Digitised connections: reflections on the image analysis and spatial modelling of Southeast Asian temples

Following the arrival of Brahmanic/Hindu/Buddhist culture, a great number of temples were constructed across Southeast Asia. Epigraphic evidence, along with the architectural and stylistic similarities between temples in these regions, is strongly indicative of historic cross-cultural links that evolved through a process of long experimentation with philosophies, world-views and architectonic methods. A wide-ranging analysis of the canonical geometry and compositional form of temples in India, Cambodia and Java, with reference to Indic texts, local antecedents and archetypal South Asian temple forms has previously been undertaken. In comparing the relationships between canonical geometry and the form of temples, the bases for the architectural composition of these temples have been reconstructed by the authors, using spatial information modelling (e.g. parametric models, rule-based design and mathematical development of rule-based surfaces). These reconstructions augment the fragmentary written or epigraphic evidence available for these temples and gradually establish the range of early South and Southeast Asian temple forms and geometric characteristics. Presently, these comparisons between geometry and form are being extended through a combination of photogrammetry and image-based analysis methods with flexible graphical simulation and visual immersion techniques. These methods serve to reassemble evidence of the architectonic links between different temple sites across South and Southeast Asia. This paper reflects on the use of these methods in developing ‘reverse-architected’ geometric/architectonic models to mediate historical and formal propositions about lineages of historical architecture.