Crawl back through history 1,500 years to the Valley of Bamiyan, central Afghanistan, in the 6th Century. You’d see Buddhist monks laboriously and meticulously etching two large statues of Buddha from the valley’s formidable sandstone cliffs. In 507 AD, the smaller of the two was completed, standing at an epic 35 meters in height. And, in 554 AD, the taller twin was finished, towering at 53 meters in height. Once the largest standing Buddha carvings in the world, the Buddhas of Bamiyan somehow managed to survive the numerous empires passing through and developing out of the great country for hundreds of years, but, on March 12, 2001, they were destroyed by dynamite upon orders from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
Rather than let the rich history and culture of the country fall by the wayside, an international team of specialists has swept in to restore these marvelous relics with 3D scanning and 3D printing technology from 3D Systems. Led by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites), a group of restorers, architects, and engineers are rebuilding the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Relying on Geomagic Studio scanning software and a ProJet color 3D printer, they are in the process of restoring the monument and its chambers, declared a World Heritage Site in 2003.
Among the team members are specialists from Afghanistan, France, Italy, Japan, and Germany. One member of the diverse group is Ing. Sekandar Ozod-Seradj, an Afghanistan-born engineer and member of ICOMOS Germany. Ozod-Seradj founded the Afghan Rehabilitation Group e.V., which has already worked on rebuilding other monuments in the war-torn country, such as the royal palace Kuti-e Baghtscha and the headquarters of the Afghan president, Del Kusha. Given the magnitude of the Buddha project, this will be the engineer’s largest endeavor yet.
The restoration began, first, with a collection of the statues’ large remnants, made up of bits of stone, plaster, and wood. Members of Ozod-Seradj’s architecture firm, Architects Seradj + scanned the niches from which the statues were originally carved and the larger sections of debris, analyzing the remains for magnetic alignment and structure. After scanning, the team repaired the scanned debris and niches, manually fixing holes and ensuring watertight models with Geomagic Studios and using the software’s Mesh Doctor tools to finalize their meshes for 3D printing. Then, on a ProJet 3D printer from 3D Systems, they were able to print 1/25 scale models of the statues and their niches. Below, you can see a handful of photos illustrating the painstaking work that has taken place so far.
[nggallery id=129]This, however, was just the beginning. The models will aid the restorers in practicing for the real challenge of reassembling and reconstructing the actual statues themselves on the region’s rough terrain. Though the task at hand is a daunting one, Ozod-Seradj knows that it will bring a bright future for those living in the Valley of Bamiyan, saying, “Through our work we give Bamiyan and its residents the chance to be in this unique historic and scenic area. And through doing this we strive to give them a future of tourism and finally find peace.”
