From authentic to realistic, from true to plausible: the digital architectural survey between the real and the virtual

Any reflection on the relationship between the authentic and the false cannot ignore the already widely discussed relationship between originals and copies, assuming the respective etymological meanings1 as the conceptual origin, and with a clear limitation of the field to Western European culture2. The subject of this paper is the digital architectural survey, where we focus on technological artefacts, although we reference some studies concerning artistic artefacts, which have been investigated much more in this sense, and subsequently will apply the necessary epistemological and disciplinary shifts. The paper proposes a reflection on the disciplinary field of architectural survey to deal with the theme of the relationship between source, process, and output characteristics. We theoretically frame the etymological an conceptual cloud populated by the terms ‘original’, ‘copy’, ‘clone’, ‘reproduction’, and ‘false’. As a subsequent technical example, we innovatively investigate the selected case study through ‘plausibility’ optimization algorithms, which are currently in the beta version phase of development.