Santa Maria Nuova, tra rilievo e disegno di progetto

The hospital of Santa Maria Nuova was founded in the city center of Florence and it is part of the process of formation of the large hospital institutions of Renaissance urban civilization. These are located in complexes that are the most sensitive parts of the old town today. They are evidence of a long process of transformation and the events that took place over the centuries, which often we do not find any trace even in the historical archives, but they are inserted into the architectural forms and they also act as witness to a city- nature relationship and a refined measure of environmental transformation. For all these reasons, the whole complex is a cultural heritage that has to be studied and preserved. The research being presented is the relief aimed to the understanding of the project design of some parts of the monumental complex of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. The survey, carried out with an agreement between the Department of Architecture and the Hospital Fiorentina, was an opportunity to investigate about the design of its architecture. The issue has been addressed by using survey techniques used over the years of training and in other research, and have been used techniques belonging to the integrated survey. This research showed that the hospital is a symbol of some original ways of interpreting the architectural design, which exclude the simple stylistic choices of the time. These choices are linked to design rules that have their own identity and give the whole complex a perfection in forms and proportions. These choices confirm the membership of a gothic model tied to the size of the urban and architectural spaces. In architectural structures it is shown a change from tradition: a scene is set in them, whose design has features not explainable with simple geometry, but they have characteristics based on paths, derived from models and not from drawings. The relief, the reading and analysis of spaces and architectural structures, the study of the different processes of expansion through the documentary research, have allowed us to understand the different events of the past, they have indicated the direction we must look introducing something “different” in the historical narrative architecture of Florence.