THE ARCH OF AUGUSTUS IN AOSTA: DATA AND ANALYSIS REUSE FOR A CONSERVATION PROJECT

The paper proposes a path for the management of the Arch of Augustus in Aosta to exploit the potential of Historic Building Information Modelling (HBIM). The HBIM system acts both as a place where to georeference the available data and as a tool for the elaboration of the conservation project in all its aspects. The system deals with different data from the survey of geometries to that of materials and alterations, up to the conservation project (mainly focused on the surfaces, with the aim of traceability of the events that the monument has lived, lives, and will live). The challenges in this research concern several aspects. First, it will be necessary to adapt the regular geometry of the BIM approach to the complex shapes necessary for the reproduction of surface alterations in the Puddinga stone. In addition, even more important, the ability to manage the monitoring data distributed at different times, comparing and making them available to current and future restorers (and other operators involved in the preservation). These tasks will be fixed by drawing up a dynamic conservation project, i.e. one that can make use of the available data at any time and all those that will become available during the work. Attempts of data digitization to give a shared value to the conservation activities had already been proposed in the past. The new research now starts from the reconnaissance of the weaknesses of the previous proposals, mainly related to the use of tailor-made systems (software) that are difficult to maintain, to implement and use in a very heterogeneous team of operators (architects, archaeologists, engineers, topographers, chemists, historians…)