Development of a Manueline Style Object Library for Heritage BIM

ABSTRACT

The use of BIM in cultural heritage is still a very challenging task and one of the hardest topics is the choice of level of detail, i.e. the balance between the building characteristics and its representation in a 3D geometric model is not straightforward. Concerning the building cultural heritage very often the architectural identity is a combination of diverse constructive solutions and different architectural styles that may be important to preserve in the final BIM model. The typification of an architectural style is based on the identification of the most relevant elements and/or shapes and its inclusion in the BIM model could be done in several ways: as a surface mesh triangulated from the point cloud survey, a parametric object defined by grammar shape rules or a single boundary shape. This paper presents a comparison of these three approaches based on the level of detail, accuracy and computational time, on the scope of the construction of a Manueline style object library. The case study is the set of highly-decorated door and window frames in the Manueline wing of the National Palace of Sintra, Portugal.

KEYWORDS:

• Building management
• heritage BIM
• manueline architectural style
• object library
• Sintra National Palace
• terrestrial laser scanning

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Eng. Daniel Silva for facilitating the communication between the research team and the Sintra National Palace management. We also thank the reviewers for their thorough reviews and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project is coordinated by IST and funded by Parques de Sintra-Monte da Lua, S.A.