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Beckford’s Ride: The Reconstruction of Historic Landscape

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Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture

Part of the book series: Springer Series on Cultural Computing ((SSCC))

Abstract

William Beckford (1760–1844) built a lookout tower and landscape garden in Bath, now almost completely vanished beneath subsequent buildings. Referring to archival documents and a few traces on the ground, we used an advanced video-game engine to reconstruct the landscape, architecture and planting as it was around 1840, for an interactive installation in the Beckford Tower Museum. Bespoke software was developed to handle the wide views and rich planting. The resulting virtual environment succeeds in relating the lost landscape to the intentions and taste of its creator, and to surviving fragments in the real world. It has enhanced the museum visitor’s experience in several ways.

This chapter is an updated and extended version of the following paper, published here with kind permission of the Chartered Institute for IT (BCS) and of EVA London Conferences: P. Richens and M. Harney, “Reconstruction of historic landscapes.” In S. Dunn, J. P. Bowen, and K. Ng (eds.). EVA London 2011 Conference Proceedings. Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC), British Computer Society, 2011. http://www.bcs.org/ewic/eva2011 (accessed 26 May 2013).

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Acknowledgments

The project was funded by the Beckford Tower Trust with the help of a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Unpublished reports and bibliographies commissioned by the Trust were invaluable: Pat Hughes on the documentary history of the Tower, Jerry Sampson’s Archaeological survey of the Tower, and A S N Lewis and J L Phibbs of Debois Landscape Survey Group on the Landscape surrounding the Tower. Modelling was carried out by three architecture students: James Bailey, Joe Mummery, and Stephan Wasserman-Fry. Paul Shepherd and Simon Hartley helped with programming and animation. John Treddinick pioneered the use of CryEngine for the Prior Park project. DTMs were supplied by Digimap, WIST and NEXTMap, Aerial Photography by Google Earth. Ambient sounds came from the Freesound Project. Additional programming used the Processing environment. Photosculpt provided by Hippolyte Mounier. CryEngine 3 was provided under an academic license from Crytek GmbH Frankfurt.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture, Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK

    Paul Richens & Marion Harney

Authors
  1. Paul Richens
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  2. Marion Harney
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Correspondence to Paul Richens .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, London South Bank University, London, United Kingdom

    Jonathan P. Bowen

  2. Department of Archaeology, University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Suzanne Keene

  3. School of Computing & School of Music, University of Leeds, Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music (ICSRiM), Leeds, United Kingdom

    Kia Ng

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Richens, P., Harney, M. (2013). Beckford’s Ride: The Reconstruction of Historic Landscape. In: Bowen, J., Keene, S., Ng, K. (eds) Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5406-8_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5406-8_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-5405-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-5406-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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