Bio-based materials have found their way to the design and fabrication in the architectural context in recent years. Fungi-based materials, especially mycelium-based composites, are a group of these materials of growing interest among scholars due to their light weight, compostable and regenerative features. However, after about a decade of introducing this material to the architectural community, the proper ways of design and fabrication with this material are still under investigation. In this paper, we tried to integrate the material properties of mycelium-based composites with computational design and digital fabrication methods to offer a promising method of construction. Regarding different characteristics of the material, we found additive manufacturing parallel to bio-welding is an appropriate fabrication method. To show the feasibility of the proposed method, we manufactured a small-scale prototype, a tilted arch, made of extruded biomass bound with bio-welding. The project is described in the paper.

Virtual Reality-Human Computer Interaction 262 changes in climate, erosion, and abandonment damaged the Rice Terraces of the Philippines Cordilleras. The development of agriculture around the archaeological site of Abu Mena in Egypt increased the level of the water table, softened the clay soil, and risked the collapse of buildings. The Bamiyan Valley and its heritage have suffered abandonment, military action, and dynamite explosions. Bam and its cultural landscape were destroyed by a strong earthquake in 2003 in our case study (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], World Heritage Centre [WHC], 2004).

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An online ontology-based knowledge representation system for historic buildings and their multimedia data is introduced in this paper. The ontology is combined from different schemas to capture knowledge of an architectural heritage and annotate visual data. Basically, a Core Data Index metadata schema in RDF describes types of buildings in a world heritage site, the Citadel of Bam (which was seriously damaged by an earthquake in 2003). The history of the buildings in the Citadel with around twenty centuries of habitation is captured from multiple resources such as travelogues, archeological reports, etc. and connected with a multilingual term-set. Each building together with the conceptualized knowledge is geo localized by UTM coordinates over Google Earth. Visual data of the buildings are connected with the knowledge-base and a Dublin Core Element Set metadata schema is applied to annotate the data, specifically results of the supporting project, the 3D CG reconstruction of the Citadel after the quake (such as rendered images, walkthrough and QTVR videos, etc.). The ontology and related resources are represented by RDF and then published into HTML pages, on a hierarchical layer structure of semantic web and web application frameworks. We present the architecture of the system, “Bam 3D CG” and discuss practical problems when building an online RDF-based system for publishing knowledge and visual data of historic buildings in a website.