Digital Visualisation and Design Development in Historic Building Projects

The design stages of projects involving high-profile historic buildings often present a unique set of challenges to architects and allied professionals. It is crucial to carefully balance rigorous cultural significance and academic criteria with modern requirements and standards, resulting in a need to investigate and refine a wide range of design options before work can commence on site. Although digital visualisation techniques are commonly used in built heritage as a means of interpreting historic buildings and sites, they can also be a powerful and flexible design development and management tool in conservation and refurbishment projects. Indeed their utility extends beyond straightforward visual design investigation to include such areas as product specification, cost control, quality assurance and change management at later project stages. This paper presents the Stirling Castle Palace Project as a case study in the application of these techniques, and also investigates ways in which convergent trends in digital data acquisition, information management and immersive systems can contribute to the formulation of a comprehensive digital workflow for historic building projects.