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From Abstraction to Mimesis. Reading Urban Form through Underground City Representation
Abstract
The paper investigates the subterranean dimension of the city as a critical key to understanding the city's three-dimensionality. Through the lens of the underground realm, the city emerges as a palimpsest of forms, a layered system where archaeology, time, matter, and infrastructure converge into a single spatial continuum.
Following Muminovic's (2019) process of abstraction in diagramming the place, subterranean representation is mediated between intangible and concrete, organising the understanding into five representational phases, and facilitating a more profound knowledge of the city's environment.
The analysis argues that representation can act as an operative process of understanding the city's morphology. This analytical and design tool transforms the subterranean into the base of knowledge and opens new perspectives for the interpretation of the urban form.
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References
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