repair facade parts

Amsterdam's facadetopping

This project investigates how new digital design and manufacturing techniques can be used to contribute to restoration and renovation projects. The project intails an incomplete historic Amsterdam façade for which research is being conducted into how the pieces can be both reproduced and reconstructed. It then looks at the extent to which new manufacturing techniques, such as 3d printing, can be used to produce or restore the physical pieces.

In cooperation with

The facade project is done from our participation as InHolland in the building Lab R&Do. The BouwLab is located in Haarlem and is an innovation hub that makes new building technologies accessible to any party that wants to delve into them, do a test case or take up an actual pilot project.

"BouwLab R & Do was founded to investigate new innovations and technical possibilities and to make them immediately applicable within the construction industry. The best way to pioneer is in a team.”

Visit the website of the construction Lab R & Do here.

How it started

It all started as a result of a news report from NOS. It was described that the citycouncil of Amsterdam offered facing bricks free of charge. The applicant had good reason to want to use the façades. An application has been made from InHolland to use one of the facade elements for the purpose education.

The motivation letter indicates that, and how, we want to use the facade element in our education. Because we believe it is important that the future generation of architects learns how to preserve the past in a proper way.

The deadline for submission was december 2019 and the preliminary result came via mail in February 2020. There was great interest in the facade, so it took a long time for the city to respond. The council of Amsterdam conducted a conversation with all potential allocations in which additional questions were asked. Based on this conversation, and various mail contact, we finally received the official commitment on May 19, 2020 that the facade elements were assigned to us.

On July 2, 2020, teachers from InHolland were allowed to pick up the facade element in the depot in Amsterdam and it was in our possession from that moment on.

Facade element

Above are the facade parts of the gabletopping.

Road map

The pieces will be used for various techniques that could subsequently be used in education. We are talking about both digital reproduction and digital reconstruction.

For the entire project, a flowchart has been created where each step is displayed for the various processes that will be carried out.

Digital reproduction

After the inventory of the boundary conditions. the possibilities of digital reproduction were examined. Different techniques were looked at. Both laser scanning and photogrammetry were used to digitally reproduce one of the fragments.

The goal has always been to make this as accessible as possible for everyone. Therefore, we worked with as many open source software packages as possible.

Photogrammetry Set-up

For photogrammetry we worked in different setups to see if there is a difference in the final mesh.

In addition to the setup, we also looked at the various settings of the camera and al that needs to be considered when taking the photos. We have summarized the information we produced in this short video.

From photos to Mesh

After taking the photos, they do not automatically become a mesh. We need software that can do this for us. We tested various programs and finally came up with the software ‘Meshroom’. This software is very easy to use and is accessible to almost everyone. We have summarized the program and the various problems we have encountered in this video.

From open to closed 3D mesh

To compare our digital model as well as possible, we also looked at the various 3D printing options. Since we do not want to print the entire fragment at once, we have made a section of the fragment. After we did this, the model was no longer closed and could not be printed. To solve this, we used’ Blender'. In this short video you can see the steps we have gone through to make this a closed mesh again.

Digital reconstruction

The next step DD-lab will work on is the digital reconstruction. This can be done in various degrades. First of all, we will look at the possibilities for the already digitized fragment.

Attention is paid as much as possible to detail and to the possibility of transferring chisel strokes that would normally be done by hand into a digital environment.