Daniele Pascale Guidotti Magnani

Exam exercise for the Construction History course - Preliminary instructions

The groups will be made up of 3-4 students. The students who will arrive in Italy in the next few weeks will be integrated into existing groups: this is why I ask you to work in the utmost spirit of collaboration.

I remind you that the exam exercise will also be common to the "Heritage Conservation" course, as part of the "Built Heritage Workshop": the second part of the exercise will be explained to you by professors Signorelli and Favaretto, of the "Heritage Conservation" course ”.

The first part of the exam exercise will be dedicated to the history of porticoes and their construction systems. Each group will have to choose a component of the UNESCO site “I portici di Bologna”: you can find the official list of components on the UNESCO Nomination Format, which you can download here: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1650 /documents/. These official documents will also be very useful for the exercise part of the "Heritage Conservation" course, so I recommend you start to familiarize yourself with these documents.

You will therefore have to reconstruct the history of these urban areas, studying the individual buildings that compose them: the research must be bibliographic and iconographic.
Regarding the bibliographic research, you can start from the short texts dedicated to the individual buildings contained in these books:

- F. Ceccarelli, D. Pascale Guidotti Magnani, The Bolognese Portico. Architecture, History, and the City, Bologna University Press, 2022.
- Historical Atlas of Italian cities, Emilia-Romagna, Bologna, voll. 1-4, Grafis, Bologna 1996.

You can of course search for other texts in the library, using the Bologna libraries search engine: https://sol.unibo.it/SebinaOpac/.do. During the revisions I will be able to provide you with other reading suggestions, if necessary.

Regarding iconographic research, I recommend the following search engines:
- https://imago.sebina.it/opac/.do
- https://digital.fondazionecarisbo.it/

Iconographic research is important to evaluate whether the buildings analyzed have changed over the centuries, whether they have been subject to restoration, etc…

In parallel to these two phases, I advise you to independently visit again the porticoes you are studying and take photographs of the most significant details, or, even better, to make live drawings and sketches. To analyze the buildings more carefully, I also recommend a redesign of the plans/elevations and sections, or three-dimensional modeling (virtual or with physical models).

At the end of these phases you will therefore have to know the history of the buildings and propose some hypotheses for analyzing the construction aspects (what materials were used? what type of structures are used? Are there some particularly relevant construction details?). Given the diversity of the various urban contexts, the final results of each exercise could vary greatly compared to those of the other groups.

I advise you to start doing some of the work over the next few days, so that we can discuss it in person in the reviews that will take place the next two Monday afternoons (16 October, 23 October). In the following months, the reviews will take place only in virtual mode (email and video calls).

Pubblicato il: 12 ottobre 2023