PARAMETRIC MODELLING (BIM) FOR THE DOCUMENTATION OF VERNACULAR CONSTRUCTION METHODS: A BIM MODEL FOR THE COMMISSARIAT BUILDING, OTTAWA, CANADA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Whether a house of worship or a simple farmhouse, the fabrication of a building reveals both the unspoken cultural aspirations of the builder and the inevitable exigencies of the construction process. In other-words, why buildings are made is intimately and inevitably associated with how buildings are made. Nowhere is this more evident than in vernacular architecture. At the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) we are concerned that the de-population of Canada's rural areas, paucity of specialized tradespersons, and increasing complexity of building codes threaten the sustainability of this invaluable cultural resource. For current and future generations, the quantitative and qualitative values of traditional methods of construction are essential for an inclusive cultural memory. More practically, and equally pressing, an operational knowledge of these technologies is essential for the conservation of our built heritage. To address these concerns, CIMS has launched a number of research initiatives over the past five years that explore novel protocols for the documentation and dissemination of knowledge related to traditional methods of construction. Our current project, Cultural Diversity and Material Imagination in Canadian Architecture (CDMICA), made possible through funding from Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), explores the potential of building information modelling (BIM) within the context of a web-based environment. In this paper, we discuss our work-to-date on the development of a web-based library of BIM details that is referenced to ''typical'' assemblies culled from 19C and early 20C construction manuals. The parametric potential of these ''typical'' details is further refined by evidence from the documentation of ''specific'' details studied during comprehensive surveys of extant heritage buildings. Here, we consider a BIM of the roof truss assembly of one of the oldest buildings in Canada's national capital – the Commissariat Building and current home to the Bytown Museum – as a case study within the CDMICA project.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".