Project Lx Conventos: Travelling through space and time in Lisbon's religious buildings

Project Lx Conventos aims to study, in a systematic and integrated manner, the impact of the dissolution of religious orders in the dynamics of urban transformation in nineteenth century Lisbon. After the liberal revolution and the civil war, in the 19th century, the dissolution of religious orders led to the alienation, in Lisbon, of nearly 130 religious buildings which were then given profane occupations (mainly public services) or demolished and divided in plots, originating new urban realities. Project Lx Conventos thus aims to show that the extinction of the convents was decisive in the urban development of Lisbon, in the eighteen hundreds. The project stands on a large set of multimedia data which includes historic and contemporary cartography and geo-referenced photos, videos and 3D models, provided by the projects partners, Lisbon Municipality and the Portuguese National Archive, Torre do Tombo. Supported by these materials, the project's team is creating an online system that will implement a spatial and temporal navigation of these resources integrated in an interactive Map of Lisbon. Besides spatially locating and analyzing the data available for each of the religious buildings considered in the project, the tool integrates cutting edge interaction technology for: 1) Enabling a temporal voyage over the available traces of religious buildings; 2) Analyzing the evolution of religious buildings and their surroundings, through available data; 3) Using 3D representations of the buildings for accessing related data, through time. In this paper, the tools under development in the context of Lx Conventos are described, as well as the technologies supporting them. The current status of the system is presented and future developments are proposed.