I think this reconstruction is from the team behind the Byzantium 1200 project. They acknowledge that by the time of the fall of the city to the Crusaders in 1204, and certainly thereafter, the city may not have appeared quite so splendid. Nevertheless, this is a chance to view the city as it may have appeared at its apogee. You would have wanted to be there to see it!
Click the image to play and let the video load and play itself. There is no sound. If the buffering gets ‘stuck’ give the play button a kick.
That’s brilliant, thankyou for sharing it. It’s interesting how the CAD textures they’ve had to use—the window-barring especially—influence the look of things. One feels as if these buildings are not so very far from those of the last two centuries in some cases, and of course that serves to remind one how much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture was classicising. All the same, one would like a medieval library of textures to be available, if it could itself be reconstructed, for this sort of work.
The other thing that’s a bit anachronistic of course is the lack of people. I very much doubt you could ever have found these spaces so free of humans in actual Constantinople!
This CAD was part of the Byzanz exhibition we had this year in Bonn, it was most intersting and wonderful. The website is in German, but have a look: http://www.kah-bonn.de/ausstellungen/byzanz/index_orte.htm