Researchers have created a detailed digital record of the Manchester Reform Synagogue in a way that is meant to preserve it for future generations as an “immersive virtual reality” experience combining architecture, history, archives, and memories.
The project, the first in a broader “Life of Buildings” virtual preservation project, will be unveiled on October 31 at an event at the synagogue, which is located in the city center and is slated for demolition to make way for a high-rise real estate development.
The building still stands, though, and at the launch event “both the virtual and real buildings will be open for the public to witness” and visitors donning headsets will be able to tour the virtual reality experience that includes memories, images and films.
An event announcement states that:
Visitors will be able to navigate the building in real and virtual ways. The team will be on hand to help guests using VR headsets encounter the history of the building as well as its digital record. Then visitors will be free to encounter one of Manchester’s best kept secrets – the fine interior of this building from 1953.
The project has been carried out by researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University, working with the synagogue, the Modernist Society, and Manchester Central Library’s Archives+ repository for archives and family history.
The University web site states:
Using a range of digital reproduction methods, including CAD software and laser scanning, they have investigated how to produce virtual models of buildings that can also host oral testimony and other memories.
Jackson’s Row synagogue was chosen for the first project because of its cultural significance to the city – the first new building completed after the end of the Second World War, when the previous synagogue was damaged in the Manchester Blitz of 1941.
Here is some raw footage of how the synagogue, designed by Peter Cummings and Eric Levy and the first new building constructed in Manchester after World War II, was scanned and digitized.
The Life of Buildings project aims to digitally record or recreate buildings that no longer exist or — like the synagogue — are in danger of demolition, in order to preserve them in virtual reality for future generations. The plan goes beyond the type of architectural virtual reconstruction that has been applied to a number of destroyed synagogues, to eventually also create a geo-located virtual social and historical evocation of the building.
“Imagine being able to encounter a building on a street where the building no longer exists, but once stood,” the project description states.
Imagine being able to enter that building and to walk through its spaces and hear the stories hidden in its walls. A 3D virtual model could contain surviving architectural drawings of the buildings, digitised from archive sources – a viewer could walk at a scale of 1:1 through the architectural drawings;. It could host still images embedded within the model; it could carry oral histories literally within its walls. This project imagines the creation of a model that can recreate a rich and layered version of a building and bring it to life through the collation of social, cultural, technical and visual archival sources. A building that becomes more than the sum of its parts and has more to impart than it ever did when it was ‘alive’.