Digital Craftsmen: digital fabrication applied to restoration projects
Artífices Digitais: fabricação digital aplicada a projetos de restauro
academic outreach
Digital Fabrication
Descrição
Among the strategies for safeguarding built cultural heritage, documentation plays a fundamental role in mitigating the risks arising from the degradation of the original material support. This task proves to be particularly challenging in the case of architectural styles with a massive presence of ornaments (such as Eclecticism), where the geometric complexity of such elements makes the use of traditional representations (through orthographic views, sketches, and photographs) ineffective in processes of recomposing lost or severely damaged parts. The proposed research project seeks to investigate possible solutions to this issue through the use of digital-based technologies for capturing, documenting, and materializing these elements. The research will be organized into three stages: a) capture, where methods for obtaining a point cloud (such as photogrammetry and laser scanning) that geometrically describes the objects in detail will be investigated and compared; b) documentation, where the possibilities for organizing and storing the data obtained in the previous stage will be explored, aligning the results with the expected products for documenting built cultural heritage; c) materialization, where the captured and processed digital files will serve as a basis for testing and comparing various digital fabrication techniques to assess their accuracy in reproducing the geometry of the surveyed artifacts and their suitability for material reconstitution; d) compilation, where the results from the previous stages will be compiled to produce process reports and academic publications. As a result, the aim is to create a tested methodology for surveying and recording, supported by material results, that can be used by organizations responsible for the protection of built cultural heritage as a safeguarding strategy.