3D Documentation in Ladakh, India (Podcast 83)

12/18/17 • 12 min

Preservation Technology Podcast

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3D Documentation in Ladakh, India (Episode 83)

Today we join NCPTT's Mary Striegel as she speaks with former NCPTT intern Satish Pandey. Satish is currently a professor in the department of conservation at the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, India.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Parks Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Mary Striegel as she speaks with former NCPTT intern Satish Pandey. Satish is currently a professor in the department of conservation at the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, India.

Mary Striegel: So, Satish, tell us, when were you at NCPTT?

Satish loading samples in NCPTT’s recirculating wind tunnel.

Satish Pandey: It was way back in 2007. It’s been nearly nine years.

Mary Striegel: What were you working on when you were back there?

Satish Pandey: When I was there on a six week internship, I was working on a project which was dealing with looking at deposition of pollution gasses on limestone, treated limestone, so looking at the efficacy of consolidants and the impact pollution gasses in the atmosphere can have on it.

Mary Striegel: What was the best thing that you learned when you were at NCPTT?

Satish Pandey: The best thing that I learned, a couple of things. The best thing is that before being to NCPTT, I have never worked with custom-built equipment like the environmental exposure chamber that I worked on being in NCPTT. It had its own challenges to operate and get some good results on that machine, but it was one of the fantastic machine that I have ever seen. By the end of my internship, it started to give really nice data.

Mary Striegel: Well, you know, that was one of the things that people who’ve worked with that environmental chamber have always said, that after they’ve had some time working with it-

Satish Pandey: Absolutely.

Mary Striegel: ... they see the beauty of the design of that instrument.

Satish Pandey: Yes.

Mary Striegel: Tell us, what have you been doing since you were at NCPTT?

Satish Pandey: When I was at NCPTT, I was doing my PhD at University of Oxford. I finished my PhD in 2010, then after that I have been a post-doctoral researcher for nearly two years with the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. I returned to India in 2011, towards the end of 2011 an of History of Art, Conservation, and Museology. It’s a small institution with three departments dealing with the history of art, conservation, and museology. I teach in the Department of Museology as a faculty member.

Mary Striegel: I had a chance to talk to you earlier this week about how you were using three-dimensional imaging. You might want to tell us a little bit about that.

Patish preforming 3D documentation of deterioration in wall paintings in Nagaur Fort, India.

Satish Pandey: Yes. 3D imaging, when I started working in my post-doctoral research, 3D imaging was used by a number of people to record and document cultural heritage. Most of those work were dealing with documenting the entire monument, the entire building, looking at the fancy, three-dimensional data. Now, when I started working on it, we tried to use 3D imaging to image small changes on timescale that happens in surface like wall paintings. Most of the wall paintings that I’ve been working on, they’re encrusted with plenty of salts and the problem of surface coating that people have put on the surface in previous conservation attempts. The problem is, most of those coatings and salts are sensitive to moisture and changing humidity conditions. All those changes that take place during changing moisture, they have kind of temporal impact on that. Every deterioration problem connected to salts and surface coatings can be monitored using 3D in real time. That is what I have been trying to, although we had some success dealing with 3D imaging of salts and surface coating, trying to monitor the changes that happen in salt crystallization over a short period of time.

Mary Striegel: That sounds like it was a really good project. Was that part of your thesis work?

Satish Pandey: No, that was part of my post-doctoral research.

Mary Striegel: I had a chance to hear a wonderful presentation you gave here at the AIC. I’d like you to tell us more about your most recent work, working with the monasteries. Tell us a little bit more about that project.

Satish Pandey: After getting back to India in 2011, I was trying to work with community to develop sustainable conservation attempts. One of the projects that I have been working on is in the northernmost part of the country, the region of Ladakh, which is a cold, arid landscape with almost nil rainfall. That was the kind of atmosph...

Next Episode

Pig Skin and Wieners, the Early Influences on Preservation Architect Jack Pyburn (Episode 84)

with Jack Pyburn, preservation architect at Lord, Aeck and Sargent Jason Church speaks with Jack Pyburn, preservation architect at Lord, Aeck and Sargent. They discuss Pyburn's career influences and current preservation projects.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the “Preservation Technology” podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation, Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Jack Pyburn, preservation architect at Lord, Aeck and Sargent. In this podcast, they discuss Pyburn’s career influences and current preservation projects.

Jason Church: The first thing I want to ask you, Jack, I know you as a preservation architect, but I notice when I Google your name, that’s not what comes up first. It’s Jack Pyburn, football. Let’s just get that out of the way. I want to know why it comes up Jack Pyburn, football.

Jack Pyburn: Well, I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, not far from here. I went to Byrd High School in the class of 1963, which was one of only three high schools (two white and one African American) in Shreveport at the time. Byrd and Fair Park were the two white high schools. We played in the highest classification in the state, triple A at the time. I’m the youngest of four boys. My brothers ahead of me were athletes. I was the largest of all of them by a fair margin. It was just sort of assumed (by me) I was to participate in sports, and particularly in football, which I did.

I played football through high school, I did okay. I was not a great football player, but I did okay, partly because of my size. Actually, my favorite sport was track (throwing the discus). In fact, I competed here at Northwestern a number of times in high school and had good competitors from Natchitoches at the time. I broke the state discus record my junior year and again in my senior year. After my junior year, I really thought I would not play football anymore. I didn’t enjoy it that much, honestly. I loved track, it was something I got a lot of pleasure of and did okay at. I had a four year track scholarship offered at Tulane.

Come football season my senior year, and I said I wasn’t going to play my senior year because I wanted to focus on track, the head football coach, the only time he ever spoke to me, and certainly the only time he ever came to the house, came to my house and basically cajoled me into playing football my senior year in high school.

Again, I was not All-State, maybe All-City and District, but nothing particularly special. A&M football recruiters showed a tepid interest in me. However a local alum from A&M did, and I ended up taking a one year make good football scholarship to A&M and giving up a four year, full track scholarship to Tulane, which does not compute as rational thought, but it’s what happened.

Jack Pyburn’s Texas A&M Varsity Football photograph.

I got to A&M knowing I wanted to study architecture, I did all right my freshman year of football. It’s a mystery why I wanted to study architecture because I had no exposure to it in high school. The A&M athletic counselor tried to talk me out of architecture with the pitch that civil engineering was just like architecture. I spent a semester drawing nuts and bolts in civil engineering until I announced that was really not what I was interested in.

I made the A&M team, I got a full four year scholarship after my freshman year. My parents, my father in-particular had a policy that as a son, you worked your way through college. They did not pay for college for me or my brothers. All of us ended up going to college and as the youngest I am forever grateful for the guidance. I was basically working my way through school playing footballand had chosen architecture as my degree. Gene Stallings came from Alabama to A&M my junior year. He was a very demanding coach.

Architecture was a five year program before the four and two six year program was offered. Football was a four year eligibility. After the four years, I figured I was going to spend a year focused on my academics and low and behold, I got drafted by the Dolphins. I had no intention I was going to be drafted. I heard I was drafted on the radio. I decided to go try professional football, and if I made it, I figured the Dolphins would figure a way to get me into the reserves or differ my service. It was the height of the Vietnam War. If I made the team I would lose my deferment. If I was not back in school by September, I’d lose my deferment.

I made the team, the Dolphins did not have an alternative to the draft for me and, I was called up to the draft board in Shreveport for induction in December of my rookie year, 1967. For some unexplained way, I was deemed to be ineligib...