Cultural heritage conservation and communication by digital modeling tools. Case studies: minor architectures of the Thirties in the Turin area

Abstract. 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 guide lines of the Modern movement which were spreading by a generation of architects as Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mendelsohn.

At the end of the war many buildings were reconverted to several functions that led heavy transformations not respectful of the original worth, other were demolished.

Today it's possible to rebuild those lost architectures in their primal format as it was created by their architects on paper (and in their mind). This process can guarantee the three-dimensional perception, the authenticity of the materials and the placement into the Turin urban tissue, using static and dynamic digital representation systems. The “three-dimensional re-drawing” of the projects, thought as an heuristic practice devoted to reveal the original idea of the project, inserts itself in a digital model of the urban and natural context as we can live it today, to simulate the perceptive effects that the building could stir up today. The modeling skills are the basis to product videos able to explore the relationship between the environment and “re-built architectures”, describing with the synthetic movie techniques, the main formal and perceptive roots. The model represents a scientific product that can be involved in a virtual archive of cultural goods to preserve the collective memory of the architectural and urban past image of Turin.