Abstract
Abstract. The paper presents the results of a research aiming at proving the efficacy of perspective restitution from photos for the reconstruction of buildings and sites that disappeared in the past century. The case study is the town of Messina, sited at the north-eastern corner of Sicily (Italy), facing the homonymous strait that divides Sicily from the Italian peninsula; in 1908 Messina and Reggio Calabria, at the opposite side of the strait, were levelled to the ground by a powerful earthquake, followed by a tsunami.No building or monument survived the destruction: a new town with the same name took the site of Messina. Except for few strongly reshaped buildings, the memory of the streets and monuments of the destroyed town is today kept by some photos, taken by the end of the XIX century by professional photographers.The experimentation on Messina aims at a twofold purpose: test the reliability and usability of perspective restitution for the reconstruction of lost buildings and urban sites; use photogrammetric tools for the recontextualization of architectural elements (cornices, capitals, portals, corbels) that once belonged to a destroyed building and are today exhibited in Museums.Such process allows the verification of the scale of the reconstructed building and opens new forms of presentation of Historical heritage: in this study panoramic images have been used to display the building ‘attached’ to the fragment during the visit at the museum and to present, on site, the building in its original location with the fragments repositioned.The destruction and fall of Messina strictly echoes the destiny of many other towns in Europe; the research aims therefore at showing the potentials of perspective restitution and the usability of this technique in many similar contexts.
Highlights
1.1 Digital perspective restitution from period photosThe paper presents the results of a research aiming at proving the efficacy of perspective restitution from photos for the reconstruction of buildings and sites that disappeared in the past century
Digital drawing and modelling tools overcome many of the limitations that, in the past, made perspective restitution from photos inaccurate and of no practical use; traditional drawing tools made perspective restitution from photos a hard task, especially when vanishing points appeared at a great distance from the image frame; the output of perspective restitution were 1D or 2D objects, i.e. segments, angles, planar figures and profiles that were revolved onto the picture plane
Remote vanishing points are almost usual in perspective restitution from photos, especially for vertical lines; in order to mitigate the convergence of vertical lines, photographers used to place the camera on elevated points of views; when no elevated spot was available, photographers used special cameras equipped with mechanical sliders that allowed to adjust the distance between the lens and the camera and the rotation of the lens itself
Summary
The paper presents the results of a research aiming at proving the efficacy of perspective restitution from photos for the reconstruction of buildings and sites that disappeared in the past century. Remote vanishing points are almost usual in perspective restitution from photos, especially for vertical lines; in order to mitigate the convergence of vertical lines, photographers used to place the camera on elevated points of views; when no elevated spot was available, photographers used special cameras equipped with mechanical sliders that allowed to adjust the distance between the lens and the camera and the rotation of the lens itself.. Perspective restitution, like any photogrammetric technique, is capable of detecting only angles and proportions; in order to build measurable 3D models, absolute orientation must be performed Such process can be developed when the photo displays extant objects; if such elements are surveyed with laser scanning or. Digital restitution retrieves the location of the camera in the reconstructed scene; the restitution of this datum verifies or neglects the reconstructed perspective layout: if the center of projection results in an inaccessible spot (i.e. under the ground, behind an occlusion element, at an inaccessible elevation) the perspective restitution layout must be reconsidered
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