Takehiko NAGAKURA1 | Daniel TSAI1 | Diego PINOCHET2
(1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA | 2Design lab UAI, Chile)

Keywords: Photogrammetric Model, Architectural History, Andrea Palladio, Digital Heritage

Abstract:
New digital capturing technologies can enable existing architecture to be seen as never before.
A set of case studies will be presented, including our photogrammetric representation of Villa Foscari (1554), one of Andrea Palladio’s best known built designs. Palladio described this building in his seminal work, The Four Books of Architecture (1570). Numerous studies, including Bertotti Scamozzi’s carefully measured illustrations (1776), have been made of Palladio’s villas. In our MIT expeditions to the Foscari site over the past two years, the entire exterior and each room of the piano nobile were photographed and processed into photogrammetric mesh and textured 3D models. When the pieces were composited, a remarkable, never before seen view of the villa was created: a view of the entire main floor looking up from below. It is as if one could stand, underground and see the vaulted structure of Palladio’s architecture, complete with the walls and the illuminated frescoes of Battista Franco and Giambattista Zelotti. Together with the exterior capture, such a representation extends a new insight on Palladio’s design, his structural solutions, proportions, volume, and space.
Conventional drawings and models have been the media of designing, recording, and studying buildings throughout the history of architecture. Geometric models are virtual constructs added in the past half century. This paper presents the outcome of our recent digital captures of Palladio’s villas and other built architecture, and uses them to exemplify how this latest, emerging media can inform and demonstrate architectural discourse. In particular, it discusses engagement of photogrammetric models in terms of (1) previously impossible viewing angles; (2) textures photographically captured with mesh; (3) compositing use with traditional design media; (4) comparative methods of study, and (5) deployment in stereoscopy, VR, and AR.
[This work has been done in collaboration with Howard Burns.]