Jeddah Historic Building Information Model

A task we frequently face today is how we can preserve, manage and record historic buildings to save them from the risk of collapse and erosion by natural and human factors or disastrous events. While most of the recent BIM work and related protocols focus on new construction projects, the approach can be extended and adopted for existing structures and heritage buildings. A major issue in this approach is the modelling of complicated architectural elements of historical buildings. The details of windows, stonework and ornaments give each historic building its individual character. But these details are difficult and cumbersome to model as there are no standard libraries to pick them from.

Our work focuses on the historic district of Jeddah, a major city in Saudi Arabia with a long history and many buildings that date back to the 16th century. Unfortunately, many buildings are abandoned today or have been lost over the last thirty years and because of that, a part of the city’s history has been lost. Recently Historic Jeddah has received renewed attention as it has been added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Jedda’s historic buildings are characterised by the Hijazi architectural style, which it shares with other Arabic cities. Our proposed Jeddah Historic BIM uses 3D laser scanning and photogrammetry to create detailed geometric models. Ahmad Baik’s major thesis output was the development of a custom library of architectural elements, the Hijazi Architectural Objects Library (HAOL), to facilitate and reduce the cost of the 3D modelling process.

More details are given in ‘Hijazi Architectural Object Library (HAOL)’, published in International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (February 2017)