TOPOGRAPHIC AND PHOTOGRAMMETRIC STUDIES OF THE BEARING STRUCTURES OF THE CAPPELLA DEI PRINCIPI OF FLORENCE

For the conservative restoration of historical buildings and cultural Heritage, it is crucial to compose a complete registration of structural data to verify many interdisciplinary and complex problems that involve different scaled parameters. For an extensive monitoring pattern, direct transducers and high precision levelling on structural nodes may detect any variations expressed in fractions of millimeters, but these data have to be correlated with other parameters expressed in centimeters or meters and spread on large surfaces (i.e a complete crack map of a building). A critical reading of structural data needs 3D restitutions and other graphical representations, as well as mathematical routine elaborations. Nowadays specific softwares offer a concrete possibility to make use of many different data sets in a single environment. Graphical and numerical data could interact at different model scales so that resulting 3D plotting elaborations may show several complex structural correlations. Similar guide-lines previously experienced for the Cupola di S. Maria del Fiore and for the Battistero di S.Giovanni in Florence were employed since the first phase of the study planned for the restauration works of the Cappella dei Principi di San Lorenzo. The acquisition process of technical data was carried out to obtain a complete integration among photogrammetric surveys and other consolidate structural investigations. Graphical elaborations derived by this approach show a kind of crowding of interesting pieces of information on some critical structural nodes in concordance to specific boundary elements of the SAP building model.