The intelligibility of the drawing: still on the territorial machine

The territorial machine is conceived as a drawing that represents a geographical system regulated by the forces of nature: the currents of water, the path of the icy winter wind and the spring breeze. The machine is the repository of history consisting of permanence and immanence, as well as reminiscences of architecture’s past. It allows us to recognize and value places, and to understand their signs and relationships, without the authority or formality expressed by considering them through the specifications determined by the scale-based representations based on the sequence of the design outputs. The reproduction of the lines, in proportion, of the drawings that intend to observe every single part as related and connoting all the others is considered as an unfolding, a reading of a set of tracings, of facts that are repositories of knowledge, coming from territorial, morphological and architectural experiences that are different, yet still similar. This takes place in the tables of a topographical manual in which the geometric-graphic categories of the countryside, the meaning of the agricultural and agrarian program, and the historical urban settlement that responds to the forming structure are represented, as well as the natural hydraulic works and the temporary architectural constructions. The territorial machine is a text, a place of inscription, of prescription, of erosion of the signs and therefore of values for which the community itself is responsible