As-Built Surveys in Sausalito, CA

Two very different building stocks share one small city. On the waterfront, the Marinship district was built in 1942 by filling tidal mudflats at the north end of town for a wartime shipyard, and the surviving industrial structures now house marine trades, fabrication shops, studios, and offices. They have long spans, heavy frames, added mezzanines, and drawings that describe a shipyard rather than a tenant improvement, and the floor slabs sit on made ground that has not settled evenly in eighty years. Up the hill, the housing stock is additions on additions: a 1920s cottage extended over a garage, over a deck, over a retaining wall, on a lot where nothing is square and nothing is level. Neither type yields to a tape measure and a weekend.

Scanning handles both because it does not care about access or complexity. We register interior and exterior setups to survey control, so the resulting model is correct not only within itself but relative to grade and to the property lines. That matters here more than in most cities: exterior elevations have to depict height from average natural grade, projects are judged on whether they obstruct primary views from neighboring properties and public vantage points, and story poles have to be built from a plan that reflects the real building and real ground. A measured cloud gives the architect a defensible starting geometry for all three, and gives the design team every dimension it forgot to ask for.

Deliverables are the registered point cloud in E57 or RCP, dimensioned DWG/DXF floor plans, sections, and exterior elevations, and Revit models at the level of development your team specifies, plus sectional drawings that read against the slope. See 3D scanning in Sausalito and our comparison of scan-to-BIM versus traditional as-builts.