Alberti's Box: The cultural multimedia project on the architectures of Leon Battista Alberti

Abstract

Far from their physical locations, buildings can be visualized, perceived and understood only thanks to a digital action of dematerialization and re-materialization., The Alberti's Box was developed starting from this awareness. The intense collaboration between the DIAPReM Centre (Development of Integrated Automatic Procedures for Restoration of Monuments) of the Ferrara University, the Consorzio Ferrara Ricerche and the Leon Battista Alberti Study Centre Foundation of Mantua realized a cultural project allowing everyone the gathering of all the data and documentation related to the Alberti's architecture: the flow of multimedia suggestions and digital reconstruction tries to describe the dynamics of his thought and tries also to explain which are the design, the technology and the interpretation queries the Alberti's architecture still place. Alberti's Box is an ideal magical box containing the philosophy of a humanist who has generated both architectural forms as well as thoughts. The idea is very simple: the aim is to stimulate the direct vision of the building, not its replacement. The digital interpretation of the buildings inside the Alberti's Box has an analytical, documentary and explanatory function and the integration of various languages is the key to understand the architectures of Leon Battista Alberti, even if absent. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.