Tangible v. intangible sources for computational reconstruction

 17-05-2024 14:15 - 15:45 GMT+1 || Join us on Zoom|| Back to the programme

«Hospitalis»: a digital art history project for the study and valorization of welfare architecture

Author:

Joana Balsa de Pinho - University of Lisbon

Abstract

The reality of hospital architecture in Portugal, in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, is quite heterogeneous and complex. There are innumerable spaces with assistance purposes, however, some without architectural autonomy. Also in historical terms this moment is crucial and challenging; the period of the so-called reform and modernization of assistance, initiated by D. João II with the process of reorganization of the care institutions, namely the unification of small units, their assets and incomes, in larger institutions and with greater capacity of the challenges of the beginning of modernity. This institutional change will lead to modifications of buildings, that is, the institutional type will define a new architectural typology. They originated the construction of new hospitals, of larger dimensions, making possible the renovation of the hospital architecture and the application of new architectural models. This process would culminate in the creation of the Misericórdias, which decisively marked the general panorama of assistance in Portugal during the Early Modern Era and who will have an important role as innovative promoters with a care function, namely to receive patients.

In this sense, and with a view to redefine the research problems that establish the analytical framework of Portuguese welfare architecture in the 16Ith century, was conceived the project Hospitalis - Hospital Architecture in Portugal at the dawn of Modernity: identification, characterization and contextualization, recently approved and carry out by the School of Art and Humanities of the University of Lisbon.

These project, frameworked in the Art history discipline, have an important digital component to support the virtual reconstruction of some of these buildings. Due to the chosen chronology and the multiple architectural remodeling to which the hospital buildings were submitted, both for aesthetic reasons and the evolution of the practice of medicine, some of them were destroyed or are very altered; in these sense, and based on the assumptions of the crypto history of art (Cf. Vitor Serrão, A Cripto-História da Arte. Análise de Obras de Arte Inexistentes, Lisboa, Livros Horizonte, 2001), we will promote their virtual reconstruction based on documental sources that describe then. These virtual reconstitutions aim the support of research and the buildings' analysis, in order to compose the global framework of the hospital architecture at the dawn of Modernity and the establishment of an instrument for the valorization and diffusion of this specific cultural heritage.

The present communication goals are the definition of the state of the art in which the project frames, to present its objectives and research methodologies and implementation phases.

Bio

Joana Pinho holds a PhD in Art History (University of Lisbon, 2013), with a thesis about the architecture promoted to the Confraternities of the Mercy in the 16th century, with a PhD fellowship from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).
She has integrated several research projects, as a member of the research team in Portugal, Brazil and Spain. Between 2018 and 2022, she was the PI of the project “Hospitalis – Hospital Architecture in Portugal at the dawn of Modernity: identification, characterization and contextualization”, funded by FCT.
Since 2020 July is an associated researcher appointed by Artis – Institute for Art History (University of Lisbon), in the context of an Individual Support Grant (Stimulus of Scientific Employment), with the project «Hosp_ARCHI – Circulation, appropriation and reassignment of architectonic models: Portuguese hospital architecture in the 16th century» (CEECIND/00691/2018).

What about a Digital Architectural History? A computational eye on Venetian facades

Author:

Paul Guhennec — EPFL

Abstract

While recent years have seen the flourishing of a digital art history, the intersection between architectural history and ”distant viewing” within Digital Humanities remains mostly an open ground. This contribution discusses the prospects and methodological this intersection offers. What are the ways of questioning the entire urban fabric of a city by means of digital surveys and their algorithmic processing? As a case study, we propose the formal analysis of all the facades of the city of Venice, following in the footsteps of a long tradition in post-war Italian scholarship. Using photogrammetry from aerial surveys and algorithmic operations, we automatically transform a point cloud covering the entire city into a homogeneous corpus of orthographic representations of all the façades of the 8567 buildings in the city. When possible, buildings are enriched with temporal and stylistic information automatically gathered from Wikidata, architectural catalogues, and older cadastral information. Thus, facades can be explored and questioned in new ways: ordered by height, by function, by date, by owner, by style. What this abstract “re-materialisation” of facades into data points permits is the possibility of a montage [4], where the different dimensions of the data and sources can be exhaustively cross-interrogated. This corpus is the starting point of a formalist reading of the fabric of the city, whereby the dimensions, proportions, symmetry, porosity of facades are mapped and compared, and the propagation of certain architectural motifs assessed across the laguna. By taking facades as markers of monumentality, and through the computational analysis of facade dimensions and lines of sight in all squares (campi), we will question the tension inherent to Venetian civil architecture: If, as historiography has long stated, the city itself is the stage for a Republic of Equals, how to stand out without breaking the continuity of the fabric? We will, most importantly, be interested in moments of discontinuity: what stands out, what catches the eye, what evades the rule. We will finally argue that this “computational eye” is a precious methodological shift, notably for the identification of recurrences and patterns in the arrangement of the city. It can, however, only be a valid method of investigation if the assumptions hidden at each step of the algorithmic process are questioned. In other words, we will highlight that the possibility of exhaustively comparing abstracted geometrical representations requires a de-materialisation, ie. a deliberate impoverishment of the “trace”.

Bio

Paul Guhennec is a PhD student in the Digital Humanities Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland). His research focuses on the usage of new computational methods for architectural history, and their epistemological implications. He is currently completing his dissertation, which is dedicated to the study of Venice's domestic architecture and typologies of housing, through the means of photogrammetry and computer vision.