Pertev Pasa Mosque

Historic Preservation near the Cradle of Civilization

Skills utilized:

• Teaching

• Photogrammetry

• International collaboration

After attending my April 2015 presentation at the Ball State University College of Architecture & Planning's Faculty & Alumni Symposium, Professor Jonathan Spodek, FAIA, invited me to accompany him on an upcoming workshop. The workshop itself brought together architecture faculty and students from three universities: the host Kocaeli Üniversitesi, the Politecnico di Milano located in Milan, Italy, and Ball State.

I was invited to present on photogrammetry in the contexts of both site documentation and historic preservation/conservation, and also led a small team of students to apply their newly acquired photogrammetric techniques to the Pertev Paşa Mosque, an historic mosque within the scope of the larger workshop site which was comprised of 4 primary focus areas throughout the town. Within the Mosque and its grounds, I led the campaign to capture the interior of the structure over two sessions, while the students used small sections such as the courtyard gates and ablutions fountains to quickly try out different techniques and methods for capture.

Photogrammetry, which is the science of producing 3D data from 2D images, has created a low/no cost method of 3D scanning. With nothing more than a digital camera which many students and educators, not to mention professionals, already own and an educational account with Autodesk, students can use the photogrammetric software for free to capture virtually any 3D object. Because it is a self-referencing unitless system, photogrammetry can be used to capture anything from a small sculpture to an entire building or city block, or even up to a neighborhood or town. Of course, the larger the object, the less detail you’ll have.

The proceedings from the workshop were published in the January 2016 issue of Mimarlık | Tasarım Kültürü Dergisi (Architecture | Design Culture Magazine). The model of the mosque was also recognized as a Staff Pick on Sketchfab (viewable above). Professor Spodek and I also later collaborated on a paper about the photogrammetric aspect of the workshop that was accepted and we presented at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training's 2017 3D Digital Documentation Summit in New Orleans. You can download our paper here.