Cultural Diversity and Material Imagination in Canadian Architecture

Whether a house of worship or a simple farmhouse, the fabrication of a building reveals both the unspoken cultural aspirations of the builder and the inevitable exigencies of the construction process. We are concerned that the de-population of rural areas, a paucity of specialized tradespersons, and complex building codes threaten the sustainability of this invaluable cultural resource. For current and future generations, the quantitative and qualitative values of these traditional methods of construction are essential for an inclusive cultural memory. More practically, and equally pressing, an operational knowledge of these technologies is essential for the conservation of our built heritage. To address these concerns, CDMICA brings together academics, heritage professionals, archivists, and industry leaders in software and computing to work as partners in the development of an innovative, on-line knowledge base that provides the tools necessary for integrative research on both tangible and intangible qualities related to the fabrication of our architectural heritage. Our project involves the development of a cross-platform, web-based application that will serve as a focal point for ongoing research among our team members and as a prototype for future national and international collaborations. At the core of CDMICA is a detailed dataset of twenty heritage buildings of diverse geographical and ethno-cultural provenance selected from the Canadian Register of Historic Places by the Scientific Committee of the CDMICA Partnership. These buildings will be documented following best-practice to ensure a complete and consistent dataset. Following the documentation process, we will construct a building information model (BIM) for each of the twenty heritage properties and integrate the models into a web-enabled database. While BIM is now generally accepted as a design and life-cycle management tool for new buildings, few have acknowledged the potential of BIM as a dynamic, graphic, and multidimensional platform for the management of the tangible and intangible attributes of our built heritage. CDMICA will expand the fields commonly associated with BIM (materials, assemblies, cost) to include data fields of cultural information related to fabrication (types of tools, typological relationships, cosmologies). Borrowing and adapting concepts from Narrative Theory, we will explore the development of a web-based application that enables the interaction between existing on-line resources and BIM content in order to generate and disseminate culturally nuanced information related to materials and methods of construction. While this is an ambitious project, we have assembled a team with the technical, intellectual, and creative capacity to see it to fruition.

How to Use CDMICA

Search the online CDMICA database and download model files (.rvt, .fbx, .ifc), familes, drawings, and sources.