Documentation for the Restoration of complex and stratified Architecture. Reading and Interpretation of signs on the wall surfaces as traces of past history and its transformations

Abstract

The reading of the signs which define the wall stratification of a complex architecture, generated by the transformations occurred in the course of its history, is an essential instrument for an aware restoration. An exhaustive documentation on the structure inserted in its context and a survey, performed with advanced and integrated detection techniques according to a scientific methodology, may be useful instruments for the knowledge and recognition of the structure walls in all their complexity. As an example, we report some elaborations carried out on a historic architecture, the House of the Knights of Rhodes in the Forum of Augustus, where the architectural transformations, distributed in an extremely extended period, have led to a large number of stratifications, difficult to decode.