The professional separation between subjective design drawings and objective construction drawings the logical conclusion is that the latter should have been easily codified. However, architects have an incredibly hard time in agreeing on construction notations, a predicament which probably extends back to the Biblical turris confusionis and Nimrod’s rave, “Rafel mai amech sabi almi,” meaningless to anyone but himself.

In the past each office, each architect had an individual system Subsequent to a confusing beginning, western musicians have mostly agreed on a system of notation, but architects have not been able of doing so in spite of the many unification and standardization attempts made by nations and professional associations. The reason is simple; the process of figuring out “sound edifices and structures” is a process to which neither the normative nor the arbitrary can give satisfactory answers. However the birth and growth of CAD and BIM is slowing achieving the unification and edifices and structures are slowly become aphonic.

By moving away from medieval tracing floors to paper, architectural drawings have evolved in a specific manifestation of non- verbal thinking, realized by either involuntary or purposeful comparison of the impressions of different modalities, drawing from structural or semantic and, most of all, emotionaln similarity. A productive explanation of this request for a mixing of factual lines and non-­factual demonstrations is that architects, in their tracings, are not making transparent notations but synesthetic images. A study of the drawings of Scarpa can be the springing apparatus for a review of the nature of production drawings.

Born under the shadow of the dome of Alberti’s Sant’Andrea in Mantua, Italy, Marco Frascari received his first degree from The Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, and then completed a Dottore in Architettura at the Istututo Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV). He trained with Carlo Scarpa, Arrigo Rudi, Valeriano Pastor, and Giuseppe Samonà. He began his professional career in Verona while simultaneously teaching at IUAV. Later Dr. Frascari moved to the United States, where he earned a Master of Science in Architecture at the University of Cincinnati and a Ph.D. in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Frascari has taught at several institutions such as Harvard University, Georgia Tech, and University of Pennsylvania, where he was director of the Ph.D. Program in Architecture. He was G.T. Ward Professor in Architecture at the Washington–Alexandria Architectural Center of Virginia Tech and founded its Ph.D. program in Architectural Representation.

Dr. Frascari is currently Director of the School of Architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He continues to run a small architectural practice in Italy and North America concurrent with his academic career.

Dr. Frascari has authored numerous books and papers, ranging in topics from history to theory, from practice to drawing. His most recognized piece is “The Tell- The-Tale Detail” in VIA 7, republished in anthologies and translated into Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. Presently is working on a book entitled: Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawings: Slow-Food for Architect’s Imagination.

http://www.abp.unimelb.edu.au/aboutus/events/special-public-lectures/2009/frascari.html

http://www.kokkugia.com/wiki/downloads/frascari_detail.pdf