A 3D REWORKING OF THE URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS OF PALERMO IN RECENT HISTORY FOR A HYPOTHESIS OF A "CITY MUSEUM" BASED ON DIGITAL VISUALIZATIONS

Abstract. The objective that drives this research is given by a multitude of information which, in addition to the contribution of technology, allows us to study, analyze, verify and remodel the sites, monuments and evolutions of the city through graphic processes of perspective restitution that start from the analysis of historical photos. The drawing methods, the digital graphic rendering and through the aid of geometric techniques, contribute to the reconstruction of projects and architectures that are now lost, this is possible thanks to the methods of perspective, axonometry and three-dimensional restitution.

This remarkable photographic heritage belonging to Palermo, but also to any other city in the world that is sometimes not even considered in the least or that is even forgotten in archives today finds new life thanks to the perspective restitution. Shooting and photographic images following particular studies, allow us to precisely establish the observation points and the dimensions of architectures that have now disappeared, giving them new life through the transposition and reconstruction of the same within a “memory archive three-dimensional”.

In order to describe the transformations of the city, both urban and architectural, we have taken as a case study an architecture that has now been lost in the city of Palermo: villa Rutelli. It was a neo-Gothic villa, built in the first twenty years of the twentieth century on the axis of Via Libertà and demolished in the 1960s along with other buildings of the Palermitan Liberty during the years of the infamous "sack of Palermo". Through the iconographic and archival research at the CRICD and the Bronzetti fund (photographer) and with the aid of research and cataloging studies, illustrative material emerged which was useful for reworking the particularities of the model through the perspective restitution.