A digital process for conservation to traditional stone heritage

The awareness of the value of traditional cultural heritage currently experiences a moment of increasing interest. The purpose of this paper is to show some results of the international AlpStone-Interreg project, whose main objective is the conservation, enhancement and management of an endangered building heritage located in the Ossola valley (North of Piedmont, Italy). Both local people and professionals are indeed involved in the goal of giving a new life to a stone architecture that is expression of the culture and traditions of this territory. Available digital technologies allow for a better interoperability between different steps of the building process, such as survey, project, maintenance and data management. This process can be more effectively managed with Building Information Modeling (BIM), a methodology based on the sharing of information. Although BIM was conceived for new projects, the aim of the research presented in this paper is to apply it to historical buildings as well. The strong irregularity of stone masonry of traditional Ossola valley buildings is the major difficulty for modeling with parametric software. Possible solutions are the point clouds 3D survey, a technique that allows exact scans of the real geometry and also communication with parametric software. Laser scanner tools and image-based modelling were tested and compared under the preventive and planned conservation point of view.