The perception’s drawing. A project for the occupation of the Ruvo di Puglia’s public land

Observation is the preparatory action that precedes the act of drawing. This basically means “identification”, an ability allowed by a precise scene’s visual scan that establishes which areas of the image must be focused on to recognize the objects. The researches of the Russian psychophysicist Alfred L. Yarbus, that found that the gaze is only interested in a few elements of the scene and not in its wholeness, and the later discoveries made by the scientists C. Kock and S. Ulman (1985), have allowed the definition of a numerical model, named ‘saliency map’, that simulates the human perception’s mechanism. Therefore, it defines digital images, in which each pixel is given a value linked to the visual impact that it embodies in the scene, in accordance with the parameters of coloration, lighting and orientation, thus reproducing the visual attention of a “common gaze”, that can be shared by almost everybody. In our project, the saliency maps have been experimentally applied to the drawing of the outline for the occupation of public land of the Ruvo di Puglia’s old town centre. Moreover, three-dimensional models have shown the possible types of the occupation’s constituent elements, later added in the urban context by the photo compositing technique, while the saliency maps’ elaboration has allowed to foresee the visual impact and the choice – in agreement with the Soprintendenza Architettonica of Bari – of materials, shapes and colors of the occupation’s elements.