Facts and narrative - the concept of 4D capturing of heritage building; a case study of Sompur Mahavihara, Bangladesh

This study embarked upon a premise that considers architecture of building as a dynamic phenomenon. A building from its conception
is susceptible to change due to various reasons. An historical building that is several hundred years old must have undergone through
changes due to political, social, religious and most importantly functional reasons. Hence capturing building and its dynamic evolution
is necessary to appreciate its architecture as well as its heritage value. Whereas the conventional method of fact based historiography
only captures the building in particular moment. It makes architectural historians to become perplexed over to which particular moment
to be documented. It is a great challenge for the architectural historians to bring back these dynamic characters of the building that are
mostly inconspicuous in nature from this point of time. In this situation the historical discourse also remains elusive and blurred. The
idea of 4d capturing comes in front in this scenario. Current research would venture into this emerging idea to record the architecture of
the early period. This paper highlights the need for a flexible tool to capture this dynamic character of the building. By citing the case
study of the 7th century Buddhist Monastery in Bengal, this paper thus argues for the need of capturing the narrative of a historical
building than the facts to get a complete picture of its architecture. This study aims at capturing the narrative of Sompur Mahavihara,
the UNESCO World Heritage site in Bangladesh, which is currently in ruinous condition. However, it’s few hundred years life suggests
that as architecture it was subject to change due to different reasons, mainly political, religious and rituals. Being a monument that
belongs to the flourishing phase of a society, traditionally this monastery architecture certainly played a role as a stage for religious and
political pageantry as well as different religious performances. As architecture it works as complex process of interaction of different
layers of ideas, agendas and authorship through time. This paper would further explore different tools for historians to capturing this
process of interaction and preserving/ conserving the narrative of this building using virtual modelling.