Trans-forma. Gli indistinti confini tra rilievo e progetto

The article starts from reflections conducted in the field of research and teaching of Architectural Design and its epistemologies; it also develops starting from the studies on the relationship between survey and project in architecture conducted over the years at the Department of Architecture of the University of Palermo. Starting from the Aristotelian assumption that there is always something underlying what becomes, and from the strong disciplinary interdependence between survey and project, the article reflects on the semantic and etymological dimension of the two terms looking at them as an intertwined and interconnected practice of critical knowledge and transformation of reality. He looks at the Portuguese Inquerito’s experience as a fertile access key to the relationship between survey and project, in the declination that the school of Porto made of it and identifies in Italian research on urban morphology and in the so-called ‘other modern tradition’ indicated by Manuel de Solà Morales, a set of experiments that have animated research on urban design and which constitute a corpus of experiences with which to trace epistemological foundations in the relationship between what underlies in what becomes, in architecture. Designates in Metamorphosis, Complexity and City three key words with which to access the understanding of the intimate and osmotic relationship that exists between survey and project also in the urban field and indicates in the survey of uncertain contemporary territories the practice for their design re-interpretation.