Perugini’s Tree House - BIM ante litteram

During the 60s and 70s there was a discreet increase of architectural designs based on the aggregation of modules and their reiteration, concentrating on the main use of structures and reinforced concrete on the facade. It became an architectural movement called Brutalism. Perugini’s Tree House is affected by the influence of Brutalist architecture.
BIM Modelling is based on the use of elements, Families, and their aggregation. The elements are parametric and may vary in size. Construction is carried out by matching the elements. Perugini’s 1970 Tree House is built exactly in this manner.
BIM did not exist in 1970, however, computers did, but were not found in the studios of architects. Perugini didn’t have BIM but he would have certainly have used it if it had existed. The compositional trend of Perugini’s Tree House is based on the use of prefabricated interconnected elements. Observing the Tree House’s modelling has allowed to retrace the design path by decomposing the villa into its constituent elements. The totality of the elements used in the project stems from only 11 families of parametric components which, with their dimensional variations and placed with different orientations, form the complex facades of the villa in Fregene.
The BIM model obtained from the villa was also tested as a 3D database for analysing the state of degradation of the villa itself.