About the Journal

AGATHÓN is an Open Access Scientific International Journal of Architecture, Art and Design (indexed by SCOPUS), a half-year tool for information and critical training; it aims to contribute to the growth and dissemination of knowledge in the themes covered by Architecture, Engineering, Art and (product and visual) Design. Therefore, the Journal represents a scientific place where Authors – who have carried out original research – can find an opportunity to spread their contributions. Each issue of the Journal includes essays and research works on a specific theme, unpublished works and not submitted for publication with other publishers.
The Journal, through its internal Board, promotes and monitors the double-blind peer review process as a method of selecting articles, providing a mandatory form for reporting. The contributions will be published in English and Italian language so that they can be placed in the widest range of the international scientific communities. The founding principles of the Journal are originality/innovation, the relevance of the investigated topic for the advancement of knowledge, the knowledge and ability to use literature, methodological rigour, the content clarity and presentation style, the impact on the scientific community, but also the easy accessibility and the wide diffusion of the articles; furthermore, the Journal is open to speculative empirical and descriptive research, about phenomena that present new characters, at least for certain important features.

SECTIONS OF THE JOURNAL | Published articles are inserted in one of the following sections:
"Focus" (by invitation for well-known Authors and/or experts in the subject)
"Architecture" (architectural and interior design, urban planning, engineering, technology, history, recovery, restoration, exhibition and museum design, representation)
"Art" (modern and contemporary)
"Design" (for industry, crafts and communication)
and are classified into the following categories: "Essays & Viewpoint", "Research & Experimentation", "Review Articles" or "Dialogues".

AGATHÓN publishes, both electronically and in print, two issues per year, in June and December. The first issue was published in June 2017 and since then the programmed issues have been produced regularly.

To encourage the publication of contributions by Authors with primary affiliation to Universities and Research Institutions in countries defined by the World Bank as low-income and lower-middle income economies, AGATHÓN selects a maximum of two Authors to publish their contributions for free, subject to the positive outcome of the double-blind peer-review process.

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Current Issue

Vol. 14 (2023): MODULE AND MODULARITY | Variations and application scales in contemporary time
modulo modulari, module, modularity

The Module is a sign, a linear trend, a geometric or free form repeated within a given space while maintaining its proportions. It is exemplary form, norm and rule, number, elementary unit and measure. It is a concept that expresses harmony, proportion, and quality. It is a catalytic element of history, culture and memory that refers, within the different disciplines of urban planning and landscape, architecture and engineering, representation, design and art, as much to man as to its artefacts and conceptualisations. The Module is both a measure of things and, simultaneously, a synthesis of the relationships that these measures activate (connections) or deactivate (separations). The Module is rhythm, interference, structure, relationship, mutation, and standardisation, but it is also a synthesis of the specific human ability to perceive, simplify and represent the environment. To design is both to measure and to relate. ‘Contare e raccontare’ (lit. counting and telling), as titled by Carlo Bernardini e Tullio De Mauro (2003), through the concept of the module that lends itself to being an expression of an act (counting or measuring) and at the same time of a narrative (telling), both actions enriched and nourished, in contemporaneity, by new semantic capital that, in its being material and immaterial, real and digital together, activates new transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary relations involving and contaminating the different scales of the project. The Module, in its capacity as a holistic measure of things, measure and measurability, seems to share, with the new contemporaneity, the idea of a ‘different’ space – at any scale – to be re-measured and re-counted both in the current configuration (the existing one) and with respect to that which it could and/or should be (the new). In this perspective, within the environmental design and transformative approaches, a renewed and contemporary expression of the Module seems to be emerging, dynamically confronting the inescapable demands of interoperability, virtualisation, decentralisation and sustainability.

A currently relevant theme, that of the Module in the Third Millennium, which relates to the counterpart proposition introduced by Giulio Carlo Argan (1965) in the collection of essays entitled Progetto e Destino (lit. Project and Destiny), in which the historian investigates the evolution of the concept of the Module and its modification throughout history along with the modes of building, synthesis and cultural expression. Based on these premises, volume 14 of AGATHÓN collects essays and research that, while not exhaustive of the innumerable declinations that can be taken on by the module to address, discretise and solve the complexity of the built environment, highlight its multiscalar nature and its conceptual and usage flexibility. With their infinite application scales, ‘from the spoon to the city’ (Rogers, 1952), the ‘module’ and ‘modularity’ resurface strongly in the new Millennium and can become a paradigm in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015) if associated with the themes of reversibility and accessibility, in addition, the varied conceptual and instrumental declinations of ‘module’ and ‘modularity’ can provide support throughout the entire life cycle of a system, optimising its ideational, production/implementation and management phases in Landscape, City, Architecture and Industrial Design, enabling the overcoming of a static and linear view of the built environment through ‘open’, ‘flexible’, ‘adaptive’, ‘multi-scalar’ and ‘sustainable’ systems especially when managed through intelligent digital tools.

Published: 31-12-2023

Full Issue

Index | Colophon | Editorial

Architecture | Essays & Viewpoint

Design | Essays & Viewpoint

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