Researchers and practitioners in archaeology, architecture, computers, and electronics explore technology that preservationists can use in locating, identifying, restoring, and displaying architectural and archaeological heritage. Their topics include the importance of being honest: issues of transparency in the digital visualization of architectural heritage, using a laser scanner for the digital surveying of the Sarnicli Inn and the Byzantine Cistern Underneath, surveying ancient Maya buildings in the forest, residential architecture of the Russian Imperial Age (1703-1843) in drawing of Italian architects, and hand-held three-dimensional scanning for cultural heritage: experimenting low-cost structure sensor scan.
– Protoview Reviews
NPR reports that 45 million tourists visit Italy and its monuments each year, generating about 9 percent of the country's GDP. This surprising fact perhaps explains a handbook that speaks primarily to the archaeological side of historic preservation in Italy. Forty-four contributors collaborated to produce nineteen case studies laden with highly technical information about photogrammetry and other measurement technologies for documenting heritage sites. [...] The volume is at its strongest in two chapters: an art-historical interpretation of Borromini's Sant' Ivo alla Sapienza tracing its iconography to the third poem of Dante's Divine Comedy; and a proposal to repurpose a Beaux-Arts post office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into a cultural center. Some of the chapters included here would actually be more accessible if the authors had instead published them as journal articles, perhaps as a special issue of the APT Bulletin: The Journal of Preservation Technology. The collection belongs only in specialty archaeology collections, whereas Donald Friedman's Historical Building Construction: Design, Materials & Technology (2nd ed., 2010) is more suited to academic libraries supporting preservation-related programs.
– P. Glassman, Yeshiva University, Choice Reviews