Reconstructing lost architecture: Digital reconstruction of the Aboriginal girls’ dormitory from archival materials with interpretive community engagement using physical and virtual models

Digital documentation techniques such as laser scanning and photogrammetry rely on the physical presence of heritage structures, limiting their applicability to demolished or inaccessible buildings. In such cases, reconstruction must be based on fragmented archival materials and contextual knowledge, raising challenges of inconsistency, incompleteness, and interpretive uncertainty. This paper presents an archival-based digital reconstruction of the demolished Aboriginal girls’ dormitory at Cherbourg, Australia, developed through the systematic integration of architectural drawing, historical photographs, film footage, and correspondence records within a phased BIM workflow. The workflow produced a phased Revit model, a 1:25 physical model, and an interactive virtual environment developed for interpretive review. The study contributes a case-based workflow for reconstructing demolished architecture from heterogeneous archival sources under conditions of incomplete, inconsistent, and temporally uneven evidence. The reconstruction process is organised through cross-source triangulation, relative chronological alignment of archival materials, and iterative refinement of uncertain architectural elements. The study also contributes a confidence-based documentation framework that distinguishes (i) dimensional, (ii) temporal, and (iii) interpretive uncertainty, and illustrates how these can be documented and managed within the modelling process. Community engagement is used as an interpretive and contextual resource to clarify selected gaps and discrepancies in the archival record, rather than as a means of formal validation. The findings show how digital models can function not only as representational outputs, but also as tools for externalising assumptions, supporting comparison across heterogeneous evidence, and enabling iterative refinement of reconstruction decisions. Rather than positioning reconstruction as exact recovery, this work frames it as an evidence-informed interpretive practice, and illustrates an approach for reconstructing lost architectural heritage in contexts where physical verification is no longer possible.