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Today, moving from a two-dimensional environment to a more advanced interactive three-dimensional (3D) environment in the industries of architecture, engineering, and construction has become one of the most significant topics of interest. This is due to several primary advantages that the 3D environment can offer. Building information modeling (BIM) can be used as a highly advanced system to present a desired reality in a 3D interactive environment accompanied with 3D reality captured data, such as the point cloud data. As such, these 3D environments can be employed for more advanced uses, such as virtual reality and augmented reality technologies (VR and AR). Recently, BIM has been employed in the context of heritage (known as HBIM, or Heritage Building Information Modeling) for different purposes, such as to provide as-built information with the ability to interact with the end user and uploading information (e.g., historical photographs, documents about materials, or any past restoration projects) into the BIM model. This research will focus on providing an interactive rich virtual 3D model for heritage management. This virtual environment can be employed in cultural tourism and used for the abovementioned purposes. The research project has been adopted in the case of the Zainal Historical House (Bayt Zainal) located in the Historic District of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This house is described as one of the significant historical buildings in the historic district. The key aim for selecting this case study is to bridge the gap in architectural knowledge regarding these heritage buildings and their hybrid structural systems (i.e., integration of steel or concrete with the traditional “Mangbi” stone technique).

This paper considers the potential of using the documentation approach proposed for the heritage buildings in Historic Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (as a case study) by using the close-range photogrammetry / the Architectural Photogrammetry techniques as a new academic experiment in digital architectural heritage education. Moreover, different than most of engineering educational techniques related to architecture education, this paper will be focusing on the 3-D data acquisition technology as a tool to document and to learn the principals of the digital architectural heritage documentation. The objective of this research is to integrate the 3-D modelling and visualisation knowledge for the purposes of identifying, designing and evaluating an effective engineering educational experiment. Furthermore, the students will learn and understand the characteristics of the historical building while learning more advanced 3-D modelling and visualisation techniques. It can be argued that many of these technologies alone are difficult to improve the education; therefore, it is important to integrate them in an educational framework. This should be in line with the educational ethos of the academic discipline. Recently, a number of these technologies and methods have been effectively used in education sectors and other purposes; such as in the virtual museum. However, these methods are not directly coincided with the traditional education and teaching architecture. This research will be introduced the proposed approach as a new academic experiment in the architecture education sector. The new teaching approach will be based on the Architectural Photogrammetry to provide semantically rich models. The academic experiment will require students to have suitable knowledge in both Photogrammetry applications to engage with the process.

There are multiple methods available for documenting heritage buildings that have significant cultural importance in the society. However, selection of a particular method varies from one technique to another according to the requirements of documenting the heritage buildings. Generally, most organizations depend on financial supports to be able to begin their project in documenting particular buildings. Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) systems are widely used for detailing 3-dimensioanl data captured from an object (i.e., historical buildings in particular). In this study, TLS system has been selected to carry out the surveying and architectural documentation process of the Hazzazi House as a case study. This research aims to provide the architects and professionals with a complete capture of architectural heritage sites via combined terrestrial laser scanner and traditional survey methodology to document the heritage houses in old Jeddah in order to overcome financial shortages while obtaining quality resolution at the same time. Specifically, the presented methodology assists in producing comprehensive architectural documentation of heritage houses in the area of historic Jeddah with the required quality and lower financial burden. This method may be applicable in similar cases in the Middle Eastern countries to set up conservation strategies of old heritage buildings across the region.

The heritage buildings in historic Jeddah City face serious issues related to their management, conservation, documentation and monitoring of this important building sector. In recent years, incorporation of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and heritage recording have been presented as Heritage BIM ‘HBIM’, which is now a technique used to deal more efficiently with the tasks of management and documentation of these historic buildings. The most important issues that can affect this method are the modelling methods and determining the level of development (LoD), which can cause delays in project delivery times. This paper examines Heritage BIM for heritage buildings in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Both the manual and semi-automatic modelling methods are considered in this study, in addition to employing Hijazi Architectural Object Library (HAOL), focussing upon two main factors: the ‘As-built’ level of development (LoD) and project delivery time (PDT) from the architecture engineering perspective.

As with many historical buildings around the world, building façades are of special interest; moreover, the details of such windows, stonework, and ornaments give each historic building its individual character. Each object of these buildings must be classified in an architectural object library. Recently, a number of researches have been focusing on this topic in Europe and Canada. From this standpoint, the Hijazi Architectural Objects Library (HAOL) has reproduced Hijazi elements as 3D computer models, which are modelled using a Revit Family (RFA). The HAOL will be dependent on the image survey and point cloud data. The Hijazi Object such as Roshan and Mashrabiyah, become as vocabulary of many Islamic cities in the Hijazi region such as Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, and even for a number of Islamic historic cities such as Istanbul and Cairo. These architectural vocabularies are the main cause of the beauty of these heritage. However, there is a big gap in both the Islamic architectural library and the Hijazi architectural library to provide these unique elements. Besides, both Islamic and Hijazi architecture contains a huge amount of information which has not yet been digitally classified according to period and styles. Due to this issue, this paper will be focusing on developing of Heritage BIM (HBIM) standards and the HAOL library to reduce the cost and the delivering time for heritage and new projects that involve in Hijazi architectural styles. Through this paper, the fundamentals of Hijazi architecture informatics will be provided via developing framework for HBIM models and standards. This framework will provide schema and critical information, for example, classifying the different shapes, models, and forms of structure, construction, and ornamentation of Hijazi architecture in order to digitalize parametric building identity.

The theory of using Building Information Modelling "BIM" has been used in several Heritage places in the worldwide, in the case of conserving, documenting, managing, and creating full engineering drawings and information. However, one of the most serious issues that facing many experts in order to use the Historical Building Information Modelling "HBIM", is creating the complicated architectural elements of these Historical buildings. In fact, many of these outstanding architectural elements have been designed and created in the site to fit the exact location. Similarly, this issue has been faced the experts in Old Jeddah in order to use the BIM method for Old Jeddah historical Building. Moreover, The Saudi Arabian City has a long history as it contains large number of historic houses and buildings that were built since the 16th century. Furthermore, the BIM model of the historical building in Old Jeddah always take a lot of time, due to the unique of Hijazi architectural elements and no such elements library, which have been took a lot of time to be modelled. This paper will focus on building the Hijazi architectural elements library based on laser scanner and image survey data. This solution will reduce the time to complete the HBIM model and offering in depth and rich digital architectural elements library to be used in any heritage projects in Al-Balad district, Jeddah City.