DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-309829
title: Informing conservation: implementation of building information modeling systems for architectural heritage conservation

description: Architectural heritage representation and information management play a key role in order to ensure informed decisions and respect the universally recognized values embedded in any historical artifacts. Building information modeling (BIM) systems, with their implicit promise of associating semantics to the geometrical representation of an artifact in a single central repository, are particularly suited to support the conservation process. However, BIM technologies, processes, and policies are still centered on the architecture, engineering, construction, and management industry’s domain, thus far from an effective application in support of conservation practices. This study aims at the implementation of BIM for heritage conservation in order to provide an effective document management system for the correct representation, organization, and management of heritage information. ❧ For this purpose, current lacks and challenges related to the representation of a heritage item in a BIM environment have been investigated and implemented. By using the rehabilitation project of the Carson Block Building in Eureka, California, as a case study, the records collected by different specialists, including historical architects, architects, and structural engineers, were modeled in a BIM environment developed through the authoring software Revit 2016. The enrichment of the 3D model was planned considering three different aspects: the diverse nature of records and documentation to include in the model and needs and requirements of different types of users at specific stages of the rehabilitation process; the representation of the building at different stages of its lifecycle; the representation of the surface mapping in order to represent the different statuses of the materials. Many other aspects would be necessary for a fully developed integration of BIM with heritage conservation. ❧ Contextual information, such as historical, social, and environmental data, was included in the model through the extension of the BIM database. While current BIM approaches mainly focus on the representation of the physical components of an artifact in terms of their geometrical and non-geometrical features, an extension of the database allows for the addition of non-physical information related to the context. Moreover, these are totally integrated with the model and available for queries and further analysis. The evolution over time of the building was more complex to represent considering changes in the geometry and decay of physical and chemical properties that occur for each element. In the proposed model, this problem has been addressed by modeling different geometrical entities to represent the same building object in different historical phases and building a relation between their IDs. Finally, Revit showed its inadequacy in the surface mapping which requires a further implementation of the software to be effective. ❧ The resulting implemented BIM system allows for a better representation and management of both physical and contextual heritage information. The proposed organization of records and documents and the development of relationships between different elements of the model in order to represent contextual data, changes, and uncertainty levels related to each item, merged with the current functionalities of BIM, increases the efficiency of information management in conservation practices. The consistent amount of information gathered during survey activities and archival research is made available to anyone involved in the conservation process and can be retrieved by simple queries reducing at the same time inconsistency of data and poor coordination among different disciplines. As a result, errors in the decision-making would be reduced and wrong interventions, irreparable damages, and loss of important values would be avoided.