Mario Santana Quintero

Harnessing Digital Workflows for Preserving Heritage
Mario Santana Quintero, Assistant Professor of Architectural Conservation and Sustainability, Carleton University (Canada)

In contemporary heritage places preservation, digital workflows are increasingly being used as tools for capturing, generating, visualizing, managing and replicating these important resources. These heritage places are at imminent risk from inherent and external causes, which can drastically and/or slowly damage tangible defining features. The aim of this lecture is to provide awareness for implementing effective acquisition of posterity records in order to ensure the appropriate collection, processing and sharing of heritage information.

A selected number of international first-hand heritage recording projects will be presented (eg. Bagan, Petra, Kasbah of Taourirt, and Kuno Tambo), which has been developed in collaboration with intergovernmental organizations, private foundations, governments, and consulting companies. Also the constraints (increasing threats and fragmentation of data), challenges (scale enlargement and development of new themes in cultural heritage), and perspectives (increasing pace of innovation, in cultural heritage presentation) will be discussed considering the international framework and current debate.

Mario Santana Quintero is an assistant professor on Architectural Conservation and Sustainability at department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Carleton University. He is also the Director of the NSERC Create program “Engineering Students Supporting Heritage and Sustainability (HERITAGEENGINEERING)” based at the Carleton immersive Media Studio Lab (CIMS). He has an architectural degree, holding a master in conservation of historic buildings and towns and a PhD in Engineering from the R. Lemaire International Centre for Conservation (University of Leuven, Belgium). He is also a guest professor at the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation (University of Leuven).

These past years he has been teaching at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico) and Universidad de Cuenca (Ecuador). In the past, he was a Professor at the University College St Lieven and lecturer at the University of Aachen RWTH and the Historic Preservation Programme at the University of Pennsylvania between 2006 and 2011. Along with his academic activities, he serves as ICOMOS Board member and he is the past president of the ICOMOS Scientific Committee on Heritage Documentation (CIPA). Furthermore, he has collaborated in several international projects in the field of heritage documentation for UNESCO, The Getty Conservation Institute, ICCROM, World Monuments Fund, UNDP, Welfare Association, and the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage.