know and understand the peculiarities of this new medium both from technical and sociological point of view. Starting from this knowledge it is pos...

New digital technologies offer some powerful tools for evaluating the impact that future architectures could have in existing settings. Historically established techniques like coloured hand drawing perspectives and photomontages have been superseded by digitally based static and dynamic representations which blend virtual models with photographs a...

In this work I want to present my recent experience of teaching of Drawing and Introduction to descriptive geometry in “5 Magister”, the name of a new university degree instituted in the present academic year. This course, activated from University of Studies of Turin with the Centre of Preservation and Restoration “La Venaria Reale”, confers the d...

The experience that I want to present consists of the case of piazza Bodoni in Turin, characterized, between 1866 and 1924 by the presence of an original pavilion dedicated to market. The 3D digital reconstruction allows to recognize the role that the building of the market plays in the characterization and identification of this specific urban loc...

The first level of safeguard is, obviously, knowledge; to know means (…) to document. (…) In architecture this problem was conceptually overcome by survey, a composite operation (…)" (Cundari, Carnevali, 2000) The safeguard of the Cultural Heritage, as stated in the above mentioned document, involves social and educational aspects. As researchers o...

In the last years dynamic and hyper-medial representations have burst on the scene of the traditionally static architectural representation methods, thanks to the most recent technological developments in the field of computer graphics. Advanced digital media techniques and dynamic representations are establishing as primary emerging modes of archi...