Santiago VILLAJOS
(Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid , Spain)

Keywords: Stratigraphy, biographies, architecture history, 3D GIS, grotesque theory

Abstract:
Interdisciplinary research is presented in order to understand and to explain the processes of planning and building the Uclés Monastery in relation to the architects Francisco de Luna and his son-in-law Andrés de Vandelvira, who was one of the most important artifices of the Early Spanish Renaissance. It combines SfM photogrammetry with 3D GIS and an originally developed contextual-sequential stratigraphic approach to the social networks of architects and the agency of their productions. The use of this hybrid method is inspired in the material and historical notion of the grotesque developed by Ruskin in ‘The Stones of Venice’.
Time is dealt from a stratigraphic and synthetic comparative perspective which connects the particular materiality of the case study to the more abstract set of social connections that shaped the architectural world in which it was produced. On the one hand, the set of stratigraphic relations within the architectural structure are expressed visually through 3D GIS and analytically through Harris matrices produced with network analyses software. On the other hand, the connections in the social world are carried out also on a matrix produced in spreadsheet software that plots chronology in relation to the masters’s works, so it affords to provide sequential ordering of events to the major developments of the period by following the approach to style of George Kubler.
This methodological contribution to heritage studies, moreover, provides relevant information for understanding the adoption of the sailed dome in Early Modern Spanish architecture that was an ‘stilema’ of Vandelvira, but traditional scholarship had not related him with the Byzantine dome of the Uclés Basilica, even though it was known the project was interrupted. Research demonstrates the vaulted dome was first projected by Vandelvira in Uclés in collaboration with Francisco de Luna and Enrique Van Eyck, also known as Enrique Egás.

Relevance for the conference: Innovative interdisciplinary digital approach for solving specific questions on the understanding of heritage architecture.
Relevance for the session: It looks at time from multiple scales (period, phase, stratographic unit, biographies) through a combination of methods
Innovation: It mixes visual documentation obtener from SfM photogrammetry within archaeological analysis of both stratigraphic units and compared biographic and constructive sequences
References:
George Kubler and John Ruskin