The Lady Chapel as a Model for Visualizations of Digital 3D Historical Reconstructions

FAIN: FEL-289811-23

Meredith Cohen
UCLA; Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90024-4201)

Research, writing, and data visualization leading to a website exploring 3D architectural reconstructions of the Lady Chapel of Saint-German-des-Prés.

In the past fifteen years, digital reconstruction of vanished, destroyed, or unbuilt architecture has become an exciting new research and representational tool for the fields of architectural history and cultural heritage. Yet this novelty has generated widely differing practices. Currently, there is no standard for the method of research, display, and dissemination of projects using this tool. This has proven problematic, particularly when research is presented through photorealistic renderings, which do not explicitly convey the different levels of certainty they integrate. My project proposes to use the flexibility of the digital realm to build a website that transparently displays the differences between primary sources, hypotheses, and conclusions concerning a digital reconstruction of the Lady Chapel of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (built c. 1245–1255, destroyed 1802). This website will advance current discourse on digital reconstruction by exemplifying a new standard of practice.