Andrew Runde

The Thick Interface: Digitally Modeling The Hawa Mahal From A Distance One of the greatest challenges in analyzing the world’s monuments is the frequent inability to view them firsthand — this has been especially true in the wake of COVID-19. Consequently, accessing secondhand information on such monuments remotely or utilizing published graphics become the only practical alternatives. An excellent resource for creating models with this available secondhand information is Photomodeler, which grants the ability to generate 3D models from photographs (presumable accessed online). The software, however, has many limitations: for example, the program looks for planar surfaces, ideally situated at 90 degrees to one another, with all photos containing a known focal length. Using crowd-sourced images on complex structures such as the Hawa Mahal (Jaipur, India) offer few of these requirements, and as a result the created models embody “incompleteness”. Counterintuitively, comparing these skewed representations reflects and gives meaning beyond simple dimensions to the building to which they refer. Thus, in taking the Hawa Mahal as a precedent, studies of incompleteness could be extended to all monuments to explore their generative potential and deeper meaning gleaned during their imperfect recreation. Ultimately, the idea of incompleteness reveals the underlying question: to what degree does the model’s “truth” or “success” reside in its origins, in the process of its construction, or in its final form?