Digital Anastylosis of the Remains of a Portal by Master Builder Hernán Ruiz: Knowledge Strategies, Methods and Modelling Results

The portal of the forecourt of the old monastery of San Agustín in Seville (Spain) has been preserved in fragments. The notarial document specifying the conditions for its construction has been preserved, although the drawing that accompanied it has been lost. To a certain extent, this loss is remedied by other designs created by Hernán Ruiz. We also have archive photographs that bear witness to its state of repair some years before it was dismantled. Armed with all of this material, we attempted to carry out a virtual anastylosis of the portal using new technologies such as digital photogrammetry, reverse engineering, BIM and visual programming. The creation of the 3D digital model was accompanied by the interpretation of the data obtained from documentary sources. The end result is a digital graphical model of heritage information (HBIM) which we hope will provide a useful tool for the analysis, promotion and anastylosis.