MIT Design Heritage

Machu Picchu

Documentation and registry of Cultural Heritage Sites around the world. I co-led the 2018 campaign with Professor Takehiko Nagakura. The group has worked in Japan, Italy, Singapore, China, Israel, and Greece. MIT News Article. The MIT students and research assistants who participated in this project were: Diego Cornejo, Paloma Gonzalez, Takuro Kikuchi, Woong Ki Sung, Chang Liu, Eytan Mann, Wenzhe Peng, Rachelle Villalon, Nikolaos Vlavianos, Xu Zhang.

The Machu Picchu Design Heritage project was made possible thanks to the MISTI Global Seed Funds. MISTI is a part of the Center for International Studies within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). The project was also sponsored by the Council of Science, Technology and Technological Innovation of Peru, with the support of the National University of Saint Anthony the Abbot in Cuzco and the Decentralized Directorate of Culture of Cusco.

"In order to digitally document and develop the foundations for future research, a laboratory team from the MIT Department of Architecture, led by Professor Takehiko Nagakura and PhD student Paloma Gonzales, has been working on the MISTI Global Seed Fund Machu Picchu Design Heritage project since 2016. The team, the Architecture Representation and Computation Group, has led the first extensive expedition to digitally document Machu Picchu, using the latest generation of instruments and techniques to explore the site�s architectural and urban importance and develop a 3-D site map using virtual reality and augmented reality. The Architecture Representation and Computation Group has an important record of working with digital capturing technologies on World Heritage Sites in Italy, China, Singapore, and Japan.

"We believe that documentation through computational techniques for the digitalization of architectural monuments is key to the preservation of the cultural heritage of humanity," Nagakura says. �But it is just a simple idea for old practice. From Renaissance time, architects have been going to building sites, and drawing them up to study them. We are just replacing tape measures and Mylar sheets with scanning tools and VR headsets.� For the project in Peru, the team visited the archaeological complex on two occasions for several weeks in mid-2017 and early 2018. At the site, more than 9,000 images were collected through panoramic cameras, photogrammetric scanning tools, and drones. Gonzales says the working hours were �intense.� �We had to reach the archaeological monument before the arrival of the tourists and stay after the closure of the monument," she says. �The great commitment and joint work of the MIT team and the San Antonio Abad del Cusco University, supported by the Decentralized Directorate of Culture of Cusco, made the work fruitful and rewarding.� Based on the photogrammetric data they sampled, the team developed 3-D models and are working on creating virtual reality experiences that would allow people to immerse themselves in Machu Picchu from anywhere on the planet. The same 3-D models are also being deployed to make a new interactive map of Machu Picchu that superimposes the photographic 3-D view of the site through augmented reality."

Date: Last updated, 03.31.2020






Project Details Location: Machu Picchu, Cusco, Peru May, 2018 Camera: Mavic Pro 2 20 mins length, 4k



Workflow

PROCESS

Registry of Cultural Herital Site.





Here is a breakdown of the integration of skills:

computer-aided design - OVERALL DESIGN AND PARTS FOR FABRICATION