The Well Tempered

drawings of a
Reflective Architect
Marco Frascari joined the Virginia Tech
faculty in %&&' as the G Truman Ward
Professor of Architecture He teaches at the
Washington)Alexandria Center+ an off)
campus College site that serves graduate and
undergraduate architecture students from
Virginia Tech as well as several other
universities in the United States and abroad

Recognized for his teaching and research in

the areas of architectural representation and
imagination+ theory+ and design+ Frascari has
taught and lectured at top architecture
institutions+ including the University of
Barcelona+ Harvard University+ Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute+ Pratt Institute+ and the
Instituto Universitario di Architettura di
Venezia Before coming to Tech+ he was
chair of the PhD program in architecture at
the University of Pennsylvania

Frascari’s early professional experience began

under the tutelage of Carlo Scarpa in the
early %&12s As a professional architect+
Frascari’s work spans the globe+ from his
marco frascari
hometown of Mantua+ Italy+ to Paris+ G Truman Ward Professor of Architecture
Philadelphia+ and Atlanta College of Architecture and Urban Studies
Virginia Tech
His projects have won several awards and
honors Frascari is also the author of "The
Tell)Tale Detail+" a seminal essay published in
%&5% which continues to stimulate discussion
as one of the most influential pieces of its
kind in the past two decades In it+ Frascari
invites us to think of architecture in terms of
its smallest detail to develop an
understanding of the whole He also
expresses the inextricable linkage between
drawing and building
 marco frascari
In the real project of architecture, drawings and buildings exemplify and suggest, rather than determine or
impose, integrating the art of building well with the art of constructing well. Reflective architects should
always concern themselves with representations. The appropriate use of representations is indispensable
both to the disciplinary relationship between theory and practice, and to that between architects and
builders. Representing the client, the architect cannot be the builder, but the architect rules construction
with the use of well-constructed graphic representations, which mediate among the three powers
governing every design: the client, the builder and the building design concept. A building can be
designed only through a continuous creative, intellectual mediation between imagination and imagining.
Using this bipolar condition, architects do not make a sensory phenomenon out of an idea, but on the
contrary, they shape the sensory phenomenon into an idea using well-tempered drawings. Both these
mediations are performed in well-tempered drawings.

Architects with their graphic dreams do not open the doors for the spirit to enter everyday life on the
contrary; they raise the everyday to the imaginal world, releasing the imaginal content of physical reality.
The union of dream and solid stuff in tectonic events raises to be an expression of pleasure, a subjective
presence rather than an objective procedure to which both the user and the architect must be subjected
and the details and the fabricated devices become playful demonstration of cosmologically constructed
events in an edifice. Rejecting the pseudo-completeness and cacothecnics of many contemporary drawing
techniques that cannot perform the fundamental act of establishing the indispensable cosmological
relationship between material order and cultural order, well-tempered drawings are the necessary
masterpieces of these inaugurations.

The most difficult assignment for architects is to draw by virtuous reflections a construction that is to
extract from the empty surface of paper the inauguration of a building. This demanding task is based on
the assembling in a visible drawing invisible
configurations concretizing in a set of lines,
marks and strokes, the potentiality of a
construction, which cannot not be fully
expressed but it is present in our thinking.
The sapience of architectural beginnings,
the core of architects’ professional
imagination is expressed in conjuring
technometric tracings, i.e., well–tempered
drawings that elaborate the relationships
between the mundane, the sacred, the
dream and the solid stuff in a transhistorical
condition.

An examination of the work of an Italian

architect, Mario Ridolfi (1904-1984) makes
easier to advance a better comprehension
of the significance of well-tempered
drawing in the reciprocal relationship
between architectural theory and
construction. An expression of the negation
of cacothecnics, the technometric
magnificence of Ridolfi’s drawings, a
display of practical and poetic events, results from a relentless attentiveness to the relationship between
the sublime and the mundane.
marco frascari
A Roman architect, Ridolfi was labeled by Manfredo Tafuri as one of the two disquieting muses of Italian
architecture. Carlo Scarpa, Ridolfi’s dearest friend, was the other (Tafuri 1975, pp. LXIII-LXIV, pp. 4-34).
Ridolfi worked mostly alone and in few joint ventures. Toward the middle of his career he formed a
partnership with Wolfgang Frankl.1 Ridolfi’s architectural firm worked mostly in Rome and in Terni (Ridolfi’s
hometown). A charismatic figure for many of his students, Ridolfi taught at the University of Rome and
Pescara.

Perceptive to the implications of the power of tectonic elements, Ridolfi conceived architecture interacting
between local and critical realities. He handled magisterially the elegant, the rough, the concrete, the
abstract, and the dynamic factors and characters of building elements using evocative construction
drawings. Ridolfi’s freehand drawings are representations of virtuous and cosmological processes of
edification. They stand for both themselves and their reason by portraying the material object, its
instrumental, final, formal and material causes fused in one technographic event: a construction and its
possible interpretations. These acts of
graphic conjuring recount possible built
worlds. They are divination on paper. Ridolfi
used layers of heavy tracing paper (carta da
lucido) and a pencil and a pen. He drew on
both sides of the paper and the drawings
were completed and edited with a skillful use
of scissors and adhesive transparent tape.
Ridolfi’s use of freehand drawing ranged
from first sketches to refined perspectival
presentation, and from dreamy site planning
to precise construction documents. The
style is vibrant and has the magic-realistic
qualities of the astonishing background
delineated by George Herriman for the
comic strip Krazy Kat.2 The intense and
vibrating pen etching imparts to the drawings
an appearance that is at the same time
hyper-realistic and magic; the dream and the
solid stuff integrates within the same
substance of expression.

Analogical expressions of the processes of construction, Ridolfi’s drawings are visual descriptions of
invisible processes. They are conceived not to be read as prescriptions, but as visual suggestions and
evocations that carry out a multi-layered display of tectonic intents. They are a building on paper, a lucid
constructive dream on carta da lucido to which a building on site will later concur.

Consider my work almost as a building on paper and all at full scale, unconcerned with
the large quantity of paper necessary. Because only in this manner one can be ...
drawing ... as it is my habit, which pushes me to ascertain and to consider every aspect
of building, and to give oneself the joy of working and to the builders, the indispensable
tool for its execution (Ridolfi 1977, p. 2).

Ridolfi’s freehand drawings solve one of the most difficult tasks of design, since they give the measure of
the building by orchestrating joints, reveals, courses, frames, slabs, girders, I-beams, joists, rafters,
cornices, moldings, friezes, beams, duct, doors, skylights, glass, windowpanes, doorjambs, fascias, bricks,
floorboards, baseboards, parterres, domes, baseboards, canopies, ceilings, nails and wires — all in a well
integrated assemblage that maintains human imaginativeness.
 marco frascari

During his very active professional life, Ridolfi undertook the compilation of a thesaurus of architecture, an
encyclopedia of tectonic images. An illustrative effort that started back in 1940 as a collection of building
details, it was finally published as the Manuale dell’Architetto (Architect’s Manual), in 1946. Ridolfi was the
chief editor and he personally drew over 70 of its plates. The Manual was a gift of USIS [United States
Information Service] to the reconstruction of Italy. In its original political intention, the Manual was
supposed to be an Italian version of Ramsey and Sleeper's Architectural Graphic Standards, a way of
putting Italian architecture—facing the problem of post-war reconstruction of the architectural patrimony of
the country—on track with industrial construction procedures.3 Nonetheless, Ridolfi converted the Manuale
dell’Architetto into a unique contribution by rejecting industrial standards in favor of tectonic norms.

A non-empirical work, Ridolfi’s manual is a map of the imaginal landscape of Italian tectonics, an atlas of a
wunderkämmer of architecture. A superficial reading will position the Manuale dell’Architetto among the
visual products of after-the-war Italian Neorealism, ranging — in film production — from the artistic highs
of Rosellini’s Roma Città Aperta, to the lows of Pane Amore e Fantasia. However, the Manuale
dell’Architetto embodies a subtle approach that characterizes another famous movie of the period: the
mundus imaginalis of De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano. The manual’s plates are images of an architectural
lexicon based on construction details transparent in their transhistoricity. The plates are a collation of
details not unlike the ones gathered within the memory of an artisan, a scrapbook of overlapping and
intermixing images demonstrating how a collage can pass beyond the threshold of a rational
understanding to become a set of transparent visual cognitive notations aiming to intellectual
reconstruction.

Pupils should learn to represent objects in such a way that they can be reconstructed …
I tell them that they should see the opaque objects as if they are transparent. They
should learn to see also beyond them to be able to draw them in a constructive manner.
[Ridolfi in Polo & Casadei, 1972, pp.4-7)

For Ridolfi, it is clear that it is one thing to apprehend directly an image as an image, and another thing to
shape ideas regarding the nature of images in general cognitive representations of constructive processes.
A tense constructive reality, a tectonic pathos is at the core of the sequence of well temperate designs
branded the “Cycle of the Marmore,” a sequence of designs indicative of the power of what Kenneth
Frampton has called Critical Regionalism. Ridolfi, who later become blind and tragically took his own life,
elaborated these designs during an untroubled period of his intense professional life.

Observed during the cycles of times, through the reoccurring of seasons and the occasions of the ever-
changing everyday life in the various instants of distract inhabiting, these edifices offers glimpses of the
marvelous reality that is attained in the transcendent moments of beatific life. The details, the building
elements and the constructional devices turn into vigorous and playful demonstration of arcane and
inaugural events, which had been both consciously and unconsciously embodied in an edifice by the
architect. The realization of these constructions is based on a set of concerns with artisanship or
workmanship and with the quality and quantities of the physical and mental materials employed. Hinged
between decoration and tectonic expression, between local and traditional system of construction and
modern manufacturing, between reality and dream, in these buildings and drawings takes place what
Massimo Bontempelli asks in his manifest for magic realism:

I would like to see the most normal and everyday life as an adventurous miracle as a
constant risk.

For Ridolfi, the adventurous miracle takes places in the design and inhabiting of Casa Lina, the house he
designed for himself. The design of Casa Lina is the inaugural masterpiece of the Cycle.4 With its 125
marco frascari

freehand drawings, drafted 1:200 to 1:1 scale, this design is the foundational technometric setting where
Ridolfi refines his powerful method of technographic descriptions for cosmological design. He has defined
this construction as his “design paradigm.”

Casa Lina and all the buildings of the Marmore Cycle are highly developed elaborations of the concept of
central plan. Renaissance architects codified and advanced central plan buildings as the cleverest
expression for mirroring the sublime encompassed by the influential correlation existing between cosmos
and humanity. A cosmographic depiction of universe, these edifying built representations were intended to
make possible a spatial
understanding of things, concepts,
conditions, processes or events in
the human world, within a full
understanding of our position in
the universe. These magnificent
Renaissance edifices, mostly
churches or palaces, draw us
through their emblematic
representational nature into the
cosmology of the sacred, where
every bound can be outdone until
even self-consciousness is
obliterated. However, Ridolfi, with
a particular use of the central plan
which he developed especially for
a single family dwelling, moves us
into the sphere of the mundane,
the territory of material necessity,
where every task has to be
completed with skill, and small
mistakes can have far-reaching
consequences for the vita beata of
its inhabitants.

In his central plan designs, Ridolfi

weaves the mundane of sleeping,
eating, working and resting. The
everyday is not a banal absence
of diversity or pleasure, as it is
assumed to be in Modernist
depictions of bureaucratic order;
Ridolfi’s mundane has its own aesthetic perfection tied to its norms of aptness which have been developed
by imbricating sublime and ordinary into details. Living this dialectic between inside and outside, between
virtuous and profane, the inhabitants of these edifices take in all of that but also experience powerful
humor changes, visions of affirmation, acts of magnificence in the minute, and moments of collective
consummation.

Designed at the beginning of the sixties, Casa Lina, is an extensive design reflection on the use of a
central plan for the everyday living, a theatre for the quotidian taking place in the human comedy of the
vita beata. The plan is generated using cosmological tactics rather than functional strategies. In an early
version of the design, the plan is generated by two interlocking squares, an octogram, which later on
Ridolfi will use in the design of other houses of the Cycle. The octogram is a traditional figure of
 marco frascari
cosmological representation; Vitruvius uses Athens’ octagonal Tower of Winds to present in an imaginal
manner his cosmological theory for an ideal city.5 Many baptisteries and churches were designed using
this geometry, and an octogram is the cosmological figure used by Filarete in his planning the city of
Sforzinda. In subsequent elaborations of the design, Ridolfi changed the rotational geometry of the double
square into a pentagonal plan with a spatial core enclosed by an annular enfilade of slightly trapezoidal
rooms and quadrangular service areas. The functional use of the rooms and services results from
tempered and prudent considerations of their orientation both physically and culturally.

In this pentagonal version of the design, the key detail studied by Ridolfi is the internal door and its hinges,
especially when located on the radial wall separating the whirling enfilade of rooms. This detail, trying to
relate the geometry of orthogonal rotation of doors with the slanted geometry of a pentagonal layout,
demonstrates the transhistorical permanence of the products of the art of living well and the art of building
well in tectonic condensation. The poignancy of details and building constructs as an effective edifying
presence results from what Aby Warburg has identified as the "pathos formula" (Pathosformel). Warburg
sees the work of art as "stored energy" (Energie-Konserve), containing in itself the powers of its own
regeneration which transcends the boundaries of time and space." In architecture through tectonic pathos,
the energy embodied in artifacts is reactivated beyond the threshold of rational understanding.

Through a tectonic-pathos, formula of construction, ancient insight, modern conception and the classical
perception overlap and intermix for the architectural beholders at a later period in a different cultural
setting. In Ridolfi’s edifice, the detailing of the doors makes them Ianuae; Ianua is the Latin word for door
and is connected with Ianus (Janus), the Roman god of doors, gateways, and beginnings, who the
Romans believed ensured also good endings.6 The pre-Classical Romans had a frugi religio, or in modern
terms, an infra-ordinary-fructuous religion, and they thought their gods resided in everything. These
unpretentious, familiar numina7 filled the Roman world and as their adjective-names confirm — Flora
(Flowery), Pomona (Gardenlike), Vaticanus (cowlike), Argentarius (silvery), etc. — presided over each sub-
section of Roman life and buildings. The ordinary individual situated the whole of religion in the doing,
making, connecting and setting of the infraordinary within extraordinary things (re- + ligare = thing-
tying/selecting) in his or her construction of a cosmological and imaginal world.

Janus’ main temple in the Forum had doors facing east and west for the beginning and ending of the day;
his other temple in Rome, Ianus Quadrifrons (Janus four faced), looked toward the four cardinal directions,
a cosmological pivot placed on earth and water. Romans sought Janus’ help mostly in domestic
undertakings and that was why the opening of the doors of his temples marked the periods of wars, the
most fearful times for domestic life. Cardea, the goddess in charge of hinges,8 was Janus’ wife and
presided over domestic health—especially chest affections. In the Roman city layout, the North-South
main axis street is the Cardus Maximus, a cardinal pivot line cast during an equinox and used as main
reference for tracing the city. Named after Cardea, the Cardus Maximus was the hinge of the city, the
solar plexus of its chest. Both Janus, and Cardea, unassuming custodians of a cyclical universe, reveal the
cosmological insight and the tectonic pathos hidden by Ridolfi in Casa Lina. After the pentagonal designs,
an alternative sequence of annular designs, based on a cosmography of circular rooms arranged in cycles
and epicycles, furthermore confirms Ridolfi’s search for a logic of coincidence between a tectonic religio
and the hidden sense that building elements acquire through their making.

In the final stage of the design of Casa Lina, Ridolfi’s tectonic and edifying insight is carried on by a
restatement of the pentagonal cosmography. In this final form, the layout becomes an affirmation of
multiplicity in a unity. Using two interlocking pentagons, Ridolfi generates a decagonal layout for the
perimeter and the interweaving of the rooms. However, the central space stays pentagonal and houses the
omphalos.9 This tectonic umbilical axis is revealed in a sequence of mundane details. First, at the bottom
of the house, it is marked by the metal pentagonal cover of the central drain that with its 25 holes and five
sides becomes the geometric standard for the radial pattern of the terracotta tiles paving the basement. On
the main floor, the marking of the omphalos is accomplished by a wooden five-pointed star held in place by
marco frascari
a metal button and as in the case of the basement drain plate, the configuration of the star becomes the
standard for the layout pattern of the hardwood floor. On the rooftop of the house, centered on the plumb
line of the axis mundi marking the omphalos, there is a pentagonal louver topped with a weathervane--a
classical black metal rooster. This small pentagonal ventilation and illumination tower sets the standard for
the terra cotta tile covered roof. A special terra cotta ventilation tile devised by Ridolfi is used to make the
louvered openings. Composed
with two interlocking square
pipes, this hollow tile is a
transformation of a traditional
building component in an
elegant tectonic element.
Ridolfi’s ventilation tile results
from an elaboration of the
shape of a traditional extruded
terra cotta tile generally used
for erecting ventilation screens
in most of the Central-Italian
vernacular barns and stables.
Ridolfi worked out a slanted cut
of the clay-extruded tile. This
cut, a penne-pasta-like cut,
negates the orthogonality
between outside planes and
inside surfaces by interweaving transcendent and commonplace. This tectonic detail does not allow
rainwater to stagnate inside it, and at the same time, modulates the substance of light cast within the
pentagonal central place.10

The use of this tile reveals how the successful merging of the sublime and the mundane is a deep
characteristic of architecture. The conceiving of this detail shows how the inter-penetration of these two
attitudes results from a canny tactical intelligence gained through technical skill, vigilance, indirection, flair,
and other attributes suited to competitive advantage when contending amidst natural or social
manifestations of life. The lure of the sublime and the call of the mundane worlds are both opposites and
complements within the intelligence that guides architecture, a tectonic expression that registers how
humanity is dwelling in a world of economy and awe, technique and terror, physics and metaphysics.

In Casa Lina, the interaction among the interlocking shapes reveals that the dominant edification is
produced by an architectural transformation of a curiosity for light, a quasi-material power. For instance,
Scholasticism argues that light is an influential substance that emanates from even the humblest material:
glass is made from sand and ashes, fire comes from coal and wood and a polished stone shines. In
Ridolfi’s designs, light is materially embodied spirit; the substance of light supplies divinity to all details.
The substance of light as a distillation of pathos triggers the internal power of architectural aspirations both
in the drawings and in the built artifact. This happens on the paper in the contrast of the etching rendering
the surfaces with the lines marking the canons and the instructions for construction. In the building the
stone sponga—a local material—and the baked clay of the bricks with their natural porous filigrees allow
the same powerful play of dark and light evoked by the chiaroscuro of the pencil and pen traits, revealing
an internal light source, an arcane lume materiale.

Ridolfi’s technographies result from architectural curiosity, a design procedure based on a divestment of
habits of believes which will consent to consider future tectonic events with insightful wonder. Architectural
curiosity is a speculative, or better yet, a reflective procedure that takes care of the constructed world. The
reflective taking care of construction is always based on the idea of scrupolositas, a concern for minutiae.
This concern for details is at the basis of one of the most powerful tool left to architects for ameliorating
 marco frascari

their own tectonic imagination. The attention to minutiae, in relationship to a cosmological framework,
develops a visual clarity that also causes a peculiar lulling of the mind. The aim is to lead the distracted
inhabitants of architecture to their limit of visual clarity. The consequence is that edifices move us as we
enthused them. Architecture is a curious discipline, which deals with the metamorphosis of the
constructed environment by producing significant images, which unifies the natures of the dwellers with
that of dwelling.

Transmuting thoughtfulness is the main resource the non-linear path demarking the complexity of growth
and change embodied in Ridolfi’s vocation to construction as an act of powerful tectonic imagination. This
powerful act not only creates thaumaturgic and beatific private buildings, but also it transmutes the vision
for a vita beata from the realm of private to the negotiation of the public realm, from the infraordinary of
dwelling to the extraordinary of monuments. In a true architectural opus, this vision, which can be attained
only for very brief moments, when listening to rain and wind blowing against a brick wall or when
contemplating its shadow under the slanted sun of a late summer sunset, becomes the necessary canon
for any other work.

Conclusions

Well-tempered drawing procedures cannot be abstractly constructed or described; they can be exclusively
exemplified through moral tropes, geometric ordering and constructive analogies embodied in buildings.
We can master these elegant design procedures only through what Pascal has called “esprit de finesse et
esprit de geometrie.” Fostered by fluid mental attitudes, these procedures dwell between the classical
dichotomies proposed by philosophy and the mystifying but powerful structure of thinking by images.
Well-tempered drawings are the only locus where this condition between rationality and non-rationality
results in a cosmography that sustains
the making of places. They are
instruments capable of integrating both
the solid stuff of the space encircling
us with the dream stuff, which takes
shape in our mind.

In architectural design, there are no

perceivable differences between
sacred and mundane actions, as we
sensible moderns believe to be. Every
action, no matter how mundane —
plowing, sowing, reaping, brewing,
building ships, waging wars, playing
games, system of weights and
measures, building a brick wall, laying
a floor, dancing on it, opening a door—
has to be viewed as an “earthly” symbol for a specific “divine” activity. No aspect of this knowledge can be
divorced from any other aspect, which makes architectural design a difficult task. Architectural conjuring is
not just manual skill, but manifestation of a design faculty acquired through appropriate techniques of
prudent visualization and temperate exercises of architectural storytelling. Only through this thought-
provoking procedure, drawings become callimetric technographies which are “just the weaving of thoughts
into images,” (Bloom, 1996:113) wonderful projections of buildings, tempered and prudent analogical
places which make possible the construction of a vita beata in edifying edifices.
marco frascari

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ames, William, 1576-1633. Technometria. Translated, with introduction and commentary, by Lee W. Gibbs. Philadelphia.
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979.

Architettura di Mario Ridolfi/1. Controspazio n.1 September 1974, monographic issue

Architettura di Mario Ridolfi/2. Controspazio n.3 November 1974, monographic issue

Auer, Gerhard (1994). Editorial. Daidalos 51 p.2.

Bellini Federico, Mario Ridolfi, Bari, Laterza 1993

Bloom, Harold. Omens of millennium: the gnosis of angels, dreams, and resurrection. New York: Riverhead Books,
1996.

Bontempelli, Massimo, L’avventura novecentista, Firenze: Vallecchi, 1974.

Brunetti, Fabrizio. Mario Ridolfi, Firenze, Alinea, 1985.

Cellini, F. - D’Amato, C., Mario Ridolfi - Manuale delle tecniche tradizionali del costruire - Il ciclo delle Marmore, Milano:
Electa 1997

Cellini, Francesco. “Geometrie e costruzione della pianta centrale,” Lotus 37, 1983pp. 179-212

Cellini, Francesco “On Mario Ridolfi,” Lotus 37 (1975) pp. 146-78.

Corbin, Henry. Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal. Ipswich, Golgonooza Press, 1976

Frommel, Cristoph L. “Sul progetto di Mario Ridolfi a Volfango Frankl a Terni,” Zodiac Sep.93-Feb.94, pp.114-119.

Gombrich, Ernst Hans. Aby Warburg: an intellectual biography, by E. H. Gombrich; with a memoir on the history of the
library by F. Saxl. London: The Warburg Institute, 1970.

Graves, Robert, The White Goddess; a historical grammar of poetic myth. New York, Octagon Books, 1972.

Harriman, Robert. Terrible beauty and mundane detail: aesthetic knowledge in the practice of everyday life. (Special
Issue: The Epistemic View, Thirty Years Later) v35 n1, pp. 10199

Kolb, David. Postmodern Sophistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990.

Polo G. & P. Casadei, Il Libro Garzanti dell’Educazione Artistica, Milano Garzanti 1972

Ridolfi Mario “Lettera di Mario Ridolfi” Controspazio 3, 1977 p.4

Tafuri, Manfredo. Storia dell'Architettura Italiana, 1944-85, Turin, Einaudi, 1982.

Tafuri, Manfredo. “The "Disquieting Muses," on the Destiny of a Generation of Masters,” Architecture d'Ajourdoui, 181,
1975, pp. LXIII-LXIV & 4-34. [N.B.: The English Summary is unreliable].

Voigt, F. “Forma costruita e folchlore italiano: da Paul Schmitthenner a Mario Ridolfi.” Casabella 52, Jul/Aug '88, pp. 34-5.

Warburg, Aby, Images from the region of the Pueblo Indians of North America. Translated with an interpretive essay by
Michael P. Steinberg. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
 marco frascari

FOOTNOTES

1 Son of the distinguished Architectural Historian Paul Frankl, Wolfgang Frankl, is the young partner of the firm. Frankl joined officially the
firm of Ridolfi in 1948—although his collaboration with Ridolfi began before the II World War. Frankl contributed to the firm’s tectonic
view of the architectural project with his German tradition of Werkgerechgkeit, the aesthetic of a proper building art.

2 George Herriman (1880-1944) is considered among the top cartoonist ever printed in America's newspapers. The favorite cartoonist of
William Randolph Hearst, Herriman elaborated a well-tempered drawing technique that remains an influence on any freehand
draftsperson internationally. Herriman created "Krazy Kat’ in 1910.

3 Presently, the Architectural Graphic Standards is a platonic book—the Sweet Catalogue being its Aristotelian counterpart—providing
only standards and carefully avoiding any concern for the relationship existing between cosmological and tectonic norms. This is true
only of the post-war editions of the Graphic standards. The first edition of this manual was carefully grounded in a cosmological vision. Its
first plate—paid by the Bricklayers Association—was a cosmological diagram of site location beautifully decorated with twelve Art Deco
side vignettes of the Zodiac signs.

4 Casa Lina initiated an intriguing sequence of construction, mostly of single-family houses, designed by Ridolfi during the last period of
his life.

5 To fully understand Vitruvius’ cosmological theory, his account of the Hellenistic Tower of Winds has to be read together with the
explanation of the layout of theatres.

6 Janus, the door, when personified, was represented with two faces; originally, one face was bearded while the other was not (probably
a symbol of the sun and the moon). Later both faces were bearded. In his right hand, he holds a key. The double-faced head appears on
many Roman coins, and around the 2nd century BC even with four faces. He gives the name to the month of January (the eleventh and
last month of the Roman Calendar).

7 At the beginning of Rome, the divinities were mysterious numenae, they did not have a persona but they were not less influential. The
idea of anthropomorphized gods came later, with the establishing in Rome of the Greek gods, who had human appearances.

8 Ovid says of Cardea, apparently quoting a religious formula: 'Her power is to open what is shut; to shut what is open “ To continue with
a Warburg-like tracing of images: Cardo, the door-hinge, is etymologically connected with the word cerdo, craftsman. In Irish mythology,
the god of artisans specialized in hinges, locks and rivets was called Credne, the inventor smith who claimed the goddess Cerdo or
Cardea as his patroness.

9 Apollo's Temple in Delphi contained a famous rounded stone called an omphalos, which was believed to be the center of the world.
Omphalos is the Greek word for navel, or umbilical button.

10 This tile was conceived by Ridolfi and used for the first time in making a small apartment building in Via Vetuloni in Rome.