Spherical Drawing for Understanding Urban Spaces

Drawing, besides being the only tool able to represent ideas that live in our mind, is also a means to represent the perception of the world. The importance that is still dedicated to freehand drawing has led to the proliferation of digital tools for simulating traditional techniques, creating good opportunities that mix manual gesture and virtual world. Spherical drawing is placed in this context: it comes from spherical photography and from digital environment but, to some extent, is bearer of that materiality and abstraction that are sometimes sought to communicate images or interpret real places. The idea is to exploit the potential of an immersive 360° environment for the understanding of urban spaces through graphic-perceptive analyses. This type of representation is very close to the human vision from which perceptual studies derive, so it could contribute to the discipline with considerable advantages. In order to verify the validity of this new procedure, piazza Sempione in the Montesacro district in Rome was chosen as a case study. The contribution includes a series of representations of piazza Sempione that are based on the fragmentation of some visual stimuli, so that they can be recognized and appreciated individually.