Digital Humanities for Increasing Disaster Resilience in Art Nouveau and Modernist Buildings

Abstract

The paper will focus on the topic of adapting digital humanities methods from architectural history to technical history, considering mapping and image analysis for increasing disaster resilience in Art Nouveau and Modernist buildings in different geographical areas—including lessons from Europe to the USA. The project proposes the transformation of the collection of photographs of early 20th-century architecture gathered by the applicant over about 30 years of travel into a database by answering the research question on how threats from the hazards of earthquakes, floods, and fires can be answered by taking into account the local culture in the European countries covered, for buildings from a period when the architecture styles were already global at that time. For this purpose, digital humanities methods of image annotation (including architectural volumetric analysis) and mapping are employed. From the knowledge gathered and the resulting database, a prototyping ontology and taxonomy is derived. This outcome can be further developed into a set of evaluation criteria, considering the decisions that can be taken to prioritize the retrofit interventions depending on the geographic positions of the buildings.

1. Introduction

1.1. Topic

Heidegger’s philosophy refers to the spirit of the place and how local shapes were adapted, while Deleuze’s hints to something totally different, briefly mentioned above, namely how the striation of the urban space results in shapes [1], while a disaster smoothes it. The phenomenology of Heidegger (Hopkins [2]) comes into question when considering the local culture related to hazards (stage 3 of the project), and it includes looking to Christopher Alexander’s [3] “Pattern language” on applying phenomenology to architecture and how this translates with its hyperlink organization in current digital humanities with the more sophisticated techniques presented above, including ontology (stage 2 of the project) (Jannidis et al. [4]).

The aim of this project is to perform cross-country comparisons of which retrofit measures are suitable or even already included in the local shape of the buildings. For example, Greece uses the Tony Garnier regular shape. In Romania, however, because the parcels were generated through the cut of boulevards, the shapes are irregular. Romania and some of the similar fascist buildings in Italy share a highlighted corner. These determine different vulnerabilities to earthquakes and, in a rapid visual screening, they can be easily recognized. However, since field work might be limited in time, additional computer work will improve the analysis. Here, the digital humanities aspect comes into work through image annotation. Map creation is necessary to organize the database. Network analysis refers mainly to the cross-frontier migration of ideas. A comparison on which the first author has already focused on in her doctorate is the one between Italy and Romania. Some might say that a comparison between France and Romania is better and well-known, but that is the point and beauty of this project, namely to bring up lesser known study cases. A lot of famous Romanian architects have studied in Italy. This has had a huge impact in their work design. Furthermore, a few Italian architects immigrated to Romania. It is about investigating these networks and how the architectural language might have been imported/exported.

1.2. Significance of Study and Literature Review—Contextualization of the Topic

This includes not only climate change but also earthquakes. Disaster research has gained ground internationally since the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) of the United Nations in the 1990s. However, since that time, the way this research was tackled has changed. In the 1990s, disaster management was seen as a combination between natural sciences research and engineering research, between the causes of disasters (study of the hazards) and engineering measures, in order to minimize the risk by mainly reducing physical vulnerability. Gradually, social sciences were also introduced in the methodology, with the aim of minimizing social vulnerability. Starting 20 years ago (since the beginning of the millennium), social sciences became part of the discussion regarding disaster management and are represented nowadays as such in a programme section in natural hazards at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly (NH9 “Natural hazards and society”). In this manner, the issue of costs also started to be tackled as part of the management plan. Despite the early start of research in this field, up until today, the approaches to the economics of retrofit are sparse, as previously studied by the first author and shown in a recent paper by Bostenaru [5].

The European Commission has been encouraging involving social sciences and humanities (SSH) into research related to disaster management. As such, a funding scheme (H20200) [6] has supported projects at the intersection between cultural heritage, disaster management, and IT. In Horizon Europe, these are supported by EISMEA and CINEA or the EU mission Adaptation to Climate Change, under LIFE or NEB (New European Bauhaus). Despite the recent opportunities, at the level of European funding and world associations running conferences in the field of disasters, the contribution of humanities is less recognized. The vulnerability of the early 20th century heritage is even less acknowledged, as this heritage is recent and often lacks the listed monument status. However, for specific places or countries, there are differences, such as in the case of Italy, where extensive knowledge in heritage protection and valuation extends to its rich stock of Modernist buildings. However, the considered approaches from a humanities perspective are still rare and more recent. Gerrit Jasper Schenk (Wieczorek et al. [7], Schenk [8]) is analyzing the images of disasters in history, an approach which is reserved not only to historians, as it has been already addressed by (Kozak and Cernak [9]). These images are not limited to photographs, a type of approach followed by the German art history institutes from Rome and Florence (Belmonte et al. [10]) by using the archives found in their institutes. In a context in which war images were the subject of a debate in 2016 and immediately after, these groups, like the group of Gerrit Schenk (Bauch and Schenk [11] and Birken [12]), are mainly dealing with images of natural hazards, including earthquakes and floods. Some other uncommon approaches took place in architecture and architecture history through the initiative “Tickle your catastrophe” in Gent, Belgium (Le Roy et al. [13]).

The efforts of associations such as DOCOMOMO or the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on 20th century heritage—ISC20C—to protect this heritage were separate from disaster mitigation. More recently, several ICOMOS international scientific committees (ISCARSAH and International Scientific Committee on Risk Preparedness—ICORP) joined efforts, together with the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), in order to handle the effects of disaster risk management on cultural heritage. Another issue is that the interdisciplinary dialogue is also more difficult at the university level. Newer fields of study, such as digital humanities, might help with incorporating approaches from different disciplines. Disaster management is a top priority in the research strategy regarding the future of Romanian research (MEC [14]). At the turn of the millennium, engineering approaches such as those used by the collaborative research centre “Strong earthquakes” of the German Research Foundation (SFB 461) did look at the built substance of protected constructed areas in the centre of Bucharest. For example, when designing retrofit measures for the so-called “Modernist Boulevard”, they looked at the architectural heritage as being a “common” one.

Ornelas et al. [15] proposed a Monitoring and Assessment Heritage Tool, as monitoring is essential in the case of disasters, for example, for earthquakes. The tool allows for the classification of heritage, which can lead, in our case, to the prioritization of interventions, in accordance with the decision-making system that is part of our research outside of this article’s scope. Gara et al. [16] make use of a key contemporary tool, artificial intelligence, a logical extension of the digital humanities approach in our research and which was addressed in this paper to create scenarios related more to the urban scale than to the building scale and structure. If in the past, the transition from deterministic to probabilistic study used tools such as Monte Carlo simulations, today, artificial intelligence can contribute to the generalization of the solution. This can also serve Internet of Things systems, such as structural health monitoring systems.

1.3. Research Question

How far the so-called other Modernisms (DOCOMOMO conference in Ankara, 2006)/other Art Nouveau styles are different from the canonical Modernism and rooted in the vernacular traditions of European countries influence which retrofit decisions can be taken against earthquakes, floods, and fires (similar to the local seismic culture, it can be regarded as a local flood culture and a local wildfire culture).

It is this local culture that may render them more resilient because in Portugal, for example, we have the “Pombalino” building, which was a braced timber construction that was used for rebuilding Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake. And we have, for example, braced timber-based reinforced concrete constructions by some modernist in Newcross (Figure 1). Bracing with steel or with dissipative devices is used in retrofitting today, applied since the 1980s in Japan (Higashi et al. [17]) and Mexico (Del Valle [18], as shown by Foutch et al. [19], as well as post-tensioned diagonals, as shown by Miranda and Bertero [20]). In Italy, two schools from Ancona, namely rationalist buildings from the 1950s, were retrofitted by FIP Industriale in 2000, involving the Gentile Fermi in Fabriano, following the 1997 earthquake in Umbria Marche and the Liceo Classico Perticari in Senigallia, which was affected by the 2002 Molise earthquake. More recent, another two schools in Potenza, Scuola Domiziano Viola and Luigi la Vista, were reinforced in 2010. Historically, near Potenza in Basilicata, Casa Baraccata was designed as an earthquake-resilient solution in 1783, proposing wood diagonals. There are also other in-depth case studies in Rome, Lisbon (in Figure 1a; Casa Pombalina), and Bucharest (in Figure 1b; a building from ca. 1950 in this city).

These nuances and the reasons behind them led to the following research question: how does local culture (learning from vernacular) influence the “other Modernisms” in response to earthquakes, floods, and fires? For Modernism, one geographical area for which local adaptations are being investigated is the Mediterranean, where the Cyclades vernacular, affected by the wildfires in 2021 [21], was a starting point for the Modernism of Adolf Loos in Vienna (Figure 2) and of Le Corbusier in France; another example is the “cula” in Oltenia (Romania) and Romanian Modernism. Local variations contemporary to Art Nouveau, such as the Neo-Romanian style, also used elements of the cula. The geographic space to look for genuine Art Nouveau is in Central and Eastern Europe, a less investigated area for this type of research.

The vernacular origins of Modernism in Romania will be presented in the Results section.

Figure 3 is not a fortified church, but it is this idea with churches in vernacular tradition which was taken. It seems that the museum of vernacular architecture in Budapest was taken as an example for a church by Károly Kós, who was an architect of the National Romantic style, which is contemporary to Art Nouveau in Transylvania. So, it was a Hungarian minority architecture taken as a model of a national identity in the early 20th century.

1.4. Research Objectives

Out of all the research objectives of the project, this paper aims to achieve the following:

Objective 1: Develop an instrument of comparison of the differences between the variations in these international styles in the above-mentioned locations. The database will be suitable for digital humanities analysis methods as well, such as mapping and image annotation.

Objective 2: Investigate the applicability of selected retrofit measures according to the local culture of disaster resilience and vulnerability to earthquakes, floods, and fire hazards. More specifically, during retrofitting interventions, the preservation of the architectural and environmental values of the buildings, that of the esthetics according to Vitruvius, and that of the beauty according to NEB, must be ensured. This starts from studying the spirit of the place, through building surveys and design drawings, sketches, and a photographic portfolio (see Section 3.2).

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Materials

The research presented in this paper is mainly about the first stage of the project, dealing with documentation. Field trips encompassed photography as a research means in architecture and urban planning, as shown by Eftenie [22], as it led to the perception of it. Also, a database of photographs taken previously by the authors was used. Besides photography, an even more ancient type of travel record of architect’s trips is drawings, be it perspective drawing or building surveys. It includes the imaginary drawing of projects for a site kept in archives. This was investigated as well. For the purpose of this study, photography and drawing equipment was purchased in frame of the project. This included slide scanners for scanning old slides, a drone to build aerial images and also map them with Drone2Map and beyond in ArcGIS (ESRI, Redlands, CA, USA), a thermoscanner (flirONEpro, Flir, Wilsonville, OR, USA) to be able to recognize the materials for Rapid Visual Screening [23] using building physics principles, a Leica Disto (Leica Geosystems AG, Heerbrugg, Switzerland) for measurements which could fly in the building survey as shown by Bostenaru and Bourlotos [24], and finally tablets for digital drawings on site, as well as artistic drawings which will be converted into digital format. In fact, the approach of the project is to use a so-called “integral planning” [25] approach, which means that specialist engineering is involved from an early stage of design and planning according to the stakeholders involved in decision-making in the form of retrofit prioritization. It ranges from the building survey/archive research and digitalization for the architect to the structural engineering finite element modelling for the engineer, as well as the cost estimation and calculation, including devices, for the investor up to user involvement. This can be achieved using Heritage Building Information Modelling (HBIM) and geoBIM (to connect to planning). Building information modelling started by coupling drawing lines to building elements represented in CAD systems, which could be semantically enriched. HBIM actually adapts this from newly designed buildings to existing buildings with all their characteristics as gathered by a survey, also including information when available, as for the more recent 20th century heritage from various types of archives. The key issue is related to the semantic enrichment, which can be performed in this case at the building scale, as it is carried out in GISs at the urban scale. In the process of elaborating the ontologies for resilience to floods, fires, and earthquakes, there was an extensive involvement of semantic enrichment aspects.

Vitruvian principles can be connected today to the New European Bauhaus principles, following the same stakeholders, namely the architect (beautiful), the engineer (sustainable/resilient), the user (inclusive), and finally the investor (circular economy).

The third pillar of documentation, the secondary literature, is not presented separately as such, but it is present throughout the paper starting from the literature review and as references. In frame of the project, these references were gathered in a Zotero database which is published on the website.

2.2. Methods

The research carried out resulted in the implementation of the 30-month project “Future on the Past: From early 20th century architecture photography collection to database: digital humanities applied to investigate local seismic, flood, fire culture” (www.future-on-the-past.eu) (Figure 4).

A three-stage approach was selected for the research. Stage 1, documentation, involved three pillars, namely field trips (including photography and architecture museums contemporary to the period analyzed); archive research (building approval plans, historic photography/drawings, catastrophe photography) as a direct cognitive investigation; and literature research, including related European projects, as an indirect cognitive investigation. Stage 2 involved the analysis of data and data processing; designing the taxonomy and ontology; image annotation according to macro-elements in order to create 3D models, mapping, and story maps; and an investigation of innovation in containing different levels of detail and zooming to also accommodate the 3D models. Stage 3 was centred around setting up a decision system, considering actors that correspond to the qualities of the Vitruvian built environment or, more recently, those stated by NEB.

References were made to the initial research hypothesis (local culture determining resilient interventions for global architecture styles which responded to the challenges of the Bauhaus), field trips to the early 20th century, and to the vernacular architecture which inspired it. Archive research of these (photographs, drawings), including museum visits, documented both resilient features and vulnerability. Mapping of the locations was performed in order to allow for field trips for fellow researchers. The ontology of decisions in the particular case of floods relates to climate change and to environmental-scale interventions, as in the New European Bauhaus, and not only to buildings or in rural areas, like the vernacular, which will be the subject of a companion paper.

The research hypothesis is an assumption. It will be followed by observation (below) and then by verification (ex. value and attribute mapping for the decision, annotating).

In this paper, the first stage will be presented.

The buildings are subdivided into macro-elements according to the method of Lagomarsino and Giovinazzi [26] to determine possible collapse mechanisms during earthquakes. Podestà and Romano [27] continued the first author’s work, which was previously performed in the CA’REDIVIVUS project through their work on a doctorate by employing this method to the heritage subject of their paper. The spatial model can be translated to a simplified 3D model for digital representation (on the map) and annotation (ex. for Modernist buildings in Bucharest; Marcel Iancu and his formal alphabet, see Ioan [28]).

An investigation of the maps developed by Nolli (18th century) [29], Lynch [30], psychogeography (Debord [31]), Caniggia [32], and Muratori [33,34] (Cataldi [35]) will be a prerequisite for maps to be developed in the project with digital means (zoom from landmarks to general plans of common buildings possible in different levels of detail).

Story maps were created in synergy with the COST action “Writing urban places” (Machado e Moura et al. [36]) working group on case studies (e.g., for arch. Marcel Iancu, see Bostenaru [37]). The above-mentioned investigation methods are how a story is told with a map. Network analysis (space syntax, Hillier and Hanson [38]) was an adopted method in order to analyze the correct position of the buildings within the cities. ORA-LITE (v3.0.9.179, Pittsburgh, PA, USA) (A Toolkit for Dynamic Network Analysis and Visualization) (Carley [39]) and Gephi 0.9.2 (The Gephi Consortium, France) was used to connect influences between the architecture in different countries after performing a comparative analysis, since they allow for network visualization independent of the year, as usually seen in historic social network analysis.

Methods included highlighting comprehensibility with an investigation of the differences between the requirements for retrofit methods in different countries based on former performance in disasters. Examples such as that by Bostenaru [40,41] show that early examples also coped with earthquakes and floods, so some buildings are resilient and some are vulnerable. Lessons from the resilient ones will lead to sustainable solutions for the vulnerable ones.

Instruments included database use methods, such as computer-based analysis according to digital humanities methods of the items in the database (mapping, image annotation, etc.) For the database for each building, the information included at least the location, architect, time of construction, and lifetime of the architect. For location, both location maps and ArcGIS story maps are used. Both geographical location and the network of architects were visualized with network methods (ORA and Gephi), generating various graphs to show interdependencies in the city where the buildings are, as well as cross-city and cross-country. For this, the research question regarding disaster resilience is of help. For the mapping stage, work was carried out on how to zoom between different scales from city, zone, and building in digital maps. That is the alternative to the maps of the 1960s (Lynch [30], psycho-geography, Muratori [33,34], and Caniggia [32]), considered innovative at the time, of which some lost their significance as they led to the loss of valuable built fabric (the Bolognese school). In a recent PhD thesis by Stoica [42], she approached the issue of vulnerable heritage in the centre of Bucharest through the lens of the school of morphology, which also had Muratori and Caniggia as its representatives. Operational history at the urban scale is something new compared to the object restoration practised in the 19th century, but it can be useful for reducing vulnerability by designing resilient textures in the general urban plan. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the term “resilience” originates from the Latin resilire, meaning to jump back. Climate resilience, including the wildfires in the case studies of this paper, is a form of ecological resilience.

A 2025 PhD thesis (Șopârleanu [43]) applies this method to the Popa Nan neighbourhood, and drawing as investigation method in this context was also considered (Șopârleanu [44]). This comes from the plans of Bucharest, as analyzed by Harhoiu [45]. It then continues with drawing the plans of the ground floor, as already started for public spaces by Nolli [29] and continued in the works of Muratori [33,34] and Caniggia [32] as serving as an example for Vienna for Psenner [46] compared to Berlin, Paris, Rome, Budapest, and Prague, also including Rome for Nolli and Muratori [34]. Both theses build on the work of Giovannoni, who was also influential in the Carta di Atene [47], defining how the restoration of cultural heritage shall be in case of danger or destruction, which built the basis of Carta Italiana di Restauro ([48] papers accompanying an anniversary exhibition of Giovannoni [49] showing drawings, sketches, and photographs at Accademia di San Luca; model for the foreign academies in Rome). On the basis of Carta Italiana di Restauro, the first Charter of Gubbio [50] was released, followed by the widely adopted Venice Charter [51]. After the adoption in the 1970s of the concept of “integrated conservation” through the European Charter of Architectural Heritage [52] and the Declaration of Amsterdam [53] during the European Heritage Year 1975, in 1990, the Second Gubbio Charter (Nuova Carta di Gubbio) [54] promoted the definition of the “historic urban territory”, which includes urban areas and suburbs, as well as rural areas and built landscapes. All these charters are cited on a page of the Getty Research Institute, which was evacuated but resisted the fire in the case study in this paper, with all the heritage remaining intact. The year 2018 was another year of the European Cultural Heritage. The Heracles “HEritage Resilience Against CLimate Events on Site” European project [55], funded as described in the Introduction by the EASME for developing IT tools for protecting cultural heritage from hazards posed by climate change, reviewed these and other charters and run during this year. Case studies were exactly in Gubbio, an Umbrian municipality which became know through the Italian “Don Matteo” series and Heraklion in Crete with the Venetian fortress and the Knossos palace, one displaying reinforced concrete interventions, as allowed at that time by the Charter of Venice. The school of Giovannoni and followers is one of urban morphology. Urban morphology and typology are the basis of climate change adaptation in rural/vernacular/traditional architecture (being found also in urban settings).

In digital mapping, the new edition of ArcGIS story maps was used. Image annotation helped to generate online exhibits with ArcGIS story maps. The photographs were analyzed to identify characteristics of buildings similar to the preparation of maps with Lynch’s [30] method and psycho-geography. For this, the identification of landmarks among the elements of the building, those which give character in architecture language such as detail, are important. Detail is important in Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and the lack of ornamentation is apparent in Modernism. In Modernism, however, building and facade proportions gain importance as main instances of architectural esthetics. These proportions—the windows/walls ratio and rhythm of the facades—are also important for the resilience of the building. According to the research question, a quantitative survey was carried out additionally as rapid visual screening in order to apply knowledge when not gathering field data. Building the prototype of the database included scanning old images and adding metadata to images.

3. Results

3.1. Field Trips

Romanian culas are simplistic large villas for boyar families from the 16–18th centuries [56], located mainly in the Subcarpathian hills in West Muntenia and Oltenia regions, such as Măldărești, Vâlcea County. The culas in this village, documented by the first author on a field trip in 2023, are different in size, form, and appearance, as shown in Figure 5a (according to Ionescu [57], the new cula, 18th century), b (according to Ionescu [57], the old cula, also 18th century), and c (converted to a hotel) for Măldărești, with larger white-plastered buildings with generous openings on the upper floor, as well as in Figure 5e, showing a construction with no plaster in the Râmnicu Vâlcea village museum. While a and b are visitable as museums, c was converted into a hotel.

However, in the architectural language used, they had the same function, namely as fortified buildings used when the local people faced foreign (in particular Turkish and Tatar) invasions, similar in use to the fortified churches in Transylvania, some of which are UNESCO listed. The “Ion Mincu” University has developed a Centre of Study for Vernacular Architecture (Nistor [58]) in such a fortified church ensemble (Dealu Frumos) in Transylvania. People and their goods took refuge and needed both heavy protection walls and small openings in the first floors to lower the risks of penetration by the enemy. Tower-like construction elements, such as the larger windows and loggias on the upper levels, were needed for preventive observation and guarding. Grigore Ionescu [57], the author of a work dedicated to the study of Romanian architecture, said while referring to the cula that “Belonging to the type of citadel house, whose remote origin is to be sought in Persia and Asia Minor (…) related in idea to the fortified house, widespread during the Turkish rule in the Balkan countries, in Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, the Romanian cula is nevertheless a variant with many original features. It has taken on local forms and, by combining it with the old traditional Romanian house, has created a most interesting synthesis”. About the cula, there are historic secondary literature sources, as documented by Costiuc [56], regarding the definition or placing culas between national and Balkan-influenced architecture and also contemporary photography albums. Some other sources (Ionescu [57], Lăzărescu et al. [59], Drăguț, [60], Giurescu [61]) document the general Romanian history of architecture, these being also seminal works/encyclopedias. Also, in a US work [62] on Romania, the ones in Curțișoara (maybe Cartianu), Măldărești, and Pogojeni, mentioned in this work, are considered the most representative, although they are more spread out. The culas are on UNESCO’s tentative list [63].

“Enlighted Culas” (https://culeinlumina.ro/, accessed on 2 February 2025, Diaconescu [64]) was a project of the “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urban Planning to document the state of these buildings, of which some models are preserved in the university and to design their refurbishment, since not all of them are well conserved to the extent that some are in a state of ruin. The project also proposes one-day trip routes to explore some, and the ones documented so far are the result of following such a route. The cula in Figure 5d (according to Ionescu [57], second half of the 18th century) has a model placed in the hall of the university.

In Figure 5f–h, there are some Modernist buildings inspired from this. Figure 5f shows a block of flats, which has a tower reminding us of the cula. Figure 5g shows a power station by Duliu Marcu, which is following the same architecture (one such was recently converted into a dwelling, see Zipiși [65]). They are both Modernist buildings. To the “Patria” block of flats, which is the one in Figure 5f, it is so much to say that it was the first Modernist building in Bucharest, and it was, like a manifesto. It was designed by architect Horia Creangă, who openly affirmed taking the source of the culas because of their simple Modernist language, similar to the Cyclades [66]. Bostenaru and Jianu [66] presents in detail postwar Modernist architecture of Haralamb Georgescu, which will build the case study of this paper.

Figure 5h, an illustration to the research question, presents a cula-inspired building, designed by Romanian architect Richard Bordenache after his 3-year-long fellowship in Rome.

Tower-like buildings against invasions can also be found in many regions of Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Italy (in detail, see Bostenaru and Jianu [66]). For instance, the so-called Casa Torre in Pisa, Tuscany [67], documented by the first author on a 2024 field trip, is such an example (Figure 6). In the same region of Tuscany, the towers of San Gimignano are emblematic and were used as example and drawn in two versions by Haralamb Georgescu in the included case study. Other regions in Italy, not yet explored for this research, have particular versions.

Elements of these tower houses have later been incorporated into 20th century architecture styles, as in the case of the “corner towers” highlighting street intersections, which can be found extensively both in Modernist and Art Nouveau examples in many regions and for various functions such as residential, commercial, education (schools), or administrative buildings. One example is in Figure 7a, an image of an Art Nouveau building in Prague, the Czech Republic, boasting such an element. The city is one of the future case studies considered for further research on floods affecting buildings from the period, documented in the“Future on the Past” project and a follow-up investigation.

Figure 7b shows an instance of an architectural item, similar to the “Patria” building tower, referred to in Romania as an “accused corner”; it is part of a building by German architect Rudolf Fränkel in Bucharest, whose work has been dealt with more in detail by the research team.

The cula motif as a tower was also adopted by the Romanian variation in Art Nouveau, the New Romanian style. Valentin Mandache documented some from the architectural tours he guided [68]. One renowned example is the Vila Minovici, belonging to the Museum of Bucharest (Figure 8a). In fact, the upper so-called prispă, the loggia of the cula, sometimes presents the same Brâncovenesc origin of a three-lobed arch, which was typical for the New Romanian style.

Also, in the so-called Mediterranean style, there are cula-type towers [69] (Figure 8b). In this second volume of the work [69], the architectural language is also approached in a similar way to “other Modernism”, the Art Deco of Bucharest, in [70]. A scholarly work derived from PhD research presented the Mediterranean style in Bucharest [71]. This is important for our research, in which Bucharest is compared to Lisbon and Rome, both Mediterranean countries.

3.2. Archive Research

Archive research encompasses resources from various countries and types of institutions, including libraries, museums, and their digital humanities centres, not only archives.

Lascu [72] and Duculescu [73] talk about Romanian archives. Guccione [74,75] are guides to use archives around Rome, a place rich in funds, be it the Italian ones or those of the foreign academies, as Rome was a place of pilgership of architects.

Archive research principally concerns the following three main topics:

• Catastrophe photography.
• The life and work of architect Rudolf Fränkel. This Jewish–German architect emigrated to Romania and then went further to the UK and the US. A chapter has been written in a book launched in Berlin in Stage 1, and a chapter has been presented at a conference on Romania–US relationships in Stage 2.
• The life and work of architect Richard Bordenache. This architect studied for a while at the Romanian School in Rome. His son emigrated to Karlsruhe, Germany.
• Apart from this, the life and work of the Marcel and Iuliu Iancu brothers is also followed, but there has been enough secondary literature so far.

In Figure 9, examples are shown of how the drawings in the Romanian archives are presented. The blue one (as a Blaupause, as it is called in German; see the novel for the Bauhaus by Enzensberger [76], another case of “Writing urban places”, the literature about architecture), a blueprint, which is a copy process with a Cyano copier in which from transparent (called in Romanian calc, tracing paper) white lines are drawn on a blue background, a negative of the original, is a section from an archive from before 1920. The archive is preserved at the national archive in the Bucharest branch, and it presents the “Tinerimea Română” Palace by Virginia Haret, an early female architect who also studied in Rome but before Accademia di Romania was founded. Archive drawings of architects from the time of rapidograph India ink drawing instruments may contain negative drawings on black or other dark-coloured papers using white India ink (tuș alb in Romanian).

The other three are positive copies. One of the perspective drawings is of a building, drawn by Duliu Marcu. One of the designs is of a power station. And it presents the palace, which is an early reinforced concrete building transformed during Modernism because of Hennebique. The middle one is the “Adriatica” building, the one which is shown as a typical Modernist building by Rudolf Fränkel, and it is a floor plan. And the right one is a facade drawing of the little building. It is a typical Modernist building in Bucharest. And because other buildings were of lower heights, these blocks of flats had to recess in the upper floors. As all these drawings were submitted to the municipality of Bucharest for building construction approval, they are not original drawings but approval plans, copies (black lines for Adriatica, indigo lines for Ambassador hotel, also known as whiteprint or blue-line process using a diazo copier) of the original drawings of the architects, which might be or not be conserved in personal funds in archives (as, for example, the original thin tracing paper—foiță in Romanian—of the Fränkel fund at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, while in Bucharest, there are copies), and in the middle, there is a stamp.

One can observe the chronology in the copy techniques reflected in the sources to be found in the archives also in concordance with the time of the drawings: the Bucharest branch of the National Archives only contains plans up to around 1922, while the later ones are conserved at the Bucharest city hall. From this point of view, the Bauhaus novel (Enzensberger [76]), published on the 100th anniversary with the title “Blaupause” (blueprint) placed around 1919—the Bauhaus founding year—is contemporary with the “Tinerimea Română”drawing from the Bucharest branch of the National Archives, which contains pre-1922 drawings.

In Figure 10, archive sources related to Richard Bordanache are illustrated. On the right of the photo is a facade of the same building typology. It was a village, a reconstruction after a flood in Corbeni, a village in Argeș County. On the top, on the right, it is an urban plan of this village. It was a rural area, but it is called an urban plan instead of a rural plan. So, this is the most important part about the research on Richard Bordenache because it is related to the flood after which the reconstruction was carried out, which involves the topic of the project. On the bottom left, there is a table with calculations of the costs of these buildings. On the bottom right is a piece of writing by Richard Bordenache related to his stay in Rome when he collected works of other Romanian fellows in Rome. As such, a couple of archives, resources, and photos of his other buildings are available for research. All houses are in New Romanian style, while his own house is inspired by a cula. Here, the relationship between the New Romanian style and the cula may become more evident, especially in some other typologies (Figure 11).

In Stage 2, the acquisition of some resources was foreseen. As such, for example, sources on other gardens were related to the Bordenache research. In Figure 12, there is a building survey by the architect during his fellowship in Italy, Santa Trinita di Venosa.

Drawn building surveys are a different source for further work on existing built substances (ex. designing retrofit interventions) than the authorisation plans shown in Figure 8 and Figure 9 or the architects’ plans in archives such as, for example, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. See Blau [77] for how the so-called “collection” at the Canadian Centre for Architecture is built. Also, the digital humanities centres in Rome house the collections of such surveys conducted by the Rome fellows of other academies. For example, the American Academy in Rome has several different such historic drawings (with trees, without trees) of the gardens of villa Gamberaia in Florence, while contemporary ones were carried out for the restoration in frame of PNRR project 2023–2024. While today, building surveys are performed with computer support in order to obtain BIM models from point cloud laser scanning or Disto, which is easier, several decades ago, the first author participated in building surveys in Karlsruhe, Nierstein, on the Rhine (the river Rhine will be a subject in a future paper) (Figure 12c,d) and in Myslakowice (Poland) (Figure 12b) using a method by hand. First a reference line was traced on the ground, with reference points at each metre. Then, each corner point of the surveyed building was measured out of three reference points. These distances were drawn with a compass on work power and had to meet at one point. After this, the corners were bound with a lineal on the work paper. For the final drawing, however, calc (translucent paper used for the approval plans) was put over these working drawings and India ink was used freehand to draw the lines with tremor because historic buildings do not have straight surfaces. The advanced building survey of a textile factory in Myslakowice (in the mountains close to Wroclaw) (Figure 12b) was conducted in frame of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 315 Preserving historically relevant buildings, the subproject of The building survey as research method in the history of architecture (Häffner [78,79]), and it was showcased at the first alumni meeting of the University of Karlsruhe, its anniversary of 175 years, in 2000.

Historic drawings are available since the Gothic period; Gothic drawings are from UNESCO immaterial heritage “Memory of the world” [80]. At the mentioned Institute for Construction History in Karlsruhe, there was a project about these preserved Gothic drawings (Böker et al. [81,82]). What is notable about these publications is that they cover the Rhine and, respectively, Danube valleys, which are the rivers to which the decision-and ontology-related results of this project are bound.

In Romania, the History & Theory of Architecture and Heritage Conservation department at the university of the authors also holds a collection of building surveys in its building survey laboratory from about the last 100 years, with some of these being published (Brătuleanu et al. [83], Calotă et al. [84,85]). The laboratory archives valuable drawings such as those of Viollet le Duc’s disciple André Lecomte du Noüy, who carried out the early restoration (Moldovan [86]), now sometimes questionable, of several church monuments throughout Romania and is buried in Curtea de Argeș (Moldovan [87], Figure 13a), which is not far from our case study involving the rebuilt village of Richard Bordenache. Besides restoring, André Lecomte du Noüy also built a church in Ștefănești, Argeș, at Brătianu vila Florica (Figure 13b). André Lecomte du Noüy also illustrated a book of the writer queen of Romania Carmen Sylva. Also, this book (Sylva, Zimmermann [88]) deals with an autobiographical experience, the exile in Pallanza on the Lago Maggiore shore (Figure 14), one of the Northern Italian lakes like lake Como and again a case of “Writing urban places” (architecture in the literature). The collection also includes building surveys by Richard Bordenache [89] and his son [90]. Other recent projects revealed his diploma work drawing [91]. The collection also contains building surveys of three of the culas presented before, namely Duca, Greceanu, and Cartianu.

Architectural drawing is still a condition in admission exams in Romania and is employed in the first years of study. Also, the first author was told in the 1990s in Germany, when CAD started to be employed, that the hand drawing of projects is important because otherwise, the possibilities of the machine (computer) would limit the imagination to design only what can be drawn by it (Rüdiger Kramm, personal communication, 1996). The innovation which could be seen in mapping in the 1950s to 1960s connected to perception by Lynch [30] and Debord [31] is still difficult to translate in a digital medium. Scenarios might be the key. Freehand drawing is gradually replaced by the digital not only in perspective but also in mapping, and a discussion on this topic is worth a thought. However, fellow colleagues developed, at the ETH Zurich (Figure 15a), software in computer drawing in landscape architecture (Fricker [92]) and later supervised research related to walkability, as it is also employed in our research (Yang et al. [93]). At the chair Girot at the ETHZ, who succeeded Dieter Kienast, mentioned later, with whom the first author studied in Karlsruhe, further research in the field of digital landscape architecture resulted in a paper at the dedicated conference examining how site analysis can be translated from paper to digital (Kowalewski and Girot [94]), an issue also followed in the mapping endeavours in our project, which, in our case, follow site visits. Also, the urban survey for the GIS, a different kind of survey than the survey of a single building, since it was conducted by photography and by questionnaires, was aiming to combine data from the site visit and data gained from the photographs through post processing, as shown by Bourlotos and Bostenaru [24].

BIM models (Figure 16) today evolve to digital twins, so existing buildings can be represented to work with them, and our approach is to do this from the building survey to decision-making. Digital twins are however not complete twins, but they have assumptions, for example, in the structural finite element modelling (FEM), which lead to limitations in simulations at the stage between building surveys and decisions on retrofitting.

As it can be seen, targeted building survey drawings do not always include perspective drawings. However, perspective artistic drawings used to be drawn since the Grand Tour in Italy after Goethe (ex. Piranesi as the most renowned) and remained so till the so-called Grand Tour of the Third Millenium in Rome (ex. Mark Andrew Kelly, BSR fellow 2015/16, whose research work was completing a sketchbook). Travel drawings illustrated at the “Ion Mincu” University used the manual for the Renaissance and Baroque by Mira Dordea. The approach is not new, as it was used in the well-known Fletcher [95] book analyzing architecture through the claimed “comparative method” across the globe by presenting drawings, although at the time when the book started to be written, 1896, photography was already available. The first author used the book as well, as the lessons by Mira Dordea as a guide in order to explore Italy during 2002–2003 stay mainly in the North, doing slides and videos with early techniques. Also, at the “Ion Mincu” University, Curinschi Vorona taught architecture by the comparative method (Curinschi Vorona [96]), and this marked the first author till today who used this method to study architecture across Europe, either by spatial (geographic) comparison through mapping or by temporary (historic) comparison, including in this work. This is the reason for starting the photography collection object of this project, as one day, we could maybe teach using our own photographs.

Travel drawings relate more than thought to the topic of this paper. The sketchbook of Le Corbusier during Voyage d’Orient depicts a cula, but one from a temporary exhibition no longer existing (Bing [97]), the one in Carol Park in Bucharest. The cula served as inspiration for the family house designed in Reseau Art Nouveau city Le Chaux de Fonds and also for later Modernist buildings. The Attic, a long open loggia on the upper floor, particular to the Canton Ticino vernacular (Buzzi, [98] p. 113), is a vertically directed opening. It may be related to the cula.

Drawings used to be a category at the first Architecture Annual and Biennial competitions in Romania until recently, without a focus on travel. Training for the admission exam in Bucharest also included observation drawing in the Village Museum. In addition, drawing after gypsum models was also exercised or phantasy compositions with geometric models out of plaster. One particular topic the first author remembers is having to draw following a literary description (so in line with “Writing urban places”) of the cula Cartianu. Four texts describing it indeed were found as follows:

“One of them, very original and picturesque, is preserved in the village of Cartiu not far from Tirgu Jiu, the Cartianu House (Figure 291-facade and plans in drawing). The building, which occupies a beautiful position on the banks of a river, is three stories high. The ground floor, which is slightly below ground level, contains a cellar and several small storerooms. The three rooms on the first floor, which are square in shape, are fronted by a continuous porch, which on the side facing the river is bordered by a wall pierced by three arches (Figure 292-photo). On the second floor, which is divided in the same way as the first, the porch is only limited by wooden posts. It is reached by two staircases, both outside: one of a picturesque and monumental appearance, attached to the lateral façade-where the main entrance is located-and protected from the rain by the roof of the house itself, which extends above it, supported by a high wooden pillar and brackets; the other on the opposite façade, between the porches and discreetly framed in their architecture”.

Ionescu [57], pp. 458–460

Other culas described by Ionescu [57] are Broșteni, Măldărești (both), Curtișoara, and Pogojeni (a drawing by Sanda Voiculescu).

“The accentuation of the opening to the outside-both by treating the perimeter walls more airy but especially by eliminating the existing single access in the block-cell-as well as the adaptation of the traditional element of the porch, on all sides and at both housing levels, we find them picturesquely but balanced designed and realized, one of the most original examples of harmonious blending of the characteristics of local architecture, the Cartianu house in the village of Cartiu–Gorj county. The massive basement, built of stone and brick, covered with lime mortar plaster, is nevertheless perforated with two arched arches and shelters the cellar and other storage spaces. The first floor, with living rooms, is surrounded by a porch, partly bordered with wooden posts and partly enclosed on one side with a wall, in which are other beautifully proportioned arches. The last level of the dwelling, the second floor, is doubled to the outside on all sides with a new porch, bounded only by wooden posts. The light, wooden external access staircases, the wide-open porches, the remarkable proportions of the volume, the well-matched ratios between the different registers and the moderation of the exterior decorative treatment all point to the stateliness of a different type of residential architecture. Simultaneously attesting the elimination of the defensive character of the cell, the Cartianu house brings to us the new type of developed dwelling, in which the programme of the evolved type is subsumed to all the characteristic features of the traditional popular house”.

Lăzărescu [59], pp. 47–48

Other culas described by Lăzărescu [59] are Casa culă Cuțui, cula Duca, Pogojeni, cula Cuțui, and cula Greceanu, outgoing as a bibliography from Ionescu [57].

“The Cartianu House (18th century) is a happy synthesis between a cula and a peasant house. Above a large cellar with two arched entrances, the building rises on two storeys, bordered by spacious arcaded porches leading to several staircases. The composition of the whole ensemble is original and picturesque, as is the roof with its very wide eaves”.

Drăguț [60], p. 82. and Giurescu [61], p. 992

The approach to reproduce architecture from writing is not singular, as a doctorate thesis (Mortu [99]) explored texts on the Romanian han, a caravanserai-type accommodation in Ottoman Bucharest in different writings of the time and drew a map of these constructions many times, now hidden under the subsequent buildings in the historic centre. During the transformation of pedestrian zone and new pavements, some were uncovered but only in one place remained to be seen under glass for preservation reasons, an approach used also in Quebec City for the 400th anniversary.

In Karlsruhe, where drawing is not a precondition to be admitted to architectural study through examinations, drawing is taught as travel drawing, with drawing excursions being organized, ex., to the South of France (Larzac). However, with the dissolution (because of retirement) of the teaching area “descriptive geometry”, freehand drawing was underposed to the teaching area “Digital design and fabrication”. Perspective drawing allowed for insertion in photographs of the site of the drawing of the new building design, in accordance with the existing neighbouring buildings, not only like in Figure 9b. While Tzigara-Samurcas documented his travels in a first attempt to teach art and architecture history by purchasing and collecting glass slide photographs (Brătuleanu, [100]), documentation through drawing sketches was more widespread. As an example, drawings of Rome were bought as souvenirs by Grand Tour-ists as in a documentation by Biblioteca Hertziana (https://www.biblhertz.it/3606906/memories-of-rome-drawings-as-souvenirs-from-around-1800, accessed on 2 February 2025). From the mentioned culas, though Tzigara-Samurcaș (Costiuc [56]) discussed them, only Groșerea (currently in SOS state) and an already disappeared one, Pogojeni, which was claimed by Lăzărescu et al. [57] to be the oldest and is dated by Ionescu [57] to 1730, was already extinguished by then, while others that more recently reached a state of ruin are documented in the collection. On the occasion of the anniversary of the “Ion Mincu” University, an exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue, was organized on the subject of travel drawing (Hostiuc [101]), similar to the surveys of Myslakowice presented at the anniversary in Karlsruhe. Travel drawing is thus connected with this key activity of architects of seeing the buildings on site and thus with travel (practical training weeks of travel, in the country or abroad, accompanied by booklets presenting the architecture to be seen). Such a booklet of documentary practical training through travel is Moldovan [102], which serves, according to the author, for the preparation of the restoration project, completing and detailing what had been presented at history of architecture and restoration courses and seminars. It also refers to the archive Lecomte du Noüy at the Department for history and theory of architecture and heritage conservation, which includes drawings of the Curtea de Argeș monastery. The mapping developed in this project is a continuation of such booklets, and it is possible to implement it in such tasks, as a new kind of teaching, in a future project, as it involves both travels home and abroad. For example, for the case of Rome, drawing in the Vatican gardens is a special permit for groups of students in practical training and their supervisors.

Before catastrophe photography, the impact of disasters also used to be drawn (Kozak and Cernak [8]), a notable example being the 1755 Lisbon earthquake engravings, which are from the same time and type as Piranesi (Kozak et al. [103]). Also, the azulejos which are the base of the 3D models proposed for Lisbon are in fact drawings of the silhouette to the river before the earthquake [104].

In the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the MAXXI, and in the American Academy in Rome, photography and archive drawings are held in the same collection related to special subjects.

The “Arhitectura” magazine also published the standalone travel drawings of architects across Romania. The archive of images, mainly slides, of the “Arhitectura” magazine was the subject of projects funded through the architect’s stamp of the Union of Romanian Architects, who also runs the magazine, in order to be catalogued. While, for example, the extension of the building with colonnades of Richard Bordenache was the subject of a computer-drawn building survey in a historic study conserved at the National Institute for Heritage, for some other buildings by him, the “Arhitectura” magazine is the only source, as is the protocol villa in Snagov from the communist time. Also, other journals may be sources of archive photographs and plans of buildings which were published, being considered outstanding for their time. For example, the images of the vila Tătaru in Cluj-Napoca by Gio Ponti collaborator Elsie Lazăr can be found in two variants even in the Domus issues of the time when they were planned, for example, at Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome. Otherwise, little is known of Elsie Lazăr, who studied in Vienna with Josef Frank and emigrated to Israel. Today, for reasons of space, libraries do not offer free shelf access to historic journals, but sometimes these are digitized. It was the duty of the literature review to also find such digital editions (ex. Hungarian architect Istvan Medgyaszai in Vienna), the amount of which is constantly growing as the copyright timeframe passes.

The archive research is connected to three main topics. One is catastrophe photography because of the topic of the project. Catastrophe photography was first investigated mainly at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Then, the life and work of architect Rudolf Frankel had an important source in the fund of him but also in Bucharest approval plans, which can be found at the city hall. We have already mentioned the Bordenache building. He was in the Romanian School in Rome, and his son immigrated to Karlsruhe where the first author studied. And then, finally, we studied the Janco brothers, in which we are looking to the literature because there were many more people who consulted archives before. A trip to Zürich gave some background information (Figure 15b, Cabaret Voltaire/Kunsthaus Zürich [105]).

We can see a computer drawing (HBIM) of such a Modernist building in Bucharest (Figure 16), highlighting why it is vulnerable by presenting how the structure follows the architectural layout instead of being a structurally optimal grid.

4. Case Study: Haralamb Georgescu and the January 2025 Southern California Wildfires

Romanian-born architect Haralamb Georgescu started his career in interwar Romania first as collaborator of Horia Creangă and then independently. Haralamb Georgescu built in Bucharest, but his last building was on the seaside in Mangalia [106]. He fled communism by ship from the seaside and settled in the USA, first on the Eastern coast and finally to Los Angeles.

Out of the buildings of Haralamb Georgescu, there is knowledge that two were restored. One of them, the Pasinetti house in Beverly Hills, is the most emblematic for his work [106] and triggered the rediscovery of the architect in Romania. An exhibition was organized at the “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism, accompanied by a catalogue [107] which featured his drawings. The maps in Bostenaru and Jianu [66] were used, investigating buildings which are catalogued either in the book or in the Getty archives. The role of drawing for his architecture is also emphasized by the paintings of Stephan Eleuteriades [108], another architect who left Romania when the communists took power. Stephan Eleuteriades was Greek and from Mangalia, founded in the antiquity as the Greek colony of Callatis. His paintings on the Hurmuzescu house (Figure 17), which was the last building of Haralamb Georgescu in Romania, are on display in the university museum. The house was visited in situ by the main author in early January 2025, just before the fire broke out in Los Angeles.

The typology of the Pasinetti house follows, as written in [66], that of the cula cube geometry and is even closer to the Hurmuzescu house though of different materials. The transparent corner showing only the skeleton is present in both and may be a stylization of the loggia.

Archive research, a second pillar of this study, was followed also for the architecture of Haralamb Georgescu. Upon distance requests from the Getty Research Institute Research Library Special Collections [109], they made available interior photos by “Robert C. Cleveland interior and architectural photography from the Pacific Palisades” showing the original state before the restoration by Aaron Torrents [106]. In Pasinetti and Georgesco [110], this research in the archives for historical photography is similar to the one conducted for Rudolf Fränkel buildings at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, published partially through the project in calls by a sister project on Romanian–American relationships in the interwar time. In Romanian archives, photography collections are rare and, as shown, drawing reproductions are conserved. At the Canadian Centre for Architecture, there are also historical photographs of disasters, and the first author investigated exactly the disasters included in this study, namely earthquakes, floods, and fires. Historical photographs in the 19th century were different from what journalism presents today, even if the birth of photography in Romania is from an early photo journalist [111]. Browsing the available files, it also becomes visible that the other emblematic design of Haralamb Georgescu, the utopian Los Angeles “Sky lots” [107,112,113], are inspired by the same vernacular design, presented in drawings in the archives of the Italian tower houses (San Gimignano, also named), the Pena palace in Sintra by Lisbon, and a French landscape but also the houses in the Cyclades in Santorini (Figure 18; in the Getty archives, drawings of these are in box 2, f. 4 0001). The Mediterranean is explicitly named in the archives and a letter of invitation for publication in “Unbuilt America” is included, along with the mention of a competition for Mt. Olympus. Bostenaru and Jianu [66] depict how inspiration from vernacular was instrumental to Haralamb Georgescu’s Los Angeles designs and also to the built Pasinetti house, which resembles the Hurmuzescu house and the cula, not only the Cycladic architecture as for Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, and Adolf Loos for Modernist architecture. The “Sky lots” proposal is for vertical neighbourhoods instead of what developed, instead of the traditional historical urban fabric with the arrival of the car and which includes having, within the metropolis conurbation and other forms between San Francisco and San Diego, what Thomas Sieverts calls in Europe “Zwischenstadt” (the city in between) [114], an urban periphery which is neither urban nor rural. The study of the urban periphery is a special field of the study of urban morphology [115], promoted as a study area in the Le Notre forums for landscape integration. This development rendered Los Angeles more vulnerable to the fires at the urban–wildland interface [116]. Negative effects are more numerous [117].

Using the inventory of the Getty archives as well as the catalogue of the Romanian exhibition on Haralamb Georgescu [107], the location of his built works was mapped in Google Maps. This was exported as a file and imported in ArcGIS online, where it could be superposed with the location of Southern California fires as of 13 January 2025 from Living Atlas US current wildfires. The result can be seen in Figure 19. The buildings next to fires are the Bucharest restaurant near Eaton forest, Lark Arrow apartments in the same area, and the Rinaldi convalescent hospital. The Pasinetti house was on fire, which is confirmed by CBS news with a note of rescuing the dogs from the house lost to wildfire [118].

Figure 20 presents ontographs created with the desktop software Protégé version 5.6.3 [119] for the ontology presented by Bostenaru et al. [120] created with WebProtégé 4.0.2:20200731:e4a5d15.

The January 2025 Southern California fires are a clear example of an instance of the decision system for fires, as shown in the ontograph in Figure 20a. From the point of view of the firefighter, machinery was important, and some residents had private machinery. Water sometimes ran out. The population was alerted that winds may result in fire, but this happened in the past without consequences, so it was not considered [121]. The affected population was evacuated, even the Getty without collections, which were protected by materials. Roads were sometimes blocked, as shown by the Google Maps. From an environmental point of view, the topography of the slope was used to obtain views from the hills on the Pacific for expensive houses. There was vegetation close to the most extensive fire (Palisades and Eaton/Altadena) at the so-called wildland–urban interface, even if it involved parks. The vegetation moisture was low because of draught. There is a history of less severe fires in Los Angeles. As for the meteorology, there was draught, high temperature, winds from the desert, and no precipitation. These all define how the hazard became a disaster. Possible measures could have been nature-based solutions from the side of the landscape architect and the silvicultor.

Figure 21 shows the (multi)criteria for decision-making of the stakeholders in fire prevention. To be highlighted is that the retrofit elements mentioned in Section 4 are criteria for both the architect and the structural engineer. It is clear that the residential value, covered also in the context of the ontology above at the perception criteria, led to poor land use and construction at the urban–wildland interface. In addition, the history of what might be fire resistance may have been in conflict for earthquake-prone California (such as the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the Loma Prieta 1989 earthquake, and earlier ones) with buildings made of heavy materials such as stone, for example, the Haralamb Georgescu Pasinetti house, which has the same language as the Hurmuzescu house. This led to vulnerability because of the desired structural performance. The protection Getty offered to its collections, opening in the immediate aftermass, is an example. Also, the Orthodox church made out of brick was undamaged and surrounded by a deserted area. This is a technical strategy. Instead, a management strategy of different land use and evacuation may have helped in the emergency stage of the disaster management cycle if the prevention was not successful as in the above criteria. This depends on the acceptability of either the technical or the management strategy by the residents and the disponibility of the investor to implement them depending on the expected indicators, including the assurance.

5. Discussion

5.1. Field Trips as Investigation Method

Several field trips were carried out during recent research, as in architecture, field trips are common and necessary when compared with other disciplines, where project-based travel is due to conferences. Relevant study visits by the authors were in Rome (2023) and Lisbon (2022, 2023), building upon earlier travels in the Eastern Mediterranean (Greece and Turkey as students), postdoc in Rome (the first author). Architectural students are required to document their field trips in booklets of drawings, photography, and postcard collections, later to be converted to slides. Experienced professionals still use this research method, but the instrument of drawing is dying, being replaced by digital methods.

5.2. Historic Photography

Research included investigating a collection of photographs of Cologne, a city of Cologne, taken after the bombardments in World War 2, by August Sander. This type of image is difficult to be included for publishing. It can be bought from the Canadian Centre of Architecture, then one owns the photograph for research (one can look at it and analyze it and write the text). But if one wants to publish a photograph, permits from VG (Verwertungsgesellschaft) Bild in Germany are needed in order to publish something by August Sander, as VG Bild has the rights of the followers of August Sander.

5.3. Digital Methods

5.3.1. Physical Conservation in Case of Digitization

Digitization is questionable. The UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage [122] deals with what and how physical media are to be digitized, but this could lead to an encouragement for the removal of the physical original, as it has been digitized. As such, there is danger in using this method. And so digital preservation is still a discussed matter because it is not the same. Photography in the Canadian Centre of Architecture is mainly photography from the 19th century, which usually does not pose problems because it is old. That is not the case for 20th century images, where there could be copyright issues, as the photographers may have died less than 70 years ago.

This is particularly relevant in cases of disasters and conflicts, as shown by Li et al. [123].

5.3.2. Digital Tools for Communication

Additional tools to be used, such as using C++, were previously employed in the COST action “Semantic enrichment of 3D city models for sustainable urban development” (it run between 2009 and 2012) and the NeDiMAH (Network for Digital Methods in Arts and Humanities) network run later (2012–2015). Even then, there were still not many 3D models. Following an earlier investigation of the Lisbon earthquake [104], carried out by the first author using Google Earth as visual support (2012), in a later revised investigation of the topic, Second Life visuals were reviewed, as Lisbon was rebuilt by developers at the University of Evora in much more detail in this computer game for architecture. The first author created her own model for the Lisbon earthquake impact, for which she started on what she has conducted previously for Cologne using Macromedia Director, which later became Adobe Director and which also had a 3D component for which she was a beta tester. Thus, she could programme 3D scenes in lingo (its script programming language).

Now, there is a lot of development, and we are trying to keep in line with this. As a postdoc in geography, the first author completed some courses on mapping and story maps. Last year, there was an ArcGIS course on integrating BIM into GISs. So, there is a lot which can be carried out now with tools, but we are still missing an innovation in maps. Since the 1990s, 1960s maps were so innovative in not depicting something all over the surface. The plan is digitized, but not really what it should be. This remains to be investigated in the future.

6. Conclusions

The research carried out and illustrated in this article demonstrates the initial claim that lessons from historical data analysis can be learned for increasing resilience in retrofitting. This is reflected in particular in rural examples, as in the highlighted case study of the Antonești village in Corbeni, on the river Argeș, which was flooded in the interwar time and then reconstructed with buildings in the New Romanian style and cula-inspired designs. This is an instance of how digital humanities tools can analyze historical data to understand past disasters and their impacts on similar architectural styles. In related research, Pagano and Daniel [124] documented rural architecture in the interwar time across Italy, which can be put in connection with the urban morphology school around Giovannoni. Data gathered from previous cases can guide the development of more resilient designs and restoration practises.

Retrofitting based on vernacular architecture means building on the local culture and reusing the existing heritage in connection with hazard resilience. Other connections can be made in relation to a circular economy, as vernacular relied heavily on repurposing resources. It is economically more efficient to establish preventive retrofitting in the face of disasters and then repair rather than to rebuild disaster-safe buildings—a principle of today’s circular economy. As such, the future may rely upon the past—a key principle in the research carried out by the team, summed up by the engraving on Sylvester Lajos’ memorial plate in the library in Cernat, Romania: “I can imagine the future only based on the past” [125]. Another European dimension of the research is going over from the historic Bauhaus to the New European Bauhaus. The research deals with style movements contemporary to the Bauhaus during the interwar time. In that time, a short one of one or two decades, numerous styles have been tried out using the new technological developments, which were however not ripe enough. In this paper, some of these are shown, such as the Art Deco in Bucharest and the Mediterranean. Also, the New Romanian, a Romanian variant of the National Romanticism contemporary to Art Nouveau, co-existed during the interwar time (Buzilă [126]). The research in this paper mainly presented a vernacular building type in Romania, the cula, which served as inspiration to Romanian Modernism, an “other Modernism” at European periphery. Fellow researchers also deal with their 3D documentation [127]. The buildings are, however, a pendant of the buildings of the Cyclades, which served as an example to buildings of canonical Modernism in their ornamentless geometrical shape. Thus, it was demonstrated that it is perfectly suitable to apply the principles of the New European Bauhaus to Bauhaus contemporary heritage. For example, inclusivity, one of the three principles of the New European Bauhaus, can mean in this context including the local culture, which in relation to sustainability, one other principle of the New European Bauhaus also means (disaster) resilience. The local seismic culture is well grounded, but there is also research on the local flood culture [128].

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) could be further used as novel tools to visualize potential disaster impacts and prepare stakeholders in disaster response. New AI tools could be employed to analyze and recommend preventive scenarios. AR and VR technologies can also contribute to planning and executing restoration projects by providing immersive experiences of the buildings, adding on touristic promotion and heritage educational attributes.

Digital tools can also be used to engage the general public along with professionals and also educate them about the importance of preserving Heritage, including Art Nouveau and Modernist buildings. This can foster community support for disaster resilience initiatives or bottom-up approaches in historical sites; as such, aside from education, digital methods are also relevant to public engagement.

Digital humanities also facilitate collaboration among researchers, architects, and engineers over different places and times. This form of collaborative research is an interdisciplinary approach that can lead to innovative solutions for enhancing the resilience of architectural styles that build upon one another. Revised styles such as local Modernisms have elements from previous historical examples. Newer instances of architecture styles reflect the globalization of the architectural education and the uniformization of digital methods. From the drawings of building surveys [129], archive drawings are still a research instrument for both the history of architecture and the future of place making, from digital and digitized documentation and comparisons to modelling. Creating detailed digital models of Art Nouveau and Modernist buildings can help in understanding their structural vulnerabilities. In turn, these models can be used for simulations to predict how both old and similar new buildings might respond to various disasters, such as earthquakes, fires, or floods.