Rendere visibile. La pianta archeologica e il segreto aperto della forma urbana / Making visible: the archaeological plan and the open secret of urban form

The archaeological plan is a drawing representing the city as a continuous ground floor plan. As such, it flattens any distinction between interior and exterior, private and public, figure and ground. By reconstructing a genealogy of the archaeological plan from the Eighteenth century till 2010, this article conceives this type of drawing as something more than a representational technique. Originally meant as a tool for the description of excavation sites, in the 1950s and 1960s it became a research method for the study of urban morphology and building typology. Later, under the the influence of the neo-avantgarde, the archaeological plan is read as a principle informing the spatial properties of contemporary continuous interior landscapes, as exemplified by some designs by OMA and SANAA.