Digital Investigation of Modern Building Elements: A Case Study on Facade Details of Munich’s to be Demolished Main Building of the Central Station

Three-dimensional (3D) digitisation of material culture has long been practised and is now integral in cultural heritage (CH) preservation and conservation efforts. These efforts, however, have rarely considered capturing small-scale elements of modern architectural heritage. Their hard-to-capture surface properties pose specific challenges, often leading to their omission in 3D conservation practices. Due to their serial industrial production, modern building elements are repetitive, seemingly similar in their fine structures. Still, because of manual assembly, reworking, and decades of use and maintenance, they need to be seen as individual and original artefacts requiring a high degree of measuring accuracy and differentiation ability. This paper highlights the accurate digitisation of window frames using different 3D-surveying tools, post-processing steps, and deviation assessments. The main goal is to understand the windows’ current state and investigate how they conform to the original production according to detailed construction plans, which are used to compare and verify the scanned objects. While close-range terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and photogrammetry were tested, the primary tool for our survey of windows at the Main Building of Munich`s Central Station was an industrial measurement arm (Hexagon 8325-7) with a high-accuracy laser scanner (Hexagon AS1). Two novel methods are proposed to investigate the conformity of the scanned window frames to the historical sources. This investigation showed the advantage of using a metrology arm in digitising small-scale, reflective and feature-poor modern architectural elements.     «

Three-dimensional (3D) digitisation of material culture has long been practised and is now integral in cultural heritage (CH) preservation and conservation efforts. These efforts, however, have rarely considered capturing small-scale elements of modern architectural heritage. Their hard-to-capture surface properties pose specific challenges, often leading to their omission in 3D conservation practices. Due to their serial industrial production, modern building elements are repetitive, seemingly...     »