Hypermedia Authoring and Contextual Modeling in Architecture and Urban Design: Collaborative Reconstructing Historical Sheffield

Studies of historical architecture and urban contexts in preparation for contemporary design interventions are inherently rich in information, demanding versatile and efficient methods of documentation and retrieval. We report on a developing program to establish a hypermedia authoring approach to collaborative contextual modelling in architecture and urban design. The paper begins with a description of a large-scale urban history study project in which 95 students jointly built a physical model of the city center of Sheffield as it stood in 1900, at a scale of 1:500. Continuing work on the Sheffield urban study project, it appears to us desirable to adopt a digital approach to archiving the material and in making it both indexible and accessible via multiple routes. In our review of digital models of cities, some interesting yet unexplored issues were identified. Given the issues and tasks elicited, we investigated hypermedia authoring in HTML and VRML as a designer-centered modelling methodology. Conceptual clarity of the methodology was considered, intending that an individual or members of design groups with reasonable computing skills could learn to operate it quickly. The methodology shows that it is practicable to build a digital contextual databank by a group of architecture/urban designers rather than by specialized modelling teams. Contextual modelling with or without computers can be a research activity on its own. However, we intend to investigate further how hypermedia-based contextual models can be interrelated to design development and communication. We discuss three aspects that can be explored in a design education setting.