Old Shanghai as you have never seen it, thanks to high-tech
Technology normally signals change, but it can also safeguard history by preserving architectural heritage.
The garden villas at 100 Wukang Road in Xuhui district of Shanghai are proof of that. With the villas’ pebble-textured facades, doors and windows framed by red bricks and exquisite interior decorations like wooden stair handrails, visitors could be forgiven for believing they are too well-preserved to have been built more than a century ago.
Covering 26,370 square feet, the villas were built in 1918 as staff apartments for a U.S. petroleum company and were then turned into homes for Shanghai residents.
In 2016 they were included in one of several architectural heritage preservation projects launched by the city. The project was completed last year and the villas are now guesthouses.
Despite damage due to neglect and the ravages of time, they were preserved thanks to modern techniques including 3D laser scanning and Building Information Modeling solutions.
Lasers scanned every inch of the villas, inside and out, to obtain data on fine details such as cracks or termite damage to help the architects come up with a preservation solution. BIM serves as a platform for storing the digitized information and real-time monitoring and can be used by architects to simulate restoration.
3D laser scanning and BIM solutions are advanced architecture preservation technology used globally in recent years, said Shen Xiaoming, chief architect at Shanghai HNA Architects, which was in charge of the restoration of the villas.
“To restore the heritage to the greatest extent, we preserved some original parts and replicated the others, which relied on accurate analysis of the heritage.
Modern techniques enhance the precision of the process, boost its efficiency and help avoid dangerous situations in restoration.”
In the case of the villas, the laser scanning was able to show how much of the carved floral decoration on the wooden handrails of the stairs was damaged or missing.
“We don’t have to count. We can easily tell the replicated ones from the originals based on the data in the BIM system,” Shen said.
As the world heads toward a digital future, China has been promoting the use of digital and information technology to preserve cultural heritage.
“We treasure the value of architectural heritage, such as its historical, artistic and economic value,” said Cao Yongkang, director of the International Research Center for Architectural Heritage Conservation at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
“The traditional preservation approaches, mainly depending on manual work and incomplete historical data, seem to be inefficient, while technology makes preservation more scientific.”
Drone aerial photogrammetry, a technique used to update maps of historical buildings, has been used in collecting data on the historical area at Xida Street in Jiading district. The map, with realtime geographic information, provides the possibility of establishing a historical building database.
The geographic information system, a framework for gathering, managing and analyzing spatial data, is utilized in the management of the East Siwenli area, a cluster of buildings in Jing’an district dating back to the mid-19th century known as shikumen, a Shanghai architectural style featuring Western and Chinese elements.
Based on big data, an experimental platform has been developed for the digital management of 4,000 immovable cultural relics in Shanghai.
Digital and information technologies have been applied in around 20% of the city’s architectural heritage preservation projects, Cao said.
“It will possibly cover the vast majority of projects in the future.”
“The traditional preservation approaches, mainly depending on manual work and incomplete historical data, seem to be inefficient, while technology makes preservation more scientific.”
CAO YONGKANG