Computer Aided Construction History. Virtual Mumeci

Construction History is a "special" discipline: on the borderline between history and technology, it requires trans-disciplinary tools of analysis. In this context, for some years now, the research group of the SIXXI3DLab of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" has been conducting an experimentation on the application of digital technologies to the conception of new investigative tools for the History of Construction, in particular for the History of Italian Engineering of the 20th century. A particular line of research is based on the combined use of virtual modeling and 3D printing. The use of these techniques, borrowed from other fields, of design and production, has proved, in the historical-technical study of the works, very useful to clarify, by means of the virtual and physical model, little-known aspects of their conception and construction. A remarkable case study of these new instruments was the work of one of the most visionary engineers of the 20th century, Sergio Musmeci, who, already in the 1960s, imagined the computer as a tool for defining form, and no longer as a mere verification instrument. In the investigation of the works, the use of virtual modeling and 3D printing has allowed a philological recovery of Musmeci's ideas, giving a second life, "virtual", to the "nameless forms" that the engineer had dreamed of designing using the computer but that, in the sixties, he could only laboriously calculate and roughly draw by hand, unfortunately leaving them almost all on paper.