Carta del rilievo: commented reading and state of the art of a contemporary discipline

Abstract

Measuring, recording, representing, in short… documenting the existing space (anthropized or not) is configured as a strategic interest that is deeply rooted in Western culture.
In a modern context, largely from the 19th century onwards, these practices ended up acquiring a specific ramification for architecture, being notoriously influenced by “preservationist interests,” even if understood in a diffuse way. Perhaps due to this process, architectural documentation is still sometimes seen as a subsidiary practice of the discipline of restoration. However, an in-depth approach to this topic may reveal a specific scientific development, with relative disciplinary
independence, which deserves to be analyzed with the following purpose: to provide a better use of an important tool for the field of preservation as a whole, that is, not only as a subsidy
for works directly involved with architectural restoration, but also for the disciplines of history and archeology and their counterparts linked to architecture (such as architectural history and
architectural archeology). In this sense, this article seeks to support a precise contextualization, in which some recent developments on the subject are examined, approached from the Charter of the architectural survey, an international reference document, for which we present a translation directly from Italian, originally brought in our Master’s dissertation and commented here in the light of the bibliographic production. Ultimately, our investigation aims to contribute to pacifying the understanding of an aspect that is still little discussed in the Brazilian context: after all, is the architectural survey constitutes a practice or discipline?