The built environment constantly changes as buildings are constructed, repaired, renovated, remodelled, refurnished, reconstructed, and demolished. But while we know from everyday experience that building existence is a temporal phenomenon, systematically defining what actions amount to the construction of a new building or its demise is not as straightforward as one could expect. This blurriness in definitions was acknowledged in recent studies on building age prediction (Li et al., 2018; Sun et al., 2022; Zeppelzauer et al., 2018), including a study that noted that “[w]hile it is one of the key building attributes […], the year of construction of a building has not been given much attention in practice and research” (Biljecki & Sindram, 2017, p. 22). When attempting to investigate large databases of building information to explore the historical transformations of a city's physical development, this conceptual blurriness becomes a genuine impediment to extracting meaningful and reliable quantitative insights. Without clearly and consistently defining the moments of “birth” and “change” of most buildings in such databases, analysing the historical trends embodied in them stands on shaky grounds.
This study presents a reproducible ontological formulation defining a building's moments of “birth” to support large-scale, high-resolution historical analysis of construction trends and cycles. The study also aims to rectify a critical gap in the methodological foundations of architectural historiography that has direct implications within the broader domain of the spatial humanities. This gap impedes different types of diachronic analysis of the evolution of the built environment, especially when studying how the ups and downs in the economy affect building stock growth.
In this study, we explored the theoretical ambiguities, blurry definitions, and technical challenges that complicate the seemingly straightforward definition of major moments in a building’s life, both within academic discourse and across professional and regulatory domains. We then attempted to distil coherent definitions of a building’s moment of inception that may serve as a strong indicator for significant construction activity concentrated on a single building plot. In defining this moment, the proposed system considers a building’s visual appearance, impact on the built landscape, and structural integrity as the most important spatial variables that indicate significant construction activity. Consequently, we suggest focusing on determining a building’s moment of “birth” based on the type of certification documents contained in municipal building files, highlighting the significance of the building permit as the most reliable document that enables large-scale and high-resolution analyses of building stock trends.
To explore the coherence, practicality, and challenges of the suggested methodology, we applied it to the historical analysis of a large dataset of planning and construction documents archived and digitised by the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality’s Engineering Administration. Based on the documents’ classifications, we automatically extracted possible “birth” and “change” years of each archived structure to recreate the city’s timeline of building expansion and reconstruction.