Reduce to Understand: a Challenge for Analysis and Three-dimensional Documentation of Architecture
Contribution to the 12th European Architectural Envisioning Association (EAEA) Conference: Image, Perception and Communication of Heritage, Lodz University of Technology, September 2015.
Abstract:
For nearly thirty years, the digital phenomenon has integrated many disciplines. Those involved in the image processing and analysis took advantage of this major technological breakthrough to revisit the tools and methods of their discipline. In this context, the architectural ield, and more speciically the one of heritage analysis and documentation, have greatly beneited from the development of acquisition and visualization techniques. Today, it is no longer unusual to document a building with millions of three-dimensional spatial coordinates. Whether in the context of archeology, history of art or architecture, digital documentation of built heritage is becoming a major contemporary challenge. AlICe laboratory (Computer Laboratory for Image and Conception in Architecture) from the Faculty of Architecture of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) investigates this ield for many years through a research and education program. In terms of architectural design, the practice of graphic representation irstly involves the deinition of an idea by drawing exclusively relevant information. The architect draws only the lines he considers necessary for the transmission of the idea of its project. This “graphical economy” is therefore for the beneit of didactic quality. But what does this issue become when the matter of representation is not the prescription but the description of an architectural object? Until the last century, documentation by drawing corresponded to a work of reverse engineering in which it belonged to the architect to understand the object and to represent its key feature. Today, 3D data acquisition technology promotes an increasingly “igurative” representation of architecture. In this paper, we will try to consider some epistemological avenues for the integration of those new approaches to the requirements of architectural representation through the lens of student’s works.
Projects form the following students are featured in the article: Vanessa Lardinois, Youssef Oueld El Hachemi, Omar Essaadouni.
