art & design - archaeological research...
TRANSCRIPT
Advertise on NYTimes.com
Search All NYTimes.com
Art & DesignWORLD U.S. N.Y. / REGION BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE HEALTH SPORTS OPINION ARTS STYLE TRAVEL JOBS REAL ESTATE
AUTOS
ART & DESIGN BOOKS DANCE MOVIES MUSIC TELEVISION THEATER
Multimedia
Preserved With Lasers
Blog
ArtsBeat
The latest on thearts, coverage oflive events,
ABROAD
Scots Aim Lasers at Landmarks
Historic Scotland
A section of Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, captured in minute detail with laser scanners. More Photos >
By MICHAEL KIMMELMANPublished: November 4, 2009
EDINBURGH — Come April a small team of experts from the
Glasgow School of Art and the government heritage entity Historic
Scotland will fly to South Dakota at the behest of an organization
called CyArk and the United States National Park Service. They will
make laser scans and computer models of Mount Rushmore.
Aside from the wee bit of Scottish
blood in three of the four enshrined
presidents (Lincoln’s the odd man
out, in case you’re wondering), there
is of course nothing whatsoever
Scottish about this most all-American
of sites. But cultural expertise transcends national borders.
The Scottish team of four or five will spend a few days
setting up and moving around their various scanners to
capture all of Mount Rushmore’s nooks and crannies,
collecting billions of bits of digital information, which will
then be brought back here, to be crunched and sorted out
by computer.
What results should be the most complete and precise
Advertise on NYTimes.com
Go to Complete List »
More Articles in Arts »
Sign up for ticket offers from Broadway shows and otheradvertisers.
See Sample | Privacy Policy
TicketWatch - Theater Offers by E-Mail
MOST POPULAR
Nicholas D. Kristof: Unhealthy America1.
Personal Health: A Breathing Technique Offers Helpfor People With Asthma
2.
Building With Whole Trees3.
Well: Phys Ed: Why Doesn’t Exercise Lead to WeightLoss?
4.
Magazine Preview: Making Health Care Better5.
Gail Collins: Hark! The Voters Speak!6.
After Mickey’s Makeover, Less Mr. Nice Guy7.
You're the Boss: 100 Things Restaurant StaffersShould Never Do (Part 1)
8.
Abroad: Scots Aim Lasers at Landmarks9.
Maureen Dowd: Who Are You Calling a Narcissist,Rush?
10.
ADVERTISEMENTS
SIGN IN TORECOMMEND
SIGN IN TOE-MAIL
REPRINTS
SHARE
TWITTER BLOGGED SEARCHEDE-MAILED
HOME PAGE TODAY'S PAPER VIDEO MOST POPULAR TIMES TOPICS Get Bay Area coverage Log In Register Now
Welcome to TimesPeopleGet Started RecommendTimesPeople Lets You Share and Discover the Best of NYTimes.com 8:39 PM
Abroad - Scots Aim Lasers at Mount Rushmore and Other Lan... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/arts/design/05abroad.html...
1 of 4 11/5/09 8:39 PM
critical reviews, multimediaextravaganzas and much more.Join the discussion.
More Arts News
three-dimensional models ever of the site, millions of
times more detailed and accurate than the best
photographs or films, precise down to the tiniest fraction
of a millimeter.
In an era of computer animation, with gamers navigating
virtual universes at the click of a mouse, making laser scans of old monuments may not
sound special, but the Scottish team has achieved some unprecedented levels of
sophistication with their models. Through scanning, the experts can conjure up what
objects looked like ages ago, in effect turning the clock back on ancient sites. They can
simulate the effects of climate change, urban encroachment or other natural or
man-made disasters on those same sites, peering into the future.
Given a proposal for a new building in a city like Edinburgh, they can also create virtual
realities, almost microscopically accurate, so viewers might see what the building looks
like from all angles in the place where it’s intended to go, including the shadows it might
cast at different times of day.
The technology isn’t brand new or unique to Scotland, but the Glasgow team is on its
cultural front line. Douglas Pritchard, a Canadian-born architect by training, is the
wizard behind the Digital Design Studio at the art school. He heads the Scottish laser
expedition with David Mitchell, director of Historic Scotland’s Technical Conservation
Group. Describing how fast laser modeling has progressed and how far it might soon go,
Mr. Pritchard said, “We’re no longer a million miles from the ‘Star Trek’ holodeck.”
He was perfectly serious.
The cultural implications of the technology are big, as are the political ones for Scotland,
which, via the country’s culture minister, Michael Russell, has latched on to the laser
team’s work.
It was about three years ago that Mr. Pritchard’s art school group began surveying a
swath of the center of Glasgow, along the River Clyde, creating 3-D digital
representations of some 1,400 buildings and dozens of streetscapes. They caught the
attention of Mr. Mitchell, who enlisted Mr. Pritchard to scan a decaying iron bridge in
Dundee, which was nearly impossible to survey with much accuracy except by laser. The
bridge project led to scans of Stirling Castle and Rosslyn Chapel, the 15th-century Gothic
fancy to which “The Da Vinci Code” has lately brought swarms of conspiracy-minded
tourists. One of them was a man who tried one day to take a sledgehammer to the
so-called Apprentice Pillar, convinced that the Holy Grail was hidden inside it.
No harm done, but the event illustrated, as Mr. Mitchell noted, why scans are necessary.
“Remember Windsor?” he asked, referring to the fire in 1992 that burned parts of the
British royal castle. “If restorers had had laser scans back then, they could have rebuilt
everything to within three millimeters of accuracy, but instead they had to rely on
conjecture from photographs.” He noted the more recent case of the Buddhas in
Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up in 2001.
The basic principle behind the laser technology is simple: A box, with a laser inside, sits
on a tripod; as the box slowly rotates 360 degrees, the laser, moving up and down,
bounces its beam off whatever is solid in front of it. In so doing, it registers some 50,000
points in space every second. Traditional surveyors might produce a couple of hundred
measurements a day, prone to subjectivity and human error. Lasers collect millions of
measurements per hour. A scanner can even identify certain materials, determining
whether something is, say, made of glass or stone.
Aerial lasers and a hand-held version operate the same way. Combined, they can bring to
life as 3-D images entire cities or a mountainside, like Mount Rushmore’s.
MetLife® Life Insurance - as Lowas $12/mo for $250K of Coverage
Ads by Google what's this?
Photo scannerTake Flatbed Scanning To A New Level. Buy Direct & Save!www.Epson.com
TKM Land SurveyorsAlta's, Topos, Boundaries, Staking, Easement, GPS Equiped,Planning Svcwww.tkmlandsurveyors.com
AS Elliott & AssociatesProfessional Land Surveyors Serving Massachusettswww.aselliott.com
Abroad - Scots Aim Lasers at Mount Rushmore and Other Lan... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/arts/design/05abroad.html...
2 of 4 11/5/09 8:39 PM
Sign in to Recommend
More Articles in Arts »A version of this article appeared in print on November 5, 2009, onpage C1 of the New York edition.
Click here to enjoy the convenience of home delivery of TheTimes for 50% off.
Ads by Google what's this?
This spring, at a digital-documentation conference in Glasgow, Mr. Russell met with Ben
Kacyra, the American engineer and inventor of the scanner. Partly because of what had
happened to the Buddhas in Afghanistan, Mr. Kacyra had established the nonprofit
CyArk to compile scans of 500 Unesco World Heritage sites around the globe.
The Scottish crew was signed up to scan for CyArk five Scottish World Heritage sites (the
Old and New Towns of Edinburgh; Neolithic Orkney; the island of St. Kilda; New Lanark;
and the Antonine Wall, an ancient Roman ruin) as well as five other sites. Having been
already in touch with the Park Service about Mount Rushmore, CyArk enlisted the team
to start there.
What are the big cultural implications? For starters, Mr. Pritchard talked about “a new
kind of empowerment.” He was referring to the prospect of using virtual-reality models
to allow the public to judge all sorts of proposed urban plans. The drawings and
computer simulations long cooked up by developers and architects will be replaced by
more detailed, easier-to-comprehend, more objective views, in essence democratizing
knowledge.
The benefits of storing and distributing state-of-the-art views of the world’s most
precious cultural sites at low cost (the annual budget for the Scottish team is under a
half-million dollars) are obvious.
By way of example Mr. Pritchard showed off on his laptop a ruined Victorian monument,
Paisley Fountain. It was returned in virtual guise to its original lacquered green sheen,
thanks to some paint scraping taken by Scottish restorers. When combined with the laser
scans, the scrapings proved what the surface of the fountain first looked like. Nobody had
imagined it to have been so shiny. “But,” as Mr. Pritchard said, “technology doesn’t lie.”
Then he clicked on a virtual model of a Maori canoe, bought in pieces not long ago by the
National Museum of Scotland and never assembled. Laser scans proved it never could be:
the pieces turned out not to belong together.
The demonstration pointed toward some bright, gleaming, globalized frontier of cultural
information-sharing and progress, albeit curiously backward-glancing. In London at the
moment there happens to be an exhibition of paintings by the German-born British artist
Frank Auerbach from the 1950s and early ’60s, marvelous pictures that show the city
rebuilding as if from scratch after the war.
Back then, death and destruction held out for midcentury Modernists the prospect of a
new urbanism, a fresh start born of loss and industrial advances.
That was half a century ago.
The new cutting edge of laser technology offers instead a means to preserve and restore
whole cities exactly as they once were. It promises a world kept as if in amber.
A virtual past that never dies.
SIGN IN TOE-MAIL
REPRINTS
Abroad - Scots Aim Lasers at Mount Rushmore and Other Lan... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/arts/design/05abroad.html...
3 of 4 11/5/09 8:39 PM
Home World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Automobiles Back to Top
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy Terms of Service Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map
Historic Buildings and Sites Get E-Mail Alerts
Laser (Light Amplification by StimulatedEmission of Radiation)
Get E-Mail Alerts
Computers and the Internet Get E-Mail Alerts
Russell, Michael Get E-Mail Alerts
Related Searches
TKM Land SurveyorsAlta's, Topos, Boundaries, Staking, Easement, GPS Equiped, Planning Svcwww.tkmlandsurveyors.com
Laser Scanners guideLooking to find Laser Scanners? See our Laser Scanners guide.fastenal.com
AS Elliott & AssociatesProfessional Land Surveyors Serving Massachusettswww.aselliott.com
BUSINESS »
To Their Own Devices
ARTS »
For Thrillers, Glenn Beck IsBecoming New Oprah
OPINION »
What Did theElectionMean?A Room for Debateforum on the broaderpolitical message forDemocrats andRepublicans.
STYLE »
Modeling and All ThatCame After
OPINION »
Op-Ed: Relax, Democrats
HOME & GARDEN »
A Dream Home Undone byDivorce
INSIDE NYTIMES.COM
Abroad - Scots Aim Lasers at Mount Rushmore and Other Lan... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/arts/design/05abroad.html...
4 of 4 11/5/09 8:39 PM