Ars sine scientia nihil est

[...]it was Colin Rowe to exorcise the architecture from that inspiration technicist, until taking - through the systematic use of the comparison of the shapes - modern architecture as a formal structure with classical meanings, artistic intentions, produced by a vocabulary that has nothing to do with the functionalist practice.7 This intense relationship with the form brings us back, once again, to the pages of the introduction of «The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays» , where the emphasis is on the perception, as the only cognitive instrument used by Rowe, defined by a critical attitude which focuses on the comparative analysis taken primarily from the legacy of Wölfflin8. If it is true that the permissible rate of experimentation in certain construction opportunities of temporary structures is proportional to their media exposure, the most striking aspect is the total alteration of tectonic structures, what denotes the monumental forms of the art of building from the conflict between the wall and the wall, from Roman to Gropius; between the carrier core and its casing, thinking of Alberti rather than in Le Corbusier; between the support function of the cover and the closure of the space, looking at the adequacy of the Gothic cathedrals section up to the space lyricism of Mies Van der Rohe; including the timely system and that continuous, etc., as key moments syntactic organization of the architectural work. Yet the extent of a part of literary semiotics which identifies a possible iconic model11 in architecture, which does not work in simplistic way by building a network of analogies between architecture and figurative arts but does involve in a determinant extent also construction as aesthetic figure, as figurative fact that connotes the idea of space able to structure the perception of the work as an artistic manufactory, as a work of art. [...]one last question concerns the relationship between research of form and tectonic metaphor.