ABSTRACT
The discipline of architecture, in its search for beauty, feels a natural attraction to what we can call perfect buildings. Built objects that represent specific moments and cultures. Iconic structures that materialise the perfect synthesis of their culture's most important values and technical capabilities, serving as models and inspiration for countless other constructions.
If we are naturally attracted to these examples of perfection, built structures almost always suffer a gradual deformation process, inherently a result of time and the evolution that progressively changes and eventually can hide the original design, making it virtually unrecognisable. However, through a typo-morphological comparison, it is possible to theoretically recover the main composition rules of these buildings, that is their Proportional Schemes, and thus recover their original undeformed plan.
It is precisely this aspect that we intend to highlight in this article, demonstrating how through the analysis of the Espírito Santo Hospital in the city of Évora, and the models of hospital buildings erected at the beginning of the Renaissance, despite the complete transformation of the original building in the centuries following its construction, it is possible to recover its original shape.
