3D Scanning in Piedmont, CA

Piedmont is a city of custom buildings, and custom is precisely what conventional measurement handles worst. The early-1900s houses here were built with carved stone surrounds, moulded plaster, curved and winding stairs, leaded windows in openings that are not rectangles, and rooflines that change pitch and direction several times across a plan. An architect matching an addition to that language, a contractor pricing restoration of it, or an owner documenting it for insurance and replacement purposes all need the same thing: the actual profile, not an approximation traced from a photograph. The scanner records those surfaces at millimeter fidelity in a single visit, and because the deliverable can include a navigable mesh model as well as drawings, the people making the decisions can look at the building rather than interpret a section.

The city has a second scanning problem that has nothing to do with architecture. Piedmont is built across the Oakland hills on narrow winding streets, and it is held up by retaining walls, hundreds of them, carrying driveways, terraced gardens, and the roads themselves. Walls that old bulge, rotate, and crack, and the usual way of watching them, a few crack gauges and a note in a file, tells you almost nothing about the wall as a whole. Repeat laser-scan epochs compare the entire wall face and the slope behind it, millions of points at a time, so movement of a few millimeters shows up as a pattern across the structure rather than as a single reading somebody has to trust. The same method applies to slopes above and below a house where drainage or an old slide is the concern.

Deliverables include E57 or RCP point clouds, DWG and DXF plans, sections and elevations, Revit models, mesh models for review presentations, and epoch comparison exhibits. See our Piedmont as-built surveys, Piedmont topographic surveys, and, for walls and structures, infrastructure scanning.