Developing a Virtual Open-Air Museum of Vernacular Architecture

Abstract

Vernacular architecture is an integral part of the national cultural heritage. Today, however, many of these buildings exist only on old plans or photographs and the average citizen has no opportunity to get acquainted with this part of the national identity. Therefore, in our work, we present the development of two web applications with the aim of creating a virtual open-air museum for presenting vernacular architecture in the Czech Republic. The applications were created using open-source technologies, and are implemented with methods that allow easy transfer from one operating system to another. The presented content is a carefully selected sub-sample of more than 10,000 available records representing all regional types of vernacular architecture. The result is one application designed for editors to manage the presented content and one application allowing interactive viewing of the available geo-located records designed for the general public. Individual records can be searched either directly using the map window or by querying the attribute table. These records contain descriptive information about the object, as well as historical photographs and plans and, for some objects, additional information in the form of 3D models, PDF documents and other files. The applications are designed in such a way that their content can be freely expanded in the future and thus contribute to the popularization of vernacular architecture among the general public, which was the main reason for their creation.