BEYOND GRAPHICS: INFORMATION - An Overview of Infovis Practices in the Field of the Architectural Heritage

Understanding and representing the evolution of architectural artefacts over time requires a careful examination of heterogeneous, questionable pieces of data. Accordingly, our position is that computer graphics can and will support such investigation if and only if they are designed, above all, as information visualisation disposals (may the visual result be realistic or not). But contemporary practices often fail to reach this goal. In this paper, we propose possible explanations, and argue why we believe the problem has more to do with a lack of appropriate methodology than with technologies. As an answer, we introduce a global methodological framework that claims to be at the intersection of figurative architectural representation and of information visualisation. We finally back up this claim by presenting past and contemporary examples showing there has been a bridge between the above mentioned fields, a bridge that we today need to rebuild with or against computer technologies.