[General View of Ashkhabad, 1945 from "Architecture of Soviet Turkmenistan"]

This project began out of a desire to explore Microstations capabilities. I might have considered tackling a design project, but my course schedule required an architecture history class. Recently I had been studying the architecture that has been built by the Bahai international community in its first 150 years. This includes the House of Worship of Ashkhabad, destroyed in 1948 by the Soviet Union. It was an obvious challenge. Create in Microstation a model of the building, capable of being rendered in color to increase the information available on this historical building.

I wrote to the offices of two Baha'i architects, one in Hiafa, Israel, in charge of construction there of the Bahai World Center buildings, and the other in Canada, the architect for the House of Worship in Panama City. My search was for construction drawings of the Ashkhabad temple, which I was told were unavailable. I was directed to a few books published by the Bahais that might lend me some information. I found those suggested and added to them one book from the Fiske Kimball library published in Russia that included two photographs.

The unavailability of construction drawings initially seemed like disaster. But after discussing my situation with Eric Field we devised a way to reverse perspective drawing theory to derive the three dimensional form of the model. The famous drawing of the invention of perspective projection was the inspiration for my efforts. Instead of projecting true height points from a viewer off an object onto a picture, I would project points from a viewer through a picture to the true height position above a plan, and fill in the object by extruding the plan.

With Microstation software it is very convenient to render a view to a picture file. So I kept a record of my progress and challenges by making images along the way and organizing these in a page on the World Wide Web. (that system is the only one I am familiar with that allows organizing multiple images with text. Many of the useful page of my research and all of the useful images I transferred directly to that format.) Please refer to those pages for the continuation.

In conclusion, despite certain refinements that need to be made for my model to be more accurate, I have achieved my purpose of using Microstation to reverse engineer a perspective photo into a model and supply a more striking image of the former Bahai House of Worship of Ashkhabad, Turkmenestan. While computer modeling has been used for other purposes in the service of architectural history, I feel that this endeavor was rather unique, owing mostly to the newness of the technology. Other applications of this technique could lie in modeling buildings only partially designed, where the architect only finished a perspective drawing and plan.