Digital Environments: Design, Heritage and Architecture
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Digital Environments: Design, Heritage and Architecture |
<< Contents |
The paper is especially relevant to the following conference themes; resource discovery, including cataloguing, metadata and search techniques; digital resources in research; pedagogic implications of digital resources and electronic delivery.
This paper presents the first stage of an investigation which will take two years to complete. The next, empirical stage of the project will consist of a survey of at least 25 art historians, divided into five sub-disciplinary groups of roughly similar numbers when scaled to the UK Higher Education community, classical and medieval, renaissance to eighteenth century, modern art history, modern architecture and design, and film and photography. A paper questionnaire employing open-ended questions will be administered to a pilot group, enabling us to design a structure for the longer face to face interviews on which the final analysis will be based. The project is based in the Institute for Image Data Research at the University of Northumbria, and it is envisaged that the findings will contribute to the development of better content-based retrieval techniques for digital image resources.
This stage of the project is concerned with laying the philosophical and methodological foundations for an empirical study of a sample of the community of teachers and researchers in the subject. The paper investigates three propositions on which feedback from delegates is welcomed. The first is that the approach to art history, as to many disciplines, has been driven by the information providers' need to find uses for new technology, and is based on a limited model of the discipline. The second is that the discipline's core skills differ from those of the other humanities but that they have been only partially elaborated. Finally, the history of the discipline in the last thirty years has been one of rapid expansion and methodological development, both in terms of teaching and research.
I have been working with a large number of architectural drawings by Le Corbusier (c. 5,000 drawings dating from the 1920s kept in the Fondation Le Corbusier, in Paris). I have a database of information on these drawings, dating back 15 years, which began on the Cambridge research IBM mainframe and has eventually migrated via dBase III to Microsoft Access. The problem has been how to integrate images of the drawings with this database and make the images useful. These images present problems, since there is an arbitrary relationship in scale between the photographic images (and their enlargement) and the original drawings (let alone the buildings represented).There are too many drawings to convert by hand into CAD drawings and not enough contrast or precision in most of the drawings to allow for an automated trace to convert the bitmap images into vectored form. Researchers are not allowed to study the drawings themselves, and are offered 35mm black and white microfilm images which can be read on a viewer. I have been able to make photographic copies of 5,000 of these and am in the process of transferring them into bitmap images.
My Visual Basic program is designed to interact with the Access database and allow scanned images of the microfilm frames to be analysed. A scale can be attributed to the drawings and stored in the database. Once this has been done, through an iterative process, measurements can be made on the drawings. Furthermore, any scaled bitmap image can be compared to any other, and I have devised a method to do this using a split screen. One drawing is stretched to match the scale of another and the registration locked so that both drawings can be scrolled together. The program has grown over the years in a way which suits my working. The flexibility of Visual Basic to adapt a working tool as you use it has here been vindicated, for me.
In this paper a software system for supporting the analysis of frescoes is presented together with the results carried out by using it in some representative restorations of Italian paintings. As it is well known, a fresco painting is executed working directly on the wet plaster (intonaco). In large paintings, in order always to have fresh plaster to work on, the intonaco needs to be applied in sections, commonly called giornate. The study of the plaster overlaps along the joins of the giornate allows them to be put in chronological order. In some cases, a fresco constitutes hundreds of giornate and the software system gives a useful support in order to study the technique used by the painter. The software system is based on a modellisation of the fresco by graphs, the nodes of the graph representing the giornate. Here, the implementation of a clustering technique in order to simplify the graph of the giornate and make it more readable, is also discussed.
The analysis of cross-sectional moulding profiles is recognised as a valuable means of tracing changes in the design of medieval buildings. However, existing manual techniques for the collection and retrieval of moulding profile data are time-consuming, and lack the consistency required for comprehensive analysis. This paper provides an overview of a prototype system for the acquisition of architectural moulding profiles. The system utilises laser triangulation to provide a contact free means of recording profiles.
Joanne Bushnell
Art that is interactive, a temporary installation, or a one off performance exists in real time and is transient. Unlike the painting or sculpture which at the end of the show is crated and returned to its store, this art once switched off, dismantled or completed ceases to exist as a physical entity. All that is left is the visitor or audience's memory of the experience and its documentation, the photograph, the video, or the textual description, which represents it. This paper presents the process of producing an application, which attempts to document and archive a temporary, on-line, interactive installation shown in a physical gallery space. The resulting applications, a web site and CD-ROM, aim to offer as complete a picture of the work as possible to those who view it after the installation has ceased to exist.
This paper draws on the specific experience of using computers in the planning process within the heritage environment of Bath. It describes the construction of a detailed three-dimensional computer model of the city, and how it has been used in specific planning cases. This work is put in the context of the planning system and the paper outlines the responsibilities of local government to develop and implement planning policies, and notes that local authorities in the United Kingdom are now beginning to use the Internet to publicise information relating to the planning process. Although limitations of both software and computing speed do not currently allow particularly effective use of 3D models on the Internet, this paper looks forward to it becoming a valuable tool, in the formulation of strategic plans, and in their implementation through development control. It concludes that the Internet has significant potential to enhance public participation in urban design.
This paper attempts to give an overview of the contribution which emerging information technologies (IT), i.e., CAD, Multimedia, Virtual Reality and the Internet, can make to the presentation, understanding and preservation of the rich architectural heritage which exists in almost every cultural context. Such simulated experiences of past, present and future environments are examples of what is now becoming known as Virtual Heritage (VH).
Drawing largely on the work of ABACUS, the Architecture and Building Aids Computer Unit, Strathclyde, this paper examines a number of examples of the application of IT to VH, and concludes with conjectures based on these examples of how emerging technologies can help secure a future for the past.
It has been argued in a recent text that developments in drawing technique have both enabled and constrained the historical direction of architecture. (Evans, 1995) Robin Evans summarizes his argument on this relationship between drawing and architecture by way of a diagram, 'Projection and its analogues', which presents architectural activity as a tetrahedron. The four nodes- orthographic projection, perspective, observer and designed object - make explicit the 'schism' between architectural representation and realised building. In Evan's words "design is action at a distance". This paper describes recent computer based procedures - emergent form, immersive editing and computer aided construction - that have the potential to allow a substantial reworking of Evan's thesis. It is suggested here that the implementation of these processes allow the nodes of 'Projection and its analogues' to dissolve and that the distinction between designer, digital model and realized project becomes blurred. Perhaps to the extent that by designing with(in) digital machines, the architect in effect works directly with the final object as opposed to 'action at a distance' via drawing.
The abbey at St Avit Sénieur in the Dordogne is an example of the particular Byzantine style of the region. In this style the abbey would originally have had domes over the three sections of the nave instead of the ribbed Angevin vaults that it has currently.
Arguments for and against this idea are difficult to prove as the abbey was sacked in 1577 and all documents destroyed. Consequently, evidence can only be deduced from the existing fabric.
The St Avit project plans to reconstruct the abbey as a computer model to test the variety of ideas about its construction and, crucially, to investigate the use of the web as a tool for collective research.
Our paper describes the abbey and the nature of the research and demonstrates some of the methods used and the research results to date and provides a description of the first web site, posted this year.