Rebuilding L’Aquila in 3D with Google SketchUp

On April 6, 2009, a powerful earthquake struck l’Aquila, Italy. Three hundred and eight people died, and most of the buildings in the city center and surrounding areas were damaged or destroyed. About six months ago, we received an email from a British architect named Barnaby Gunning proposing an ambitious project: to use Google SketchUp to build a digital 3D model of the city, as it is now, in order to stimulate discussion about its reconstruction. He had already created a website—called Comefacciamo (“What can we do?”)—to contact and organize volunteers.

Barnaby Gunning with the project T-shirt

Barnaby asked if Google would support a geo-modeling workshop in L’Aquila in an effort to create a digital model of the city. An engineer working on SketchUp and an Italian by birth, I was asked to travel to L’Aquila and give geo-modeling classes in Italian. I was excited! I could visit my motherland, teach people about the product I work on and help out with a project that could have a great impact on reviving the city. I ended up teaching six full-day classes over the course of two trips in October and November.

Teaching Google SketchUp skills to volunteers in L’Aquila

Teaching in Italian about a product on which I work almost exclusively in English proved to be more challenging than I thought. It took me awhile to get used to using the correct Italian name for the Push/Pull tool: Spingi-Tira. (It’s more fun to say, though.) The passionate volunteers who attended my classes more than made up for the language frustrations. Not only were they interested and attentive learners, but their desire to do something for their beloved city was contagious.

The church Santa Maria Paganica in real life (top) and modeled with SketchUp in Google Earth (below).


The modeling phase of the project is now in full swing. Several of the volunteers’ models have already been accepted into Google Earth—you can see them in your browser if you like. You can even take part in the project by helping to model the city from wherever you live. We’ve added L’Aquila to the list of places where you can use Google Building Maker to create geo-models, so no previous 3D modeling experience is necessary. If you’d like to dive in a little deeper, you can use SketchUp in connection with the many photos and other information on Barnaby’s website.

My few days in l’Aquila teaching SketchUp proved to be a fantastic experience. I met so many people who are enthusiastic about this project and willing to sacrifice their weekends to learn how to model, and to provide an exhaustive photographic record of the current situation. The time I spent with them was a wonderful remainder of the love they feel for their city—a love that I now share. I count myself lucky to be a participant in this important project.

Google as Big Brother in the Forums

For example, as we cede control of money, traditionally a public function, to the likes of PayPal or Bank of America in the form of internet or credit card payments we run the risk of them unilaterally and arbitrarily removing access to this form of exchange, as in the case of Wikileaks. As commercial entities, they are not held to the same standards as a government of due process and can behave without much criticism or oversite, limiting access to given individuals to a critical public function at a whim.

But we run the risk of not just losing control over public functions but of language as well. In the novel 1984, George Orwell articulated the idea that the control of language was a way to control not just actions but thoughts. I.E. The loss of language can lead to a loss of freedom.

I work, study and breath in a very small corner of the internet, Google Places. In that corner, I interact with Google in all of their glory and weirdness.

In Google Places, Google feels a need to control language. Perhaps that is a good thing, limiting use of drug and sex terms in a public directory. But it requires any business that is using those terms to go to Google and request permission to use them. A very strange relationship for sure. And a slippery walk down the  slope of language control indeed.

But even stranger has been a recent “discovery” that Google is intervening, humanly or algorithmically, to prevent the use of some non controversial terms in the forums. Forums, unlike Places pages, are meant for “open” discussion.

The phrase that they are deleting? World Trade Center. That’s right, a word that is embedded not just in our language but in our psyche is being actively deleted when used in the forums. Their handling of the phrase is inconsistent, allowing it sometimes and deleting it on others. But delete they have. And on more than one occasion.

Google is a company that proclaims from the height of the highest newspaper hill that they are the essence of openness …. open systems, open technology, open source, open information. They use words like “transparency” and phrases like “Open will win” as mantras.

Yet for whatever reason, they can not abide by the the words “World Trade Center” being used in posts in the Places forums and see fit to act as arbiters of our language… very weird indeed.

你好, नमस्ते and bonjour to better mobile web Gmail

There are many ways to get your Gmail on your phone. The mobile webapp version of Gmail (which you can get to by going to gmail.com in your browser) is the best way to get the most Gmail features on your iPhone or Android-powered device. Features such as search, stars, labels and threaded conversations all work in the mobile webapp just as they do in the desktop Gmail experience. Today, we’re bringing the latest version of our HTML5 webapp to 44 new languages.

Before today, this new version was only available for U.S. English, but we’re now expanding to Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK and American), Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (for both Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (for both Spain and South America), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu and Vietnamese.

If your phone’s default language is one of those listed, go to gmail.com in your phone’s browser and the new interface will appear in your language automatically. We’ve been rolling these changes out, so some of you may have already seen them. You’ll get a bunch of new goodies including offline support, smart links (titles will appear in links for Google Maps, YouTube and Google Docs), the ability to add and remove labels, layout improvements and more—in addition to the existing features like starring, better threaded conversations and search.

This new version works for iPhones running iOS 2.2.1 and above, and all versions of Android. Go to gmail.com in the browser of your iPhone or Android-powered device to try it out, and if you have any feedback, let us know in our forum.