A Peek Behind the Façade. The Virtual Interiors Approach to Visualise Herengracht 573 in the 17th century

The Amsterdam City Archives have launched a vast plan for the digitization of notarial deeds and other historical documents with the aim of making their collection available and fully searchable online. This and other initiatives provide a large amount of previously unknown data about the city of Amsterdam and its inhabitants over the centuries. The challenge ahead is to organize these thousands of digitized documents in a way that facilitates access and consultation by a larger public. The spatial information that can be extracted with varying degrees of accuracy from these documents allows them to be mapped to reconstruct urban historiographies and geographies. This contribution takes the house as a starting point for this spatialization and discusses the approach of the Virtual Interiors project which aims to create virtual reconstructions of XVII century domestic interiors that act as interfaces to access the archival documents used as primary sources for their creation. The case study that will be presented in detail is Herengracht 573 in the Amsterdam historical centre. As will be demonstrated with the reconstruction of the XVII century entrance hall, a prototype web viewer developed as part of the project integrates the 3D models and contextual information, thus giving direct access to digitized archive documents. This approach would offer a way to organize the sources about this and other houses and to make the stories hidden behind the façades known to a larger public even when these historical buildings are closed.