In the summer of 2016, Professor Andrew Saunders of the University of Pennsylvania and some of his students spent six weeks in Italy laser scanning and amassing an archive of some of the most important examples of Italian Baroque architecture. The resulting archive includes key works from Francesco Borromini, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Girolamo and Carlo Rainaldi, Pietro da Cortona, Guarino Guarini and Bernardo Vittone.
The motivations beyond archival and preservation purposes were to find better methods to explore and teach formally highly complex baroque architecture (Phase 1) with the idea to continue and using computational methods to reverse engineer the ‘algorithms’ behind the baroque architecture (Phase 2).
‘The era of “big data” has fostered the need for new approaches to analysis and representation in all fields of design. …The ability to capture, record and simulate increasingly larger sets of data coupled with remote access to cloud computing and…