Insight on HBIM for Conservation of Cultural Heritage: The Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze

Abstract

The application of Building Information Modeling (BIM) on historic constructions is investigated in this paper by discussing, as a representative case study, the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze (Italy), thus showing as this tool can be used effectively for the management and maintenance activities of a historic museum. In fact, while BIM is already well-known as a powerful tool for the design and management of new buildings, its development in the field of historical construction is currently growing and attracting increasing interest in the scientific community. This paper proposes, in particular, an Information Model (IM) aimed to collect the structural information to be subsequently employed for numerical modeling of the building, thus representing the link between the real world and the computational models. The possibility to handle different types of information to be used for the management, maintenance, and modeling of existing constructions, as shown in this paper, encourages the popularization of this approach as an effective method to support cultural heritage (CH) conservation.