MARIE SALDAÑA
I explore the borderlands of history, data, design.
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CAVE AND CITY
Magnesia on the Maeander was a Greco-Roman city located in what is today western Turkey. Some of the city's monumental buildings are still visible on the site, but most of the city's streets, houses, and many other public buildings have been lost or remain unexcavated. This project seeks to reconstruct Magnesia's urban plan, examine how it changed over time, and explore its relationship to the surrounding landscape. The project makes use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and procedural 3D modeling to bring together archaeological, geographic, textual, and visual data to create a holistic analysis of the city and its environment.
The project comprises three main research foci: The architectural evolution of the city over time; the city's ritual connections with the surrounding landscape, particularly a cave sanctuary dedicated to Apollo; and the development of a digital research workflow centered on procedural modeling.
This workflow resulted in the development of the Roman City Ruleset, a library of procedural rules for Esri CityEngine that can be used to generate urban models of Greco-Roman cities, using site-specific GIS and architectural data. The ruleset was used in a number of collaborations with researchers in the US and internationally, to produce models of Republican and Augustan Rome; Vulci, Italy; Rhodes, Greece; and Nysa, Turkey.
The work was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation in Architecture, “Cave and City: A Procedural Reconstruction of the Urban Topography of Magnesia on the Maeander.” (University of California, Los Angeles, 2015).
Related Activities
“An Integrated Approach to the Procedural Modeling of Ancient Cities and Buildings” Journal Article, 2015
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol.30, Supplement 1, pp.48-63.
| “Holistic
Urban Modeling for Experimental Reconstruction”Invited Talk, 2015 Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, April 10. |
Fortier PrizeAlliance of Digital Humanities Organizations International Conference, Lausanne, Switzerland
Award for best paper by a young scholar, 2014
“An Integrated Approach to the Procedural Modeling of Ancient Cities and Buildings.”
Dissertation Year Fellowship 2014
Graduate Division, University of California, Los Angeles
“Procedural Modeling for Rapid-Prototyping of Multiple Building Phases and Hypothetical Reconstructions of Early Rome” Conference Proceedings, 2013
International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol. XL-5/W1.
“Procedural Modeling for Rapid-Prototyping of Multiple Building Phases and Hypothetical Reconstructions of Early Rome” Conference Presentation, 2013
5th International Workshop 3D Virtual Reconstruction and Visualization of Complex Architectures, Trento, Italy, Feb.24-25.
“Modeling Historical Cities in the Digital Age” Conference Presentation, 2012
Society of Architectural Historians Annual International Conference, Detroit, April 20.
CollaborationsDiane Favro, Architecture & Urban Design, UCLA
Chris Johanson, Classics, UCLA
Mauricio Forte, Archaeology, Duke University
Ruth Bielfeldt, Archaeology, LMU München
Orhan Bingöl, Archaeology, Ankara University