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Digital Humanities for Increasing Disaster Resilience in Art Nouveau and Modernist Buildings

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: The paper will focus on the topic of adapting digital humanities methods from architectural history to technical history, considering mapping and image analysis for increasing disaster resilience in Art Nouveau and Modernist buildings in different geographical areas—including lessons from Europe to the USA. The project proposes the transformation of the collection of photographs of early 20th-century architecture gathered by the applicant over about 30 years of travel into a database by answering the research question on how threats from the hazards of earthquakes, floods, and fires can be answered by taking into account the local culture in the European countries covered, for buildings from a period when the architecture styles were already global at that time. For this purpose, digital humanities methods of image annotation (including architectural volumetric analysis) and mapping are employed. From the knowledge gathered and the resulting database, a prototyping ontology and taxonomy is derived. This outcome can be further developed into a set of evaluation criteria, considering the decisions that can be taken to prioritize the retrofit interventions depending on the geographic positions of the buildings.

Source: Sustainability

DOI: 10.3390/su17031328

Authors: Maria Bostenaru Dan, Adrian Ibric

Institution: Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism

Language: English

Topic: Digital Humanities and Scholarship

Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,896