Methodology to reconstruc virtual cities from the past

Abstract

The project dealing with the construction of a virtual model of 1714 Barcelona was commissioned to the LMVC (City Virtual Modeling Laboratory) by the Catalan Public Television (TV3), in an attempt to reproduce the events of the battle fought in September 11th of that same year. The main objective of this project was to generate a virtual model of an urban area and particularly the area of Old City of Barcelona (Roca and Muñoz, 2004). Among the considered applications the following can be mentioned: a) The visualization of areas of interest; b) The analysis of urban and architectural environments as a tool for planning and urban design; c) The rehabilitation of buildings to the extent that virtual environments allow the analysis of structural and constructive behavior and, therefore, to deal with their conservation and recovery. But all this requires a process of geometric generation, sometimes with a high degree of complexity, and a perfectly timed work methodology. It also requires a research in historical and architectural contexts to reach even the virtual recovery of non existing buildings. This paper explains the main decisions taken during the course of these works with special emphasis on those aspects related to the organization of different kinds of data in a unified whole that had to be sent to other professionals and had to be, for that reason, organized in a clear and comprehensible way for its further development.