Digital-assisted and automated modes of building documentation are rapidly transforming methods of recording architectural heritage worldwide. Because technologies such as remote sensing, machine-learning for typological recognition, and LiDAR can execute
batch tasks quickly and reliably, they are increasingly called upon to replace traditional field survey techniques guided by historians and local communities. While automated methods can significantly enhance architectural recording, they cannot capture
communities’ and historians’ knowledge of place. Communities gain such knowledge through their lived experience and practice, while historians gain insight into a place’s past through anthropological and archaeological methods. This
local and historically contextualized information can reciprocally inform the recording of architecture to preserve what is meaningful in a building or site. This panel considers the benefits of bringing this local and acquired knowledge to bear on architectural
recording itself, challenging the premise that automated recordings, such as those carried out by industrial scanning firms, are comprehensive and separable from these intellectual processes.
Through comparative
consideration of the panelists’ place-specific documentation goals, their approaches to visual communication and abstraction, their ways of representing uncertainty, and their reliance on local knowledge, the panel engages diverse perspectives on
the value of human-oriented recording techniques in an age of increasingly automated building documentation.