Abstract
The ravages of time, natural and man-made disasters, pollution, fatigue, overexposure, mismanagement, and the unintended consequences of efforts to preserve our cultural patrimony, have all taken a major toll on historical structures. Structural health assessment is the first pivotal step towards creating a strategy for long-term life-cycle management. Historical structures provide an abundance of unique challenges that when combined serve as a great qualifying test for the study of as-built structures. This paper explores the diagnostic value of terrestrial laser scanning for the structural health assessment of the Baptistery di San Giovanni in Florence, Italy and proposes an integrative methodology for repeatable data acquisition, processing, visualization and analysis. The presented study proves that even under challenging circumstances, efficient documentation of entire structures is possible. The case study at the Baptistery demonstrates that even when objectives are not formed prior to the survey, comprehensive data sets of high quality and reliability will enable meaningful structural health assessments. With a reliable comprehensive baseline model in place, it can be annotated, qualitatively analyzed and recurring surveys can be conducted to track changes and damages throughout time.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Maurizio Seracini, the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore and President Franco Lucchesi for the opportunity to study the Baptistery di San Giovanni. Opinions, findings, and conclusions from this study are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the research sponsors.
Notes
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.