Documenting Theatres as Spaces for ‘Transitions’

The paper is focused on an extensive analysis of historic theatres in Emilia-Romagna affected by the 2012 earthquake, aimed at optimizing an integrated survey procedures for seismic risk mitigation. These specific heritage buildings allowed to deepen the concepts of historical, spatial and survey ‘transitions’, by assessing changes in social perception of these spaces for imagination and new needs for documentation and digital data management for heritage preservation. The Social Theatre of Novi, Modena, is presented as an emblematic case study, analysed through integrated survey procedures according to three documentation levels: historical, by identifying architectural features; spatial and volumetric, highlighting space connections; experimental, by developing an optimized digital workflow. This procedure proposes a transition from analog datasheets to 3D digital environments for multi-level analysis optimisation aimed at the integrated and extended documentation of the architectural asset.