The Representation of Architectural Heritage in the Digital Age

An architectural heritage is a unique and complex building, an organism synthesis of constructive systems and historical events. Therefore inevitably the issue of an architectural scientific representation has to include the problems of historical and aesthetic characteristics’ understanding and communication. According to these principles, the architectural representation concerns aspects of interpretation and criticism, going beyond purely instrumental questions of measurement, modeling and rendering. Digital technologies favor the definition of complex models, useful to the historical study, protection, exploitation and management of architectural heritage. In particular 3D models are able to describe functional, structural and figurative aspects, last but not least, building transformations. Moreover such models can be used as core aggregator of the vast and heterogeneous data and archival documents, ever associated to an historical building.