Ecns: Drones increasingly used to protect Great Wall. “The use of drones helps human inspectors gain a precise understanding of the preservation of the Great Wall at delicate levels and reveals more information on areas difficult for people to access. Yanqing has the most extensive Great Wall elements in the capital city as well as a complete preservation system. Authorities said drones, satellite images and other new technologies will provide the most comprehensive, accurate data on the Great Wall to create a digital archive platform.”
endangered architecture
Pacific Standard: Rising Sea Levels Are A Threat To World Heritage Sites
Pacific Standard: Rising Sea Levels Are A Threat To World Heritage Sites. “New research finds that rising sea levels due to climate change will put dozens of World Heritage Sites in the Mediterranean region at increased risk of flooding and erosion—threats many of the sites are already facing.”
Scientific American: Geologists Measure Bullet Damage to Ancient Middle Eastern Settlements
Scientific American: Geologists Measure Bullet Damage to Ancient Middle Eastern Settlements. “[Lisa] Mol, who specializes in rock art and rock deterioration, is now spearheading an initiative—the first of its kind—to quantify and catalogue the impacts of bullets in rock at a heritage site in the Middle East. The eventual goal is to inform efforts to conserve or repair such sites.”
Getty Iris: Conservation and Technical Reports for Modern Buildings Now Freely Available Online
Getty Iris: Conservation and Technical Reports for Modern Buildings Now Freely Available Online. “Established in 2014, Keeping it Modern is an initiative of the Getty Foundation that supports the conservation of twentieth-century architecture around the world. Experimentation with materials and construction techniques during this era resulted in great architectural innovation, but they were often untested and have presented complex conservation challenges with age…. Now the Getty Foundation has launched the Keeping It Modern Report Library with the first 20 completed reports, free to download and use by practitioners in the field or anyone interested in cultural heritage preservation.”
Washington Post: The disappearing story of the black homesteaders who pioneered the West
Washington Post: The disappearing story of the black homesteaders who pioneered the West. “The physical vestiges of these communities are gradually disappearing. No buildings or markers indicate that black homesteaders once lived at Empire in Wyoming or the Sully County Colored Colony in South Dakota. DeWitty, Blackdom and Dearfield have historical markers, nothing more. A project that I head at the University of Nebraska, working with the Homestead National Monument of America (part of the national park system), is dedicated to creating a digital archive to preserve the memory of the black homesteading movement. But there is an urgent need to save the actual places where so many black people, in the decades after the Civil War, toiled to live and prosper in freedom.”
Gulf News: The past will be the future
Gulf News: The past will be the future. “[Yusuf] Shegow is the founder of Somali Architecture, a project that digitally recreates buildings and monuments from Mogadishu’s pre-war age, presenting a positive vision of a city that was once a flourishing economic and cultural capital — and could be again. Their work includes an ambitious set of 3D digital models of prominent buildings now largely destroyed, created by Shegow after years of archival research.”
