What future for Descriptive Geometry? This question is the starting point for a reflection on the role of this discipline in contemporary research and education, focusing on one of its founding objectives: the study of the geometric properties of figures and their implications in the genesis of designed form. Starting from its mongian origins, the discipline is reinterpreted not as a science of representation, but as a science of form, in which the speculative dimension and design application are interwoven through the heuristic value of drawing.The analysis is grounded in several invariants - the centrality of form, the relationship between geometry and construction, and the cognitive role of representation - which run through the discipline’s historical transformations while preserving its relevance. The main recent transformations that have redefined tools and fields of operation are then examined, ranging from the constructive-topological revolution of the twentieth century to the digital turn, up to the current opening towards artificial intelligence.These transformations have led to a progressive fragmentation of knowledge, outlining a “grey zone” in which Descriptive Geometry appears to be losing its role, becoming articulated into autonomous disciplinary fields. In this context, the need emerges to recompose these competences within a shared theoretical framework that recognises research on form - and its pedagogical implications - as its privileged field of inquiry, recovering the historical roots of the discipline and reaffirming its role in relation to generative design processes.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.36.2026.12
In the evolution of the relationship between architecture and representation, the traditional centrality of manual drawing has progressively been challenged by alternative methodologies within the design process. Starting from the emblematic cases of Walter Gropius and Oscar Niemeyer, this contribution shows how an architectural idea may emerge even without an im mediate graphic transcription, through mental prefiguration, physical models, or collaborative design processes. The concept of “drawing in absentia” is explored through the experiments of Antoni Gaudí, Frei Otto, Sergio Musmeci, and Frank O. Gehry, whose hanging-chain models, elastic membranes, and study maquettes anticipated many principles of contemporary digital and parametric modeling. The paper investigates three current directions in architectural representation that no longer depend on conventional drawing: immersive Virtual Reality (VR), parametric computational design, and generative Artificial Intelligence. VR enables designers to sketch directly in three-dimensional space through immersive and haptic interaction. Parametric environments such as Grasshopper, Dynamo, and Houdini replace lines with operational diagrams and algorithmic relationships, making the project the outcome of flexible computational processes. Finally, ma chine learning systems, including deep neural networks are transforming image and model production through automated generation, three-dimensional shape recognition, image-to-model conversion, and text-prompt-driven rendering. These developments reveal a progressive transition from drawing as a direct representational act to new forms of design mediation in which the architectural project emerges through simulation, computation, and intelligent generative processes.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.36.2026.18
Mitchell (1994) highlights how the current era is characterized by the ‘pictorial turn’, that is, a growing interest in visual culture. The pictorial turn and the digital turn — fostered by the development of ICTs and by social practices of ubiquitous, real-time interaction and communication — go hand in hand in a process of changing modes of intelligence, correlated with a shift in ways of knowing: we have witnessed a gradual transition from a learning model founded on a culture of books and writing — which favoured alphabetic vision and a type of intelligence characterized by sequence — to one that integrates listening and non-alphabetic vision, typical of a simultaneous mode of intelligence. Consequently, the cognitive paradigm has evolved: we have moved from a system based on linearity to one dominated by the simultaneity of stimuli and their parallel processing.In this context, vision and drawing take on a central role. It emerges how representation can serve as common interpretive keys for different disciplines, each of which operates according to different theories, methodologies, and tools, and in relation to diverse cultural frameworks.In this sense, the sciences concerned with visual representation explore drawing not merely as a technical-productive issue, but as an all-encompassing sphere of vision, thought, and action. It follows a reflection on the nature and role of those disciplines founded on the graphic sciences: they possess profound disciplinary characteristics, yet at the same time, they appear as a meeting ground for scholars from various sectors.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.36.2026.aw3
Francesca Fatta in conversation with Giancarlo CarnevaleGiancarlo Carnevale is a scholar and designer whose work has long explored the role of drawing within ideation and design processes. Situated at the intersection of representation, design theory, and the authorial dimension of the mark, his research foregrounds drawing not merely as a tool, but as a form of thought.This conversation examines the evolving role of drawing in the age of artificial intelligence, distinguishing between representation—currently undergoing profound transformation—and drawing as prefiguration, an autograph and atemporal space of design thinking. While AI dramatically expands the capacity for variation and formal proliferation, it does not replace the critical act of judgment: selection, synthesis, and authorial responsibility. The discussion identifies a longstanding fracture between exhibited drawing and intimate drawing, the latter conceived as an auroral field of morphemes, figurative obsessions, and non-linear logics akin to Matte Blanco’s “symmetric thinking.” Immersive technologies, while redefining representation as experience, risk saturating the productive ambiguity essential to design. What emerges is a possible shift: from tools of definition to environments of exploration—immersive Wunderkammer in which designers curate constellations of possibilities. In a future shaped by the exponential multiplication of images, authorship will reside less in production than in the capacity to select, order, and withhold. Drawing-for-oneself—imperfect, slow, and accountable—may thus reassert itself as a critical anchor. Not because it is purer, but because it remains irreducibly human. DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.36.2026.aw1
The disciplines of Drawing, as defined in the sec tor’s manifesto, in their broadest sense, are con cerned with understanding formal structure, and with analysing, conveying, appreciating and disse minating existing values, both tangible and intan gible; from this derive its main fields: the scienti fic-technological and the social-humanistic [1]. For some years now – almost coinciding with the ‘digital revolution’ – we have witnessed an ever-increasing volume of scientific output that is more closely aligned with one aspect of the first sphere – the technological sphere – rather than with the second sphere or the scientific aspect of the first. Naturally, there are exceptions, but it is deeply concerning that these constitute a sub stantial number; for example, to mention just the content of some of them, what emerges is more a description of tools and procedures than a ge nuine analysis of the subject under investigation and its necessary documentation.It may seem paradoxical, but it happens, for instance, that in a study of an architectural ar tefact – such as a survey – the representations relating to the plan, elevation and section, upon which architecture has built its foundations, are absent, whilst screenshots of digital processes are presented as if they were convincing, the reby distancing both the reader and the author themselves from an understanding of the archi tectural ‘thing’. It also happens, in certain cases – whilst acknowledging the ethical value of interdiscipli narity – that studies from the disciplinary field of ‘Topography’ are presented as studies of ‘Dra wing’, thereby signalling a loss of the very mea ning of the discipline itself; furthermore, terms such as ‘resilience’, ‘panglossianism’ and ‘post pandemic’, by contrast, are thrust into the fray with the aim of ambiguously emphasising—in a flight of fancy—a possible value of drawing.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.36.2026.aw2
