Abstract:

The Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Architecture and Society, has a strong educational and research tradition on new technologies and computer-assisted design tools. This abstract deals with a research carried out by the CoDE (Cooperative Design Environment) Lab with the students of the "3D Parametric CAAD Design" class (Leonardo Campus - Milano) and “Automatic Drawing for Architectural Design” (Arata Campus - Piacenza), with trainees and dissertationists.
Both classes deal with all the subjects concerning CAAD-assisted design, with the aim of teaching students how to work autonomously from the analytical pre-planning phase to the final rendering of the artifact.
The workgroup, reporting to the Italian Chapter of IAI (International Alliance for Interoperability), relies on the cooperation of qualified professionals.

Subjects of analysis and reconstruction were not the projects, but the already created buildings that supply a wider choice of sources and information.
We analyzed the formal, morphological, historical and architectural aspects.
For the time being we only deal with Aalto, Botta, Bottoni, Holl, Le Corbusier, Meer, Mies van der Rohe, Niemeyer, Ponti, Terragni and Wright.
CAAD Digital Model Archive of CoDE Lab presently boasts more then 250 models.

In our survey we have highlighted some important issues for the growing and development of a critical analysis of the students.

TRANSFORMATION ANALYSIS
The 3D simulation applied to the transformations that some important functionalist buildings have undergone during their existence. Sometimes the changes were due to a difference or adjustment of their intended use, and sometimes the changes were quite substantial and due to design and/or assembly mistakes.
We often just observed the remarkable differences between the designed and the created building.

HISTORIC WORKS AND PROJECT NEVER CARRIED OUT
The virtual 3D CAAD models reconstruction applied to (accomplished) works by Andrea Palladio and some (unaccomplished) projects by Sebastiano Serlio.
These two masters of Renaissance architecture are also the authors of theoretical-practical treaties aimed at illustrating the basic criteria of architectural composition and at analytically coding their language accounts. A learning by doing method directly applied to their architecture is a great deal.

ARCHITECTURE DESTROYED OR DEMOLISHED
A very important kind of 3D simulation but the shortage of traceable sources, thus made the real/virtual barrier very thin and we therefore had to reconstruct by subsequent suppositions.
For example, the whole technological aspect of the building would often be further neglected, since in project representations of the past it isn't always possible to understand and extrapolate the building's structure, facilities and many constructive details.

MODULARITY, GEOMETRY AND MATHEMATIC
The constituent proportional analysis of the modularity from masters of the Modern Movement to contemporary architects. We are browsing a whole series of works and looking for the expressive language of modular grids and symmetries, thus producing 3D constituent morphological analyses.
Another fascinating aspect, almost consequential, has been the rediscovery of the appeal of certain buildings' analysis, which disclosed a trend, a morphology and/or a plasticity shaped on mathematical-physical elements.