Many projects concerning the protection, conservation, restoration, and dissemination of cultural heritage are being carried out around the world due to its growing interest as a driving force of socio-economic development. The existence of reliable, digital three-dimensional (3D) models that allow for the planning and management of these projects in a remote and decentralized way is currently a growing necessity. There are many software tools to perform the modeling and complete three-dimensional documentation of the intervened monuments. However, the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector has adopted the Building Information Modeling (BIM) standard over the last few decades due to the progress that has been made in its qualities and capabilities. The complex modeling of cultural heritage through commercial BIM software leads to the consideration of the concept of Heritage BIM (H-BIM), which pursues the modeling of architectural elements, according to artistic, historical, and constructive typologies. In addition, H-BIM is considered to be an emerging technology that enables us to understand, document, advertize, and virtually reconstruct the built heritage. This article is a review of the existing literature on H-BIM and its effective implementation in the cultural heritage sector, exploring the effectiveness and the usefulness of the different methodologies that were developed to model families of elements of interest.

In this paper, a new approach for the virtual modeling and reconstruction of Architectural Heritage is presented. The graphic and semantic information required to determine the conservation status of the analyzed buildings, obtained from point clouds and historical and bibliographical data, are combined. The modeled components are used to create a library of parametric elements under the concept of Heritage Building Information Modeling (HBIM). This represents a solution for the 3D modeling of a wide range of buildings in the same style, due to the flexibility of the modeled elements which can change in shape and proportions, thus adapting to new requirements. Moreover, technical documentation and quantitative and qualitative information can be produced, allowing detailed analysis in a remote and multidisciplinary way within the general framework of "Smart heritage".

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This essay approaches architecture from a humanist point of view, analyzing social dialogue in relation to design processes and architectural production, which search for a balanced interaction between the built environment and its natural and cultural settings. In a first approach architecture is considered as a 'second nature', one that is fit to meet man's needs, which goes beyond functional and pragmatic issues, and include in a fundamental way the spiritual aspects, those which ultimately define our human nature. In a second phase a historical-interpretative analysis is developed for a better understanding of the main practices in sustainable architecture over the last two decades of the 20th century. The concepts of dialogism and the hermeneutic trilogy (pre-figuration, con-figuration and re-figuration) developed by M. Bajtin and Paul Ricoeur, respectively, are explored as a methodological structure to analyze and interpret a sustainable architecture. The idea is to bind dialogism and sustainability as one concept, in order to approach architecture in an integral and holistic way, and to try to visualize it as a multidimensional cultural phenomenon. Here, the main hypothesis is explained, one which establishes that both, biophysical and tangible factors, as well as social and intangible ones, are indispensable cultural parameters to consider when designing a truly sustainable architecture.

The building information modelling (BIM) platforms have serious difficulties to represent historical buildings and cultural heritage. These platforms have no libraries with historical parametric objects able to represent the particular characteristics of the historical buildings. One solution to represent faithfully the buildings is the use of point clouds obtained by laser scanning systems and photogrammetry. However, these clouds points, although they may represent faithfully the geometry of the buildings, are difficult to incorporate to BIM platforms because of the enormous volume of data they contain. Moreover, the particular nature of historic buildings makes it essential to incorporate semantic information including historical and bibliographic data of the analysed building.In this article a new methodology which facilitates the modelling of heritage buildings by incorporating point clouds to BIM platforms and tackling their subsequent treatment for obtaining parametric models is proposed. The obtained models can be incorporated into libraries for later reuse, along with their historical semantic information, under the concept of heritage BIM. To do this, performing cuts, sections and views following the norms, rules and constructive patterns of the different historical architectural periods is proposed.The proposed methodology has been applied to a real case study: the Romanesque church Santa Maria la Real de Mave located in Palencia, Spain. Moreover, the results of the digital modelling of the church are a solution for 3D modelling recurring a wide range of buildings in the same style. This is possible because the shapes and proportions of the modelled elements can be modified to adapt to new requirements without having to restart from scratch. This will allow sections, details, projections and other features to be generated automatically. We can provide quantitative and qualitative information, thus allowing detailed analysis in a remote and multidisciplinary way, within the framework of 'Smart heritage'.